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The Global Free Trade Economy

our global economy is outgrowing the capacity of the Earth

childhood in the 'New World Order'


"The global economy is a rigged game, rigged so Third World politicians, rich investors and global corporations win – and American taxpayers lose." – Patrick J. Buchanan

"Nearly 70 percent of world trade is controlled by just 500 corporations, and one percent of all multinationals own half the total stock of foreign direct investment. In both the U.S. and across the globe, many large corporations - either directly or through intermediaries - are obeying the implacable logic of capital by creating barriers to entry, stifling local economies, and racing to liquidate finite resources. " - Donald O. Mayer

"Until our global economy is fueled by more than unfettered markets and an insatiable appetite for profit at the expense of human dignity, history will repeat itself." - Marie Dennis

"The threat posed by humans to the natural environment is nothing compared to the threat to humans posed by global environmental policy." – Fred L. Smith

"American economic hegemony has generated enormous hostility to an American dominated process of globalization, frequently on the part of close democratic allies who thought America was seeking to impose its antistatist social model on them."- Francis Fukuyama

"To base an economy on endless building and continuos population growth is greed disguised as progress." - Tim Viselli

"Edward Abbey once said that "an economic system that can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human." Some part of society must soon step up and begin to figure out how to end "progress", if not reverse it, until the world reaches a steady state of ecological sustainability." - Fred S. Barker

In 2007 the United States owed $10 trillion, nearly a quarter of the global debt total of $44 trillion.

One of the founding premises of unregulated trade is that it will reduce the temptation of participating nation states to engage in armed conflict and yet there are too many emerging signs of discontent from different places on the Earth and from varying ideologies to continue to marginalize those who question the wisdom of an unfettered global corporatism and the colossal disparities in the distribution of wealth .

If we lived on a socially perfected Earth and we had limitless supplies of fossil fuel global free trade would be all that it was promised to be in which not just jobs but also goods, humans and capital freely flowed from one country to another. Everyone would do what he was best at, and we all would be richer for it but unfortunatly we do not live on a socially perfect Earth with a limitless supply of fossil fuel.


Global free trade economists believe we should export lowbrow jobs but do the 'creative' work ourselves,
thus keeping our hands clean and our wages high.

This notion assumes that God has anointed American aristocracy to be the Master and Commander of the Earth while the rest of the people of the Earth have been chosen to do the menial work.

What will less talented American workers do if there are not enough 'creative' jobs to go around? Will they be retrained to do something else? Or will they move - or be moved - to the nations where their jobs were outsourced, as free trade theory calls for?

Americans lowered trade barriers to Japan and a large part of our vehicle and electronic manufacturing was outsourced to Japan. Japanese corporate culture of keiretsu (close business relationships) works so that foreign companies are excluded. So skilled work was outsourced to Japan.

Anime uses creative skills but how many Americans are drawing cartoons in the most prominent creative media of Japan?

None! The lowest paid workers in Japan draw anime!

Yoshitake Ogata of the Anime Union, which represents freelance illustrators, said: "However keen they are when they come in, the reality is that they cannot live on the pay. There are animators with 10 years experience earning less than $20,000 a year. In the end, they have to quit."

The main factor holding down pay is the availability of cheap labor in East Asia. Japanese production companies now outsource to illustrators in South Korea, the Philippines and China who do much of their routine work.

Global free trade economists argue that eventually other countries will raise their living standards and then we will all compete on an equal footing.

What if the average standard of living does not go up?

Will Americans have to lower our standards until the rest of the Earth catches up?

With the ongoing population explosion it is unlikely the average Earth standard per capita income will ever catch up with standard middle class American expectations.

To remain competitive on an Earth in which billions of workers are paid one dollar a day and have absolutly no benefits, and in which corporations need not worry about the environmental destruction of the Earth, requires Americans to drastically lower our own standard of living.

"We are often told that ‘Americans won't do that job,' but never does a businessman or politician add the other half of that argument, namely, ‘at the meager wage that I am willing to pay'." - Gary Peters

A much ballyhooed success of the North American Free Trade Agreement has been the opening of Mexico to American industrial agricultural corporations, who are now selling millions of bushels of maize south of the border.

Why would Mexico, whose people still subsist on maize, whose farmers still grow more maize than any other crop, ever buy maize from an American farm corporations?

Because American industrial agricultural corporations can sell it much more cheaply than any Mexican farmer can.

How? American government writes subsidy checks to American industrial agricultural corporations encouraging them to undersell Third World farmers.

