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Terry Boswell writes inter alia:
> There is no oil crisis. There never was an
> ecological crisis of supply, but one of international politics.
>
> To be sure, the natural supply of oil has a real finite limit that if
> consumption trends continue we might reach in what, a 100 years? But
> long before we reached that point, Carter's coal gasification plants
> would be profitable again (perhaps once gas reached $5 a gallon) and
> there is enough coal to last 400 years. One could also mention that
> fuel efficient cars would again become more valued, that electric
> cars would become more viable, and so on.
He is radically wrong on all counts, for the reasons hinted out in the
attached. There certainly is an ecological crisis of supply, and its
effects will not take 100 years to manifest themselves.
Mark Jones
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Date: Mon, 26 May 1997 21:53:47 -0700
From: Mark Jones <majones@netcomuk.co.uk>
To: jim@cag1.demon.co.uk
Subject: The final crisis of capitalism # 2
Capitalism and Fossil Fuels
Comrades:
Nikolai Rozov, professor of philosophy at Novosibirsk University,
Russia, today criticised on WSN the theory of a 'Final Crisis of
Capitalism' (as earlier described by Peter Grimes, see LL05169)
as follows:
> Dear Peter,
>
> i have nothing agains your arguments but i doubt very much that the
> contradiction is 'final' and that peripheral disasters will globalize.
>
> Fiscal crisis already began, probably it will encrease, but how
miserable it > is in comparison with 1930th depression!
>
> Ethnic cleansing, raise of violence > probably will occur, but can you
compare it with such storm of violence as > Napoleonic wars, 1848, 1870,
WWI and WWII?
>
> After ALL historical crises capitalism became > only more strong and
matural.
>
> The core always managed to save itself and > transfer main load of
crisis to periphery.> > The worst things that happened were
> appearence of new world-imperal challengers (f.e.France, Germany,
USSR) and > shift of world-economy hegemony (the Braudelian line:
Venice-
>Anthwerp-> >Amsterdam- >London- UK- >NY-US).
>
> What real arguements tell that extrapolation of this general
principle > fails in your 'final contradiction'?
>
> Depopulation? Sure - but only in periphery and with further fine
propects > for economic growth (like after Black Death in Europe).
>
> New challenger? -Yes, probably - the pact China-Islam, but it will
not be > very dangerous because both are too much economically linked
with
the West > (much more than USSR in 1920-70th).
>
> Shift of leadership in the core? Probably (Japan+dragons+Southern
China).>
> Are these contradiction and crisis final for capitalism? ( as
> also I.Wallerstein and Ch.Chase-Dunn appeal) - NO!
>
> Capitalism just like commerce once having been born is
frequently sick > but never dies.
>
> best, Nikolai
Neither Rozov nor Grimes are Marxist-Leninists. World System
Network is a discussion list for bourgeois scholars operating within
the intellectual framework of core/periphery world system models, an
outlook illuminated by the ideas and teaching of Fernand Braudel,
Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Arrighi, Gunder Frank, Chase-Dunn
and others.
It is a school of thought of Marxist and even more of Ricardian
provenance but now lacking either emancipatory or even much
scientific relevance.
Rozov's eternising of commodity production and now of capitalism is
about par for the WSN course (recently Rozov posted an article
comparing Soviet socialism with feudalism, a common attitude among
post-Soviet Russian intellectuals).
Nevertheless Rozov in the above message echoes concerns expressed
on the LeninList: the perspective is not of ultra-imperialism but
continued imperialist rivalry, with the US being challenged by
Japanese/Chinese rising imperialism, as the main motor of 21st century
conflict (Rozov has also put forward a scenario for China-US war). And
the WSN-mindset exists in a compartment of its own, where
environmental-contraints on capitalism barely figure and the single
decisive fact about capitalist accumulation, namely that its entire
history has been based on the exploitation of non-renewable resources,
especially fossil-fuels, barely figures at all.
Peter Grimes, too, produces a theory of the 'Fiscal crisis' of
accumulation which is bound to seem weak to Marxists on this LeninList.
The poverty of modern bourgeois scholarship is thus well illustrated by
the World System Theoreticians (WST-ers).
This school takes a time-frame for the development of the modern
world system and extends it back as much as five thousand years, since
the first agrarian, surplus-gathering settled human societies of which
we have knowledge. WST then traces the rise of commodity production,
from simple commodity production to modern capitalist commodity
production.
On the face of it this is an encyclopaedic, wide-ranging intellectual
horizon.
But it does not help WST-ers see fairly common-sense things, like the
fact that time's arrow moves in one direction only, and the fact that
because commodity production is a HISTORICAL mode of production, that is
by itself reason to question its immortality.
But these reservations barely scratch the surface of WST's theoretical
inadequacies.
