I set about creating this weblog for several purposes, but primarily as a tool to help me study and explore in more detail what I only generally “felt” to be an impending crisis facing mankind on a global scale, and to grasp how I might understand and prepare for it. As part of this assessment I outlined a Timeline for the Unfolding Crisis and a report on How We Can Prepare. But in the past three or four weeks I’ve found that I’ve reached a place where I feel the need to digest some other residual information I’ve received into some more or less temporarily-conclusive form, in the hopes of finding a new place from which to go forward.
The Crisis
There are many areas of stress and crisis affecting the planet and our lives, but ultimately they are all merely symptoms of our primary problem, which is overpopulation. It’s forecast that world population is set to double from today’s approximately 6 billion people to approximately 12 billion by 2050. There is nothing radical at all about this forecast, and there is realistically nothing that is going to significantly change this growth. Human beings simply do not have enough awareness and resolve to take the decision to change this. Certain high population-growth countries have taken steps, most notably China (each family is taxed heavily for having two or more children) and perhaps India, which is just beginning to examine steps in the direction of education and awareness. But China was able take practical steps simply because it has a centralized government—India will not likely be able to issue any “edicts” in similar regard, for this and a variety of other reasons. Of course, it’s evident that affluent societies have fewer children per family than poorer ones, which leads us to the next point….
Many Asian countries are experiencing incredible growth of enterprise, and this includes India as well. This is not a cyclical event (from an economic standpoint). The fuel for all this enterprise, and also very much the aim of it, is the consumption of greater amounts of resources. The result is that we have entered a phase in which America and the European Union are finding themselves increasingly in competition for the world’s resources with countries experiencing significant economic growth and which hold a substantially greater percentages of the world’s population.
This is the situation that is undoubtedly going to define world-affairs for the rest of our foreseeable future, and yet nowhere do I find any (public, at least) acknowledgment or assessment of this impending crisis. Even the most venerable financial and news rags proclaim the terrific growth of the Asian Tigers, and the abundant economic potential they believe the Western World will tap into there, yet they appear to have blinded themselves to the obvious fact that these countries have entirely antagonistic agendas to ours.
Here’s some perspective on China alone:
China has approximately 1.3 billion people, or about 3x the U.S. population, and even with severe birth-rate limits it is exceeding the U.S. in population growth.
In 2003 China consumed: one-half of the world’s cement output, a third of its steel, a quarter of its copper and a fifth of its aluminum.
Only the U.S. imports more oil than China
Demand for power there is exceeding supply. In 2003, China burned 1.5 billion tons of coal, most of it to produce electrical power. That number is expected to double by 2020. (This is an environmental nightmare—airborne pollutants coming from China are being recorded off the coast of Washington state).
Chinese demand is causing prices for basic materials and commodities to skyrocket worldwide. But more important is that this economic growth is benefiting all of its classes. As such a distinct middle-class is developing, and is naturally following in the same footsteps that every middle-class trods as a taste develops for consumption and luxury. Substantially all of the world’s major retailers and service companies are lined up to invest heavily in this market—although they are facing frustrating governmental roadblocks. Viewed from a Chair on the Corporate Board, China must look like America did in the 17th Century: an almost limitless sea of opportunity. Of course China knows this, and has no intention of having its progress co-opted into Western pocketbooks. Central planners are focusing on promoting domestic businesses to capitalize on this growth—apparently determined not to repeat the American mistake of “outsourcing” its future growth for short-term profits.
So looking solely at China, it has been conservatively estimated that it will take four times the current resources of the world to meet their continued growth over just the next two to three decades. Yes, China’s heated growth will not continue unabated, but it is a growth of infrastructure, which means they are investing now to reap returns many years down the road. So while this growth will certainly fluctuate year-over-year, it’s nevertheless set to continue for perhaps decades. And it should be mentioned that they are making no serious endeavor to incorporate or adopt any kind of sustainable lifestyle (nor is it really possible to do so in light of the vast quantities of basic resources they currently require).
And it’s not just China. High-population countries such as India and Brazil are also entering the resource-fray through the same doorway. And all the while, the world’s population—and the resulting consumption of resources—is on a path to double by 2050….
