É apenas um ponto de vista, mas não deixa de ter uma certa lógica:
"Economy and ecology
Global
economic systems crash not only because of greed, fraud and toxic
assets, but because those systems rest on fallacies about the natural
world. The Ponzi scams and derivatives swindles of international
bankers are no substitute for real economy: the living ecological
systems, energy, soils, minerals, forests, and seas.
The
self-serving theories of growthaholic economists peel away from this
deep reality like cheap wallpaper. Since the days of Akhenaten and
Caesar, overfed profiteers have insisted that their elite and esoteric
genius creates wealth. When they salted the soils or decimated forests,
they would march into the next watershed or “discover” another
continent.
Those
days are over. There are no more giant resource pools to plunder. The
wealth of Pharaohs and stock hustlers arrived not from their genius,
but from their facility with deception, fashioning loans with fantasy
money, and trading bets on the changing value of paper promises, the
modern “derivatives” market. But in the end, all this affluence relies
on the real wealth: nature, her systems, her materials, and her
energies.
Markets
will rally and crash again, and paper pushers will stuff more cash into
their safety deposit boxes, but in the end, money cannot replace soil
and water. Gross domestic products provide no surrogate for authentic
well-being.
As
world stock markets collapsed this fall, several urgent environmental
events rumbled below the superficial hand-wringing, like deep volcanoes
awakening to announce, “Nature shall not be mocked.”
It’s the soil, folks “We
abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us,” wrote
American ecologist Aldo Leopold five decades ago. “When we see land as
a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and
respect.”
Economists
ignored, even ridiculed, such warnings from ecologists, and the planet
now faces a shortage of fertile soil, the result of erosion,
salination, contamination, desertification, and a swelling population.
UN Agriculture head, Lennart Bage, announced last summer, “Fertile land
with access to water has become a strategic asset.” It always has been,
for everything that lives.
This
year, Iran bought over 1 million tons of wheat from the US, something
it has not done since 1980. Iran would not come begging to its avowed
enemy if it had any other option. Iran, the Saudis, and other oil-rich
Middle East nations rely on global agriculture for grain. The United
Arab Emirates buy farmland in Sudan and Kazakhstan. South Korea seeks
land in Mongolia, China in Southeast Asia. Libya leases farms in the
Ukraine.
With
the closing of Ukrainian shipments, only three major grain exporters
remain: North America, Australia, and New Zealand. However, these
global producers rely entirely on fertilisers and fossil fuels.
However, the production of phosphorus, principal component of
fertiliser, is rare and in decline, and the era of cheap energy is
coming to an end.
The big bonfire Globalisation
is literally running out of gas. Geologists at the Association for the
Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) Conference in California, in September,
confirmed that world oil production has stopped growing and will begin
its inevitable decline during the next decade.
A
US Department of Energy study (The Hirsch Report) warned in 2005 – the
year that global production plateaued – that society required a 20-year
lead time to implement an optimal new energy plan. It is already too
late for such a measured response, and this failure to act in time is
the direct result of denial from lobbyists and economists, who chanted
“eternal growth,” while obscuring or ignoring the evidence before them.
Conventional
economic theory has claimed that resources are virtually infinite, that
only capital and labour are required to create “wealth.” Oil depletion
exposes this tragic conceit. Oil production declined last year in eight
of the top twelve producing nations. Every major oil field on the
planet is in decline, and global discoveries peaked 40 years ago.
Meanwhile,
economic growth promoters expect humanity to double its vehicle fleet
over the next decade, from 1 billion to 2 billion vehicles, while
building more roads across arable farmland.
Wind
and solar power developments will help mitigate the coming energy
crunch, but will not replace cheap liquid fuels. Biofuels will have
certain localised value, if based on agricultural waste, but will prove
insignificant on a globalised scale. Corn ethanol undermines food
agriculture, and will not remotely replace cheap oil. Cellulose and
algae biofuel projects cannot even produce net energy, so they are not
economic at any price.