"Our system is so complicated - ie. rigged - that it's almost impossible to know how much agricultural subsidies cost American taxpayers. Since 2000 the American government paid out $1.3 billion to "farmers" who don't farm. They were simply "compensated" for owning land previously used for farming. Cash payments have cost $172 billion over the last decade, and $25 billion in 2005 alone, nearly 50% more than what was paid to families receiving welfare. These numbers barely tell the story of our appallingly immoral agricultural corporatism. Subsidies combined with trade barriers (another term for subsidy) prop up the price of food for consumers at home and hurt farmers abroad. This keeps Third World nations impoverished, economically dependent and politically unstable.

Subsidies wreak havoc on the ecosystem. One small example: There's a 6,000-square-mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. It's so depleted of oxygen because of algae blooms caused by fertilizer runoff that shrimp and crabs at the Louisiana shore literally try to leap from the water to breathe. Most of the fertilizer comes from a few Midwestern counties that receive billions in subsidies (more than $30 billion from 1997 to 2002 - Environmental Working Group). Also consider that American farming is hugely energy intensive. Those energy costs are not fully borne by the producer, so in effect the taxpayers is paying for greenhouse emissions that do not benefit him." - Jonah Goldberg

A river of cheap American corn began flooding into Mexico after NAFTA took effect in 1994.

A 2003 report by the Carnegie Endowment says this flood of subsidized corn has washed away 1.3 million small farmers. Unable to compete, they left their land and illegally immigrated to the United States to pick crops - former farmers have become illegal alien day laborers. Now they have learned that construction jobs pay better and refuse to work in the industrial agricultural sector.

Cheap American corn in Mexico threatens all humanity. The small Mexican farmers who grow maize in southern Mexico are responsible for maintaining the genetic diversity of the species.

While American industrial farm corporations raise a small handful of genetically nearly identical hybrids, Mexico's small farmers in the past grew hundreds of different, open pollinated varieties, commonly called landraces. Monsanto produces the nearly identical hybrid corn seed. The seed from this genetically altered hybrid corn is unviable and will not grow. Each year a new supply of seed must be purchased from Monsanto.

Maize originated in southern Mexico where it was domesticated from teosinte, a wild grass. Scientists at four universities analyzed the DNA sequences of 774 genes in strains of teosinte and corn. They found that a small group of these genes were alike in all corn strains, but far more varied in teosinte strains. This implies that these genes, because they shaped corn like traits, were bred for during domestication.

This genetic diversity, created over the course of 10,000 years by human genetic manipulation, represents some of the most precious and irreplaceable genetic information on Earth. These landraces will survive only as long as the farmers who cultivate them do.

"Nearly all of the crops in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's database of approved genetically engineered varieties have been modified for resistance to certain insects or to tolerate applications of herbicides. None has been shown to increase intrinsic crop yields, nor do any have traits for drought tolerance. Biotechnologists are finding drought tolerance to be a major technical challenge. Meanwhile, traditional farming systems have demonstrated their effectiveness in raising yields and improving drought tolerance; they should receive the lion's share of attention as a route to increasing food production." - Doug Gurian-Sherman

"Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries." - Point 9 Communist Manifesto, Karl Heinrich Marx aka Karl Heinrich Mordechai

In the 2006 Mexican Presidential election it was revealed that for every maquiladora job created (job created by NAFTA) there were four jobs lost in the Mexican agricultural sector.

"The global free trade economy is a disaster for the environment, a disaster socially, a disaster for small farmers, it drives wages down and is a giveaway of sovereign power to corporate and goverment bureaucracies. Economic globalization is not satisfying human needs. This doesn't lift all boats, it's lifting yachts. Eventually the only way order can be maintained is through oppressive means. The solution: site here to sell here."- Jerry Mander.

Globalization has created interdependent systems spread across the face of the Earth. From food production to financial transfers, the electricity grid to the internet, critical American infrastructures are linked to one another in an interlocking web of connections. Interdependent networks are vulnerable to the unintended consequences of interdependence. When one "domino" falls a cascading set of "dominos" may fall in every direction.

As an example take the interdependent electricity grid. Intelligent problem solving suggests Americans encourage "distributed energy production" which means having lots of small generating plants rather than a few large plants.
This is one way to reduce the "domino" effect from creating large scale power outages. Unfortunately vested interests would no longer be able to control resources.



When American aristocracy depends on other nation states to provide America with 'necessary' resources Americans lose freedom by having to protect those resources. At this time America has over 1.4 million men and women in uniform.

At the end of 2005 69,000 troops are stationed in Germany and 40,000 troops are stationed in Japan. Why does America need to have 109,000 men and women in Germany and Japan?

160,000 troops were stationed in Iraq at the end of 2005. The rest, which totaled 500,000 in 2004 are stationed in nearly every country on Earth to protect resources deemed critical to American aristocracy. American aristocracy would be wiser to build resilience into a whole host of fundamental infrastructures by diversifying energy production and by using American technological expertise to create sustainable resource systems. But with such systems it would be harder to create the conditions that produce the windfall profits needed for American aristocracy to play with.