Which means we need to firmly acknowledge—with no hedging or argument—that in a world which is already suffering to feed America’s consumption habits…there is simply no way for it to support the consumer appetite of a fully developed China, let alone India, Brazil, etc. It’s not that we cannot “deconsume” our lifestyles, and it’s not that we cannot accommodate many of our needs through techniques such as biodynamic farming and hybridized crops that require fewer resources to grow. What it boils down to, in my humble opinion, is that our corporate and government leaders show no interest in embracing and promoting a new way of living, and in reality it's already too late for the more gradual, popular, grassroots movements to save the day. In fact, what we find is that our corporate and government leaders consistently seem to hinder the small percentage of people who do wish to initiate and educate for change in this direction.
So we're hurtling toward a crossroads. One where we'll experience either a significant decline in population resulting from resource starvation and war, or a significant “shock” to the system which forces a decline in economic growth worldwide (thus reducing the immediate needs for resources) and thereby buys more time for a radical reinvention of the way we live with our present population levels. The most realistic (and efficient) conclusion will probably involve both scenarios.
Now such a comprehensive and unique crisis—one resulting in a substantial reduction of the human population of the planet—might well meet the qualifications for the long-predicted End-Times crisis in the cycle of Mankind on this Earth. But optimistically, try to remember that according to many of the prophecies foretelling this event, the result is not believed to be the end of all human life altogether, but what we might generously call a kind of distillation of the human race down to its more essential elements (and the beginning of a new cycle in which Mankind does not predominate). And if you desire a more Western/Linear way of relating the same conclusion, see this report on the Earth's carrying capacity (reposted at the all-too-frankly named website www.dieoff.org) by a group of researchers at Cornell University, which relates that the planet currently has sufficient resources to support only about one-third of its present population at a “European standard of living”—and even that is assuming the widespread adoption of sustainable use of resources.
As far as when this will occur, it seems the jury is still out, but we could arguably surmise that it is already beginning among the most under-privileged societies in our world. Things will almost without doubt resolve themselves in this century. I can’t bring myself to support the “Dec 2012” theories, although that certainly feels like a plausible enough target date by which current forces might have escalated to a noticeably worrisome level. Certainly we're now just entering a period of unfolding global crises in several spheres (e.g. financial/debt and economic collapse, resource scarcity, decline of Western/American hegemony, impending housing collapse), and these should unfold in more pronounced fashion over the next decade or so. And keep in mind that such crises tend to snowball until they finally exhaust themselves. What’s more, because all crisis periods serve to usher in profound societal changes, there’s little certainty going into them exactly how they will ultimately develop and resolve. And to my mind it’s difficult to imagine any case where nuclear weapons will not be used, so as such I think we need to steel ourselves into accepting that the next couple decades could be profoundly distressing for the great majority of those who cannot anticipate these events and re-organize their lives in a more simple and flexible way.
One optimistic possibility, however, is that it is always possible that this immediate period of crisis, instead of devastating our worldwide population, might instead serve as a sufficient enough shock to cause the human race to begin to deconsume our lives and control our mating habits. This would in no way resolve the situation definitively, but just as with earthquake fault-lines under pressure, sometimes a smaller shock acts to release the immediate tensions and delay the onset of the larger shock (a drastic reduction of overpopulation). In this case, perhaps until somewhat later in the century.* Unfortunately, one argument against this theory is that human beings as a whole have an exceedingly poor track record in recent decades for accepting self-restraint and making ethical choices. And as our current culture is dominated by a small number of media outlets, which in turn are ruled by corporate/consumption ideologies, there is effectively little chance of this happening.
So let’s go over things one more time, because this is an important issue and one not to be mistaken about. Does competition for resources necessarily mean the onset of war? Well, in this case it’s not simply competition. China’s progress is well underway, and it’s set to last for generations. With a population four times the size of the U.S., when their hunger gets up to speed there are simply not going to be enough available resources to support both countries, much less everyone else. If the U.S. had a thriving economy this might only lead to escalating price inflation, trade wars, etc. but the U.S. economy is on its last legs (which I’ll address in more detail in a moment). As such, when China begins buying up substantially all of the world’s available assets, America will be forced to either take the issue out to the streets or suck it up and accept its fate. Now if you feel the latter option is still open to debate, then more power to you—in all fairness, I’m willing to admit to one possible scenario, outlined in the previously referenced footnote, in which a move toward sustainable use of resources delays any immediate crisis. But thus far there are no indications that America will adopt that position willingly.