New
oil discoveries and recovery technologies lag hopelessly behind the
decline of conventional oil fields. Oil industry promoters recently
proclaimed “90 billion barrels of oil” in the Arctic. However, these
lobbyists failed to mention that this oil – even if it could be
confirmed and recovered – represents three years of global supply.
The
best and cheapest energy source is conservation. The only
environmentally feasible solution to the end of cheap liquid fuels is
to burn less. Analyst Randy Udall, who drafted Colorado’s Renewable
Energy Mitigation Program, told the ASPO conference that energy
companies have no use for conservation. Instead, they will burn more
coal, make liquid fuel from coal, and melt bitumen at unearthly
temperatures in low-efficiency tar sands and oil shale projects.
Udall
called our era of history “the Big Bonfire.” We burn a million tons of
fossil fuel every hour, releasing 80-million tons of CO2 each day. And
here, we arrive at the third big crack in the growthaholics’ thin
facade.
Ancient methane According
to the international Global Carbon Project, last year’s annual increase
in carbon emissions, 2.9%, exceeded previous projections, “generating
stronger climate forcing and sooner than expected.” All the
international gatherings, carbon-trading festivals, and Kyoto
handshakes have failed to reduce carbon emissions or even stabilise the
growth rate of these emissions.
Meanwhile,
in September, Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University – with the
International Siberian Shelf Study, sponsored by the Russian Science
Academy and American Geophysical Union – announced evidence that
millions of tons of a methane gas – 25 times more potent than CO2 as a
greenhouse gas – now escapes into the atmosphere from beneath the
Arctic seabed. As the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has
warned, the deep permafrost appears now to be thawing.
Scientists
on board Russian research ship Jacob Smirnitskyi recorded methane
bubbling to the sea surface, causing air-borne concentrations 100-times
background levels. Ten previous expeditions since 2003 did not detect
these levels of free methane. The new data describes releases so
intense that the methane does not have time to dissolve in seawater but
rises as bubbles to the ocean surface. Similar releases have been
recorded in the East Siberian and Laptev Seas, amounting to millions of
tons of methane from melting sub-sea permafrost.
The
escaping methane represents a massive exhalation of ancient
hydrocarbons likely captured in the Paleozoic warm era when amphibians
crawled from the sea. The carbon escaped once before, during the
Permian ecological collapse, 225 million years ago, leading to peak
Mesozoic heat, and was recaptured as methane during the last 100
million years. Meteorologists warn that this significant store of
ancient carbon could lead to run-away global warming, far beyond the
influence of human technologies to sequester or forestall.
The
methane represents an unaccounted cost of doing business in the era of
the “big bonfire”. Market wizards may shave toxic assets from their
balance sheets, but they cannot dictate nature’s accounting.
Resilience Regardless
of stopgap bailouts and more paper promises, economic collapse will
continue in fits and starts until humanity achieves genuine ecological
balance, adopts a steady state economy, and finally understands that
ecology is the foundation of human enterprise. There are only two
options for living cultures in a physical system: homeostasis or
collapse.
Future
generations will have every right to dismiss the “big bonfire” as an
era of ignorance and unconscionable excess. But I want future
generations to know this: Many from our generation never sold you out.
We kept our eyes open, witnessed the truth, and did our best to warn
our bumbling, myopic civilisation.
I
speak to many young people, who are terrified and/or angry about the
state of the world, the wasteful extravagance of society, and needless
ecological destruction. I experienced similar reactions when I learned
as a child that our world could be vapourised by nuclear weapons. When
we’re young, our families and teachers protected us from certain
disturbing realities. If we remain naïve or ill-informed, the discovery
of alarming truths about our world may create shock and outrage.
The best way to never again be disillusioned is to not be illusioned in the first place.
Economic
sleight of hand won’t restore our place on this Earth. Human survival
strategies now will be as much about resilience during transformation
as finding “solutions” to preserve untenable expectations. Our
resilience will include a rediscovery of a richer life with simpler
means, a genuine quality of life that cannot be purchased but only
lived. Human society can change, and in fact has to change. Don’t get
depressed. Get informed and get active.
- Rex Weyler"