The claim that global "free" trade involves a race to the bottom is valid.

Individuals who go through major life changes due to income reduction caused by outsourcing show a significant increase in mental illness, suicides and family breakdowns. These are hefty human and social costs that global free trade economists conveniently forget to plug in to their equations.

"People do lose their jobs as a result of globalization, and it's painful for those who lose their job." - George W. Bush

"Unemployment makes people very unhappy." - Carol Graham, co-director of the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics, Brookings Institute

The recent exponential increase in the power of corporate govermental bureaucracies to challenge other nations traditions, environmental, social and business laws on behalf of global free trade exporters assures us that the fight to keep our standard of living from being drastically reduced will not be an easy fight for working class Americans to win.

Working class Americans must use courage and vision to lift the fog in which global free trade economists, international corporations, American aristocracy, naive dreaming 'liberals' and opinionated neo-con or ‘compassionate conservatives' have shrouded this whole sordid, greedy, evil business.



"There is more on the table than sugar when it comes to the Central American Free Trade Agreement. An article on the pros and cons of CAFTA would be of more interest than an editorial that says, "It defies all economic reason for America to grow most of the sugar it consumes."

Historically one of the factors aiding the demise of a civilization was due to that civilizations dependence on outside sources for food coupled with the variable conditions of war and climatic conditions. What will be the effect of CAFTA on American agriculture in general? For example, what will happen to the avocado growers and other sources of food production in California? Will these types of questions be addressed before CAFTA is pushed through Congress?" -Carol M. Harder


Childhood in the 'New World Order'



The United Nations children's agency, UNICEF, stated in annual State of the World's Children
report in December 2004 that out of the 2.2 billion of the Earth's children:

640 million lack adequate shelter;
500 million have no access to sanitation;
400 million lack safe water;
270 million receive no healthcare;
140 million, mostly girls, receive no education;
90 million are severely deprived of nutrition;
10 million children younger than 5 die each year of diarrhea or measles;
and 2 million are exploited by the global commercial sex industry.

"Too many governments are making informed, deliberate choices that actually hurt childhood,"
- UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy.

A UNICEF study in 2007 looked at childhood in over 20 developed countries and found that America and Great Britain ranked last in childhood well-being. Lower rankings were the result of less spending on social programs and "dog-eat-dog" competition for jobs that lead to adults spending much less time with their children.

America was at the bottom in health and safety because of high rates of child mortality and accidental deaths. America has the highest rate of children living in single parent homes and has one of the highest rates of children living in poverty.



"Our global economy is outgrowing the capacity of the Earth to support it, moving our early twenty-first century civilization ever closer to decline and possible collapse.

In our preoccupation with quarterly earnings reports and year-to-year economic growth, we have lost sight of how large the human enterprise has become relative to the Earth's resources. A century ago, annual growth in the global economy was measured in billions of dollars. Today it is measured in trillions.

As a result, we are consuming renewable resources faster than they can regenerate. Forests are shrinking, grasslands are deteriorating, water tables are falling, fisheries are collapsing, and soils are eroding.

We are using up oil at a pace that leaves little time to plan beyond peak oil. And we are discharging greenhouse gases into the atmosphere faster than nature can absorb them, setting the stage for a rise in the Earth's temperature well above any since agriculture began.

"Can we just realize that there are limits to growth? That "smart growth", at best, delays the moment when we must concede the limitations of a finite world? After observing the mindless expansion of the Los Angeles region, predicated on a future of cheap energy that will not be realized, I have to ask, are we smarter than a colony of bacteria that reproduces and proliferates until it suddenly dies off from an exhaustion of resources?" - David M. Marquez

Our twenty-first century civilization is not the first civilization to move onto an economic path that was environmentally unsustainable.

Many earlier civilizations also found themselves in environmental trouble. As Jared Diamond notes in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, some were able to change course and avoid economic decline. Others were not.

We study the archeological sites of Sumerians, the Mayans, Easter Islanders, and other early civilizations that were not able to make the needed adjustments in time.

Fortunately, there is a consensus emerging among scientists on the broad outlines of the changes needed.

If economic progress is to be sustained, we need to replace the fossil fuel based, automobile centered, throwaway economy with a new economic model. Instead of being based on fossil fuels, the new economy will be powered by abundant sources of renewable energy: wind, solar, geothermal, hydropower, and biofuels. Instead of being centered around automobiles, future transportation systems will be far more diverse, widely employing light rail, buses, and bicycles as well as cars. The goal will be to maximize mobility, not automobile ownership.

The throwaway economy will be replaced by a comprehensive reuse/recycle economy.

Consumer products from cars to computers will be designed so that they can be disassembled into their component parts and completely recycled. Throwaway products such as single-use beverage containers will be phased out.