The history of the earth is of a planet slowly cooling as life covered
its surface. It is life which caused the cooling. Over prolonged periods
lasting hundreds of millions of years, living organisms gradually
sucked carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, from the
atmosphere, fixating it and depositing it in sedimentary layers.
As plankton and crustacea died they sank to the sea bed and the CO2
trapped in their bones and shells was removed from the atmosphere,
forming vast shales, coal, oil and gas ponds.
As quantum theory shows, CO2 acts as a heat-trap; a bottle full of
CO2 does not allow heat thru but traps it inside; CO2 is actually a
rare gas in the earth's atmosphere, but even in small quantities it
helps to trap solar radiation.
Removal of atmospheric CO2 by life ensured that the climate cooled,
but within the overall cooling there were oscillations, as astronomic
variations in the orbits of the earth, the sun and other bodies caused
phases of relative warmth to be succeeded by phases of relative cold.
Sometimes there was no ice anywhere on the planet; at other times the
whole planet was shrouded in ice (one such glacial period lasted 200
million years).
In the present Cenozoic era which has lasted 60 million years since the
last mass extinction there has been a succession of Ice Ages,
fairly prolonged periods of hundreds of thousands of years, punctuated
by interglacials usually of much shorter duration, usually around
10,000 years. The present Holocene interglacial has endured for the past
10-12,000 years and is presumably approaching its end.
Human civilisation has arisen during this interglacial although humans
have been around for a lot longer.
The main impact of human civilisation has been (a) to cause a
mass extinction (not everyone agrees about this, but it seems likely
that around a third of all species will become extinct during the
capitalist epoch) and (b) to burn off a proportion of the atmospheric
carbon turned into coal and oil during the past half billion years,
reinserting in a very short time a significant quantity of fossil
carbon.
The proportion is probably around five percent of the great
'bank' of fossilised carbon -- enough to double the percentage
of atmospheric CO2, which together with methane releases and other
greenhouse effects will serve to increase average global temperature
by a few degrees in the next century.
Naturally, WST-ers, despite their vaunted historical long sight, do not
trouble themselves overmuch with this! As we see, this perspective
does not figure AT ALL in the prognoses of the philosopher and one-time
Marxist Nikolai Rozov.
The theoretical (and historical) complacency of WST-ers is based on
more than academic blinkers.
For one thing, it is commonly alleged that 'the jury is still out' over
anthropogenic (man-made) climate change. So nobody is sure what, if
any, actual effects of global warming there may be (in fact that is not
true; not only do western governments know a great deal, they, and
the scientific community which serves them, are panicky about what
even the short-term future holds).
For another thing, the economic and social effects of the burn-off of
fossil fuels is also alleged to be full of uncertainties when it comes
to evaluating possible outcomes (interestingly, bourgeois spokesmen,
scientists and governments do not generally like to discuss these two
related things together: it is thought to be quite unserious, quite
unscientific, to discuss global warming in the same breath as
fossil-fuel depletion, but as we shall see they are EXTREMELY
related questions when it comes to analysing the Final Crisis of
Capitalism (FCC).
Thus for a variety of reasons few people in the social sciences or
students of politics want to discuss these questions (except in
whispers).
As for the newspapers -- anyone who buys the British Sunday Times is
familiar with the inverse ratio which now holds between the amount of
wood pulped per issue and the actual content. The bourgeois mass
media draw a veil of silence over the truth. The capitalism Rozov
celebrates is a gin-palace called Titanic.
It has recently been discovered that the earth's climate is much more
unstable than was previously supposed. Ice-cores taken from the
Greenland ice-sheet show that the earth's temperature has in the past
shot up and down by tens of degrees within the space of a few years.
That is because the system is DIALECTICAL. The earth's climate is a
dialectical unity of many contradictory and complementary
components, including the World Ocean (which is in a constant flux),
atmospheric and cosmic (astronomical, gravitational) oscillations.
Like any dialectical system (bourgeois scientists have now
discovered!), changes can be gradual or they can be sudden.
As Engels showed in the Dialectics of Nature and the Anti-Duhring,
gradual, cumulative, quantitative changes in physical processes
eventually produce sudden dramatic QUALITATIVE changes.
That, so earth scientists, geologists, climatologists and
oceanologists have learnt, is exactly how the climate FLIPS from one
state to another, more-or-less steady, state.
Global warming may trigger a sudden change in the overall
climate. The sea level may rise enough to threaten island states such as
Japan, Indonesia, Great Britain. Or a new ice-age may be triggered, in
which case an ice-sheet a mile thick will lie across most of the
capitalist world, as far sought as Michigan, London, the Alps, sucking
up the sea and reconnecting what's left of England with the continent,
as happened in previous ice-ages.
Of course, this may not happen for centuries, even thousands of years,
although the present interglacial is nearing its end.