Furthermore, while conflict wouldn’t necessarily have to occur for many years yet, two factors are going to force it: one is impending economic collapse (and China is in this same boat since it holds substantial positions in U.S. currency), and the other is the characteristic prevalent in capitalistic thinking to “buy the rumor, sell the news”. In other words, it is ingrained in our Western leaders that opportunities must be seized before their results become realized.
The Corporatocracy
Now here I find myself entertaining an only slightly speculative question, but one which could significantly influence the unfolding of events in the next few years: are some of our world leaders aware of the severity of our situation and resolved to bring it about in a more intentional manner, rather than letting it unfold naturally?
It has become apparent to a great many people that the world is presently ruled not by popularly-supported leaders but by a self-interested Corporatocracy—an inter-related collective of captains of multi-national industry, whose existence is for the most part rooted in the ownership and distribution of resources for consumption. This is a crucial point to understand: that for every single resource we require or use, one or more corporations have interposed themselves as an owner and/or distributor of it. And these corporate leaders exercise a disproportionate—and frequently secretive—influence over our elected leaders. This explains why there has been no impetus whatsoever “from above” to transition to a less consumptive way of life. They couldn’t significantly change this lifestyle if they wanted to, and in fact have fought this type of change every step of the way. This has led some people to view the unraveling of our society as an evil plot by evil men, but in reality there was really no other direction for us to go once corporate capitalism came to dominate over individual capitalism. Independent businessmen and workers have warned of the destructive potential of corporate entities throughout this century. In fact, if you read the children's story “The Lorax” by Dr. Seuss—you'll find the message: corporations that are allowed to grow as large and powerful as they can, will. And what's more, human enterprise operates within an "ecosystem", and once a business loses its organic roots within a home community, it starts down a treacherous road toward becoming solely a “profit machine”. And as such it ceases to maintain a dynamic relationship with either the society or the environment (customers, for example, become “faceless”, and the business owners feel protected from them and no longer accountable to them). Another way of looking at the issue is that a corporation essentially concentrates human resources in the hands of a small number of owners, and that gives those few owners a much more defined influence in matters than the citizens could have individually. Thus, a corporate leader for a company which employs 100,000 workers will have a far more marked influence over government decisions than any of those individuals could ever have. But, unlike a union, the company does not directly promote, or even necessarily consider, the welfare of those individuals when lobbying it's desires. In this way, corporations gradually take over “public” affairs. First they utilize the Media, then the media comes to depend on them and cater to them over its audience…then they simply usurp the Media altogether to promote their culture of consumption. First they lobby the government, then the politicians come to depend on them and cater to them over their constituents…then they simply usurp the Government altogether to create an administrative and regulatory arm for their interests. (And when those fail, they create “world governmental organizations” like the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank, etc. to serve their purposes). It’s certainly no coincidence that so many of our highest ranking government officials and regulators leap to their posts directly from corporate boardrooms….
I think we can see why the way of “deconsumption” would certainly run counter to the wishes and intents of the leaders of the world’s largest corporations. After all, it is consumption itself that is the life’s-blood of a corporation. And I have little doubt that if the coming crisis is successful in “uprooting” the excesses of the previous cycle and “sowing the seed” for the next, then it will mean the uprooting of corporate dominance, and the sowing of a society whose values are spiritual and not selfish.
But while these world leaders may be obtuse, they’re not stupid. The corporate elite and the leaders of major world nations certainly know better than anybody where the fate of the world’s resources is leading. It’s the civilian population that is blind to the journey. Now our human tendency is to assume that our leaders continually ignore the situation either out of simple ignorance or perhaps short-sightedness, because deep down we assume that they’re decent people like ourselves. But another explanation makes far more sense: that they know that the world is going to enter a period of warfare and crisis, and since they cannot undermine their own interests and take the hard rode of preventing it (the road of deconsumption), they are instead resigned to the far easier (and let’s be honest…profitable) rode of embracing it, preparing for it, and even directing it.
