Carbon-neutrality is dead.
So, now what?
After carbon-neutrality was declared an official goal in the 2015 Paris Agreement it became fashionable for governments and corporations to declare their intention to become carbon neutral by 2050 or soon thereafter. This was never more than an empty promise, however. The deadline was set far enough in the future to make immediate action unnecessary and few if any governments or corporations ever accepted a realistic plan to actually achieve carbon-neutrality. A decade later, they have largely given up pretense. Some have officially given up the goal; others have silently voided or discarded it. Of course, carbon-neutrality by 2050 was...
Rent, Profit, and Degrowth – A Postscript to “Capitalism and Climate Collapse”
In Capitalism and Climate Collapse, I argued that catastrophic climate collapse cannot be avoided under capitalism because capitalism requires economic growth, economic growth requires energy growth, energy growth requires extensive burning of fossil fuels, and extensive burning of fossil fuels causes catastrophic climate collapse. To avoid collapse, we need to shrink the economy – that is, degrowth – to a sustainable level with respect to energy requirements, and then switch to a steady state economy to stay at that level. What exactly that sustainable level is is debatable, but regardless of whether it’s closer to one third of current closer...
Capitalism and Climate Collapse
The claims that capitalism is the cause of climate change and that catastrophic climate collapse cannot be avoided under capitalism are as obvious to some people as they are nonsensical to others, but really they are neither. They are probably true, which implies that they are not nonsensical, but their (probable) truth is not obvious. They are not obvious, because these claims depend on four other claims that are themselves non-obvious: (1) capitalism requires economic growth; (2) economic growth requires energy growth; (3) energy growth requires extensive use of fossil fuels; and (4) extensive use of fossil fuels causes climate...
A Buddha Land in This World (New Book)
My new book, A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism, has just been published. Here is the abstract/back cover blurb: In the early twentieth century, Uchiyama Gudō, Seno’o Girō, Lin Qiuwu, and others advocated a Buddhism that was radical in two respects. Firstly, they adopted a more or less naturalist stance with respect to Buddhist doctrine and related matters, rejecting karma or other supernatural beliefs. And secondly, they held political and economic views that were radically anti-hegemonic, anti-capitalist, and revolutionary. Taking the idea of such a “radical Buddhism” seriously, A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy,...
Uchiyama, Marx, and Gramsci on Ideological Superstitions
In 2019 typhoon Hagibis destroyed part of the railroad that leads to Hakone, a small town near a volcanic lake in Japan that has a long history as a resort town. One of the stops on the line that can no longer be reached by train is Ōhiradai. About fifty meter south of the station there is a small and inconspicuous temple named Rinsenji. In 1909, during the railroad’s construction, the police searched that temple. They found dynamite used for building the railroad that was temporarily stored there. They also found an illegal printing press under the main altar. A...
Lessons from the Ongoing Disaster (for the Next One)
Presumably, you are aware that we’re in the middle of a disaster. That’s unpleasant – to say the least – but it’s also quite instructive. There is much we can learn from the ongoing disaster and humanity’s responses to it. But whether we can use those lessons to avert the even bigger disaster looming on the horizon is questionable. Rather, it seems that the most important thing that we can learn from the corona crisis is that we as a species may very well be incapable of avoiding catastrophy. ignore and deny For months, the general attitude of most governments...
The Possibility of a Revolution
(This is part 6 in the No Time for Utopia series.) In The Ethics of Climate Insurgency I argued that an insurgency aimed at overthrowing the enemies of our children is not morally justified because it is unlikely that – in the present situation – such an insurgency can succeed. It may seem that that conclusion also makes a discussion of the possibility of some kind of revolution to avoid catastrophe and establish something like the Lesser Dystopia is moot, but that is not exactly the case for (at least) two reasons. Firstly, in considering the possibility of a revolution...
Enemies of Our Children
(This is part 4 in the No Time for Utopia series.) In the previous two episodes in this series I argued that there are two possible futures for mankind and our planet. One is global societal collapse, which may take place within a matter of decades. The other is the “Lesser Dystopia”, a set of policies and adaptations intended to avoid societal collapse and the massive suffering it would cause. The Lesser-Dystopian path is a rather narrow path, however, and significant deviation will inevitably result into a slide towards the Greater Dystopia of global societal collapse. To some extent, both...
The Lesser Dystopia
(This is part 3 in the No Time for Utopia series.) In On the Fragility of Civilization, I argued that due to the slowly compounding effects of an increasing number of relatively localized “natural” disasters caused (directly or indirectly) by climate change, a vicious circle of failing disaster management, economic decline, civil unrest, and hunger will trigger a cascade of collapsing societies, eventually leading to global societal collapse in roughly 25 to 30 years from now (give or take a half decade). The world during and after collapse will be very different from what most of us have ever experienced,...
On the Fragility of Civilization
(This is part 2 in the No Time for Utopia series.) Doom has always been a major attraction for some, perhaps even many people. There are whole subgenres of extreme (heavy) metal built on the aesthetics of death, doom, and decay. But “doom” in the form of extreme pessimism about the (near) future is also increasingly common in discussions about climate change and its effects. In Stages of the Anthropocene I tried to look into the more distant future. Whether what I found is an example of “doom” in this sense is debatable – at least I didn’t predict human...
Rent, Debt, and Power
In 2009 Rolling Stone published an article by Matt Taibbi about Goldman Sachs. Taibbi writes: “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” The statement is rather unfair to vampire squids, but aside from that detail the characterization is quite appropriate and, moreover, equally applicable to the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector as a whole. A revised version of this article is part of chapter 15 of A Buddha Land in This World (Punctum Books, 2022). In Killing...
Crisis and Inertia (5) – Derailing a Speeding Train
(This is part 5 in the “Crisis and Inertia” series.) In the first episode in this series I argued that societies and other social “objects” (cultures, beliefs, institutions, ideas, ideologies, and so forth) are as inert as physical objects. Social “objects” resist change – if they are moving in a certain direction, they resist a change in direction. The second notion in the tile of this series is “crisis”. A crisis is an event that changes a social object’s momentum – that is, it’s path, speed, or direction. Crises come in several kinds. A minor crisis produces a (nearly?) immeasurably...