More optimistically, global warming may only exacerbate existing
trends: the decadal Sahel droughts (caused by climate change in the
Atlantic); the devastating monsoon changes and typhoons, the flooding
of the Mississippi in 1993 (almost certainly caused by greenhouse-gas
forced climate change), the growing desertification of the world's
arable land (as much as a third of arable land has become marginal
since world war two).
However, these effects are bad enough to doom the two-thirds of
humankind living in the peripheries, the colonialised south, to much
more of the same misery they now endure, with the added bonus of a
collapse of freshwater systems, a spread of malaria, cholera, typhoid,
super-TB and other diseases, and the emergence of antibiotic-resistant
superbugs plus new forms of AIDs-type illnesses (malaria has now
arrived in globally-warmed England).
But it is at least probable that the doubling of atmospheric CO2 will
trigger catastrophic climate changes of a nature which will cause a
massive die-off of humankind. It is possible that OTHER THINGS
BEING EQUAL the human population may not rise to 12 billion by 2050 as
present demographic trends suggest, but may stabilise or fall as a
result of mass-death caused by the collapse of ecological and
economic systems.
But OTHER THINGS ARE NOT EQUAL and indeed the population
CANNOT rise to 12 billion WITHOUT FORCING SUCH A GLOBAL
CATASTROPHE.
Therefore global demograhpic trends are already unsustainable, which
is another way of saying that world capitalism can no longer guarantee
even minimal existence to the human population.
(Nikolai Rozov is already living through a real-time fragment of global
catastrophe, for the Russian economy can never be reconstructed on a
modernised capitalist basis, it can only be plundered
as a new northern Zaire. Reforms in Russia are chimerical).
Most importantly, although only five percent of fossilised carbon has
been burnt off, that five percent consists of *all the oil*.
I am going to post some more detailed statistics on this and also
provide some web links for comrades to follow if they wish. But the
plain fact is that recoverable reserves of oil will be exhausted by
2050, and world oil production will start to fall early in the next
decade.
The implications of this are far-reaching. They are in fact the clue to
the Final Crisis of Capitalism, already in its first stage.
There are two psychological crutches to the hypnotic complacency we
are encouraged to enjoy in the face of this looming catastrophe.
Firstly, we are constantly reassured that there is plenty of oil and
there are no 'Limits to Growth'. In the past year for eg, oil
majors like BP have argued at legnth that the world is
'swimming in oil'.
This is simply a falsehood and I shall show why in detail in
later postings.
The world is running out of easily and economically recoverable oil.
But the entire global capitalist economy depends critically and
fundamentally on the easy availability of low-priced energy inputs. For
every calorie of food you eat (produced by photosynthesis) four
calories of fossil fuel have been required to grow it, process it and
bring it to
your table. The whole basis of material life in the metropoles depends
on the consumption of cheap fossil fuel, primarily oil.
And there are no substitutes for oil.
This brings me to the second point: we are constantly reassured by
images of techno-future utopias where cyborg-ruled, computerised,
Disneyland science will solve everything.
That, too, is a falsehood.
Of course, it is possible that in time science will find substitutes for
all the uses of fossil hydrocarbons and most of all for oil, in
every stage of production, from primary energy, to transport, to
plastics, fertilisers, drugs et cetera.
But IN TIME is no longer good enough (even if it is AT ALL possible
for human endeavour and ingenuity to substitute for the colossal
profligacy, the sheer wanton plunder of the entire oil reserve
accumulated
in the history of life on earth, which is the real history of world
capitalism).
Capitalism, capitalist commodity-production, is based upon
fossil-fuels, When they run out so will capitalism run out of time.
Oil can be made from coal, but not cheaply, easily or without releasing
even more CO2 greenhouse gas.
Cars can be made to run on hydrogen, but oil is needed to make the
liquid hydrogen, and so it goes on.
Remember that the lead-time for any radically new technology is at
least forty years.
Fusion energy has been 'in the works' for almost half a century, and
this alleged panacea for capitalism's energy deficits is still no
nearer availability and may not be for another fifty years. By then, it
will all be over as far as world capitalism is concerned.
In a century's time, after the final and catastrophic colapse, after
capitalism has been dismissed from history by the proletariat, there
will far fewer humans living on earth, 2, billion or less at the best
estimate, and they will not live as they do now. They will live in
sustainable economies, they will not use non-renewable energy sources
and they will not live under capitalism.
The Titanic is really going down. Locked in its multiplicity of crises,
with no time left to complete its increasingly desperate search for
technical fixes and ways-out, capitalism is doomed and the process of
its collapse has begun -- and may develop with the horrifying speed of
a hurricane, as its systems fall apart and as its billions of enraged
citizens, the sorcerer's apprentices of the peripheries, call it to
account.
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