Admittedly I may be mistaken in this line of suspicion, but it certainly seems to shed some light on recent world events, as I'll show in a moment....
First of all, we need to acknowledge that the people who run the operational affairs of corporations are often different from the people who truly direct them. Just as the Commander of a ship takes orders from the General, when we refer to the “corporate elite” and such, we are not necessarily talking about the listed officers of the company. We’re referring to people who may sometimes sit on the boards of (usually several) corporations, sometimes elect others to sit for them, but who ultimately determine (or at least approve) the larger actions and directives that the day-to-day executives will carry out. Their power and money derives not so much from a paycheck or stock options as it does by benefit of the various ways they can leverage their numerous corporate and government relationships to steer world events as they envision them. Their work is not to direct a company, their work is to direct the course of the world. This is a unique point of view, and one which would naturally influence the whole of their lives and color their way of thinking and feeling.
In reality, very few people wish to see harm come to others, but obviously that doesn’t mean that they don’t actively create harm through their insensitivity and selfishness. So when we consider that our leaders might be pre-emptively positioning and directing the coming crisis, we should be aware that they would undoubtedly have justified these actions to themselves, believing they are serving the greater good with their foresight and vision: saving their “way of life”, or the “rule of law”, or some such.
So if resources are insufficient for continued growth, if war appears unavoidable, and if even a concerted effort to change our manner of living would evidently not be sufficient to prevent much of the world’s population from dying-off anyway…would they not wish to direct this terrible outcome in a more intentional manner? After all, they stand to lose so much of what they’ve built in an uncontrolled global catastrophe. Rather than let starvation, sickness, and civil strife rage out of hand, I suspect they might find themselves wondering if there might be some merit to choosing more or less where, when, and how the “culling” would take place. In this manner, the damage could be contained to regions “hostile” to their interests (remember that this “corporate elite” we’re speaking of are the product of Western culture, and as such will never have any ultimate authority in China or the Middle-East), or to ones that are just plain “expendable” in their eyes (as we see now in regions of Africa). And keep in mind that they'd also appreciate the substantial opportunities to be had in “rebuilding” these regions afterwards.
The Conclusion
As stated earlier, we can categorically assume that the Powers that Be (especially in the U.S.) are not interested in exploring ways to avoid the coming crisis of overpopulation and resource-struggle, since we find no meaningful actions or evidence to support that view (and it can actually be argued that there are indications that various movements in that direction have been ridiculed and undermined). So from their point of view, as hardened and committed strategists dedicated to directing the course of events, we could well assume that the basic goal going into this coming period of crisis would be the preservation of resource availability for the Western culture, the sabotaging of foreign prosperity (directed toward inward investment), and possibly even the diminishment of specific overpopulation zones, of which China would be an obvious choice. Only this strategy would preserve the Western way of life while addressing the immediate threats to it.
In a conflict over resources, the first step of preparation would be to secure the single most important imported one: oil. Oil is the crucial “fuel” for maintaining our modern society, and these central world powers all import far more than they can produce domestically. So maintaining oil flow for yourself (and substantially denying it to your enemy) would be the most critical strategic initiative. Also, from the vantage point of America and the E.U., a great deal of oil money flows into Middle-Eastern pockets—cultures which are not really “birds of a feather” with the Corporatocracy or the Western Way of Life, and governments which would quite likely support China in a global conflict. We know that preparations for the invasion of Iraq had been in place since the late 1990’s. The American political organization The Project for a New American Empire (many of whose members occupy prominent positions in President Bush’s administration) had made this the lynchpin of their strategy for imposing the Western Way of Life on every corner of the globe. Long before 9/11 they stated that they might need to wait for a justifying event, purportedly so as to assure the support of the American people. But perhaps this was also to allay the suspicions of the Chinese central government.
Of course, oil costs primarily apply when waging conventional warfare, and advanced countries with nuclear capabilities could retaliate should even their reserve supplies become depleted. So stealing oil isn’t a complete answer to all the problems, but it is a crucial first step.
The next step of preparation would be to step-up military spending and recruitment. This requires little misdirection at all, since America has a long history of it already. Still, it’s interesting that the Bush administration began to ramp-up defense spending even before 9/11. Remember that the tools of war are not much of an issue because these will be paid for by taxation of the citizens, and will in fact produce earnings for many corporations.
Now admittedly the occupation of Iraq and the increase in military spending could serve the United States’ interests of “securing” oil without necessarily implying a further strategy for conflict with China. And with a steady stream of reports surfacing that oil reserves are overstated, production is already running full-bore, and projected demand is skyrocketing, it may turn out that competition for other commodities and resources is never going to become much of an issue anyway….
But what do we make then of the recent deployment of an unprecedented seven aircraft carrier groups to the Pacific—some specifically within “intervention” distance of Taiwan? And certainly China has openly renewed its drum-pounding over the island-nation.
Also, the U.S. Congress is testing the waters on the draft issue as we speak, even though it flies in the face of its stated intention to begin an orderly withdrawal of troops from Iraq and hand military enforcement over to Iraqi forces.
Even more interesting is that this assessment seems to perfectly justify why the Federal Reserve has intentionally hyper-inflated the U.S. Dollar to help fund this war—bankrupting the American society and insuring a crash in both the capital markets and the currency markets (for itself and probably the world). This would only be a rational action if they recognize that war and global crisis will come anyway. In that case, “domesticating” Mid-East oil reserves essentially amounts to selling Dollars (already severely inflated during the '80's and '90's) for Oil, which is far more crucial for our society’s survival than paper money. Trading dollars for hard assets is what we should all be doing anyway in periods of high inflation. And the icing on the cake—though unanticipated—is that the Chinese government has been the single largest buyer in these markets. Some have even speculated that this is a pre-emptive move on their own part: that they're building a kind of “financial nuclear warhead” with which to threaten the U.S. economy. At any rate, it might indeed serve that purpose as well, in addition to suppressing the rising strength of the yuan before a yawning balance of trade and subsidizing further continued growth.
(This “financial nuke” theory would certainly support the suspicion that they may be making their own conflict preparations. But if so, the Chinese are assuming that 1) the U.S. cares about the value of the dollar or even intends to honor debt payments, and 2) the Chinese could strategically wield those reserves in a strike against the U.S. economy. It’s often the case that rational minds are blinded to the irrationality of financial markets. When stuck carying a large position in a falling market, there's no such thing as strategy. Your position becomes a burden against you, and every attempt to sell only drives prices lower and lower as buyers evaporate altogether. But perhaps they write these losses off as “military spending”, who knows….)
In any event, the Fed finds themselves in a fortuitous situation where they've been able to open-wide the monetary floodgates to fund the oil-war, and discovers their main competitor for resources standing outside the sluices with a gigantic sponge. This is one of the principle reasons dollar-inflation has been kept under control long enough to enable the prolonged coup in Iraq (helped along by the controversial “skewing” of the U.S. economic indicator reports).
But of course, “the best laid plans of mice…gang oft agly”. The botched plan for control of Iraq has thrown a giant wrench into the whole works, and it now seems that economic collapse may come before the U.S. administration has secured control of the oil fields. To add insult to injury, resistance to U.S. interests has mushroomed throughout the Middle East, and beyond. And while the upcoming election probably won’t put the kibosh on things, if the Bush administration is thrown out it will likely prove a painful delay as the new administration is brought up to speed. All of which opens up a great deal of speculation about how the Powers that Be are going to pull off the coup…. So we may have reached a point where they will have to tip their hand, and make some type of decisive maneuver without having time to adequately “justify” it in the world. One way or the other, the next few months should prove decisive.
____________________________________________________________
* One scenario would be that a worldwide financial collapse serves to significantly reduce the level and degree of the affluent world’s growth, and therefore its appetite for resources and the resulting competition for them. Or perhaps China may manage to avoid the collapse that befalls the U.S., which should bring about a similar reduction of competition—perhaps even leading in co-operative trade agreements between the two powers. But neither of these situations would definitively settle the central problem of the “carrying capacity” of our planet’s resources vs. population.