The good news is that we can already see glimpses here and there of what this new economy looks like.

We have the technologies to build it—including, for example, gas-electric hybrid cars, advanced-design wind turbines, highly efficient refrigerators, and water-efficient irrigation systems. We can see how to build the new economy brick by brick. With each wind farm, rooftop solar panel, paper recycling facility, bicycle path, and reforestation program, we move closer to an economy that can sustain economic progress. If, instead, we continue on the current economic path, the question is not whether environmental deterioration will lead to economic decline, but when.

No economy, however technologically advanced, can survive the collapse of its environmental support systems.

We recently entered a new century, but we are also entering a new global order, one where the collisions between our demands and the Earth's capacity to satisfy them are becoming daily events. It may be another crop-withering heat wave, another village abandoned because of invading sand dunes, or another aquifer pumped dry.

If we do not act quickly to reverse the trends, these seemingly isolated events will come more and more ffrequently, accumulating and combining to determine our future.

Resources that accumulated over eons of geological time are being consumed in a single human lifespan.

We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize. These deadlines, determined by nature, are not politically negotiable.

Nature has many thresholds that we discover only when it is too late.

In our fast-forward civilization, we learn that we have crossed natural thresholds only after the fact, leaving little time to adjust. For example, when we exceed the sustainable catch of a fishery, the stocks begin to shrink. Once this natural threshold is crossed, we have a limited time in which to back off and lighten the catch. If we fail to meet this deadline, breeding populations shrink to where the fishery is no longer viable, and it collapses.

We know from earlier civilizations that the lead indicators of economic decline were environmental, not economic.

The trees went first, then the soil, and finally the civilization itself.

To archeologists, the sequence is all too familiar.

Our situation today is far more challenging because in addition to shrinking forests and eroding soils, we must deal with falling water tables, more frequent crop-withering heat waves, collapsing fisheries, expanding deserts, deteriorating rangelands, dying coral reefs, melting glaciers, rising seas, more-powerful storms, disappearing species, and, soon, shrinking oil supplies.

"We are dependent on oil for our food, transportation, commerce, medicine, communication, sanitation and the job specialization that provides the vast majority of our livelihoods. Breaking our dependency will involve wholesale change in the way we live and who we are as a people." - Sara Anne Edwards

Although these ecologically destructive trends have been evident for some time, and some have been reversed at the national level, not one has been reversed at the global level.

The bottom line is that the Earth is in what ecologists call an "overshoot-and-collapse" mode. Demand has exceeded the sustainable yield of natural systems at the local level countless times in the past. Now, for the first time, it is doing so at the global level. Forests are shrinking for the Earth as a whole. Fishery collapses are widespread. (Harvests of nearly 30 percent of commercial seafood species already have collapsed. Harvests of less than 10 percent of historic highs is considered a collapse. In 1950, only six commercial seafood species worldwide had collapsed. By 2003, more than 2,200 species - 29 percent of all commercially fished species on Earth - had collapsed.) Grasslands are deteriorating on every continent. Water tables are falling in many countries. Carbon dioxide emissions exceed carbon dioxide fixation everywhere.

In 2002, a team of scientists led by Mathis Wackernagel, who now heads the Global Footprint Network, concluded that humanities collective demands first surpassed the Earth's regenerative capacity around 1980.

Their study, published by the American National Academy of Sciences, estimated that global demands in 1999 exceeded that capacity by 20 percent. The gap, growing by 1 percent or so a year, is now much wider.

We are meeting current demands by consuming the Earth's natural assets, setting the stage for decline and collapse.

In a rather ingenious approach to calculating the human physical presence on the Earth, Paul MacCready, the founder and Chairman of AeroVironment and designer of the first solar-powered aircraft, has calculated the weight of all vertebrates on the land and in the air. He notes that when agriculture began, humans, their livestock, and pets together accounted for less than 0.1 percent of the total. Today, he estimates, this group accounts for 98 percent of the Earth's total vertebrate biomass, leaving only 2 percent for the wild portion, the latter including all the deer, wildebeests, elephants, great cats, birds, small mammals, and so forth.

Ecologists are intimately familiar with the overshoot and collapse phenomenon.

One of their favorite examples began in 1944, when the Coast Guard introduced 29 reindeer on remote St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea to serve as the backup food source for the 19 men operating a station there. After World War II ended a year later, the base was closed and the men left the island. When U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist David Kline visited St. Matthew Island in 1957, he discovered a thriving population of 1,350 reindeer feeding on the four-inch-thick mat of lichen that covered the 332-square-kilometer (128-square-mile) island. In the absence of any predators, the population was exploding. By 1963, it had reached 6,000. He returned to St. Matthew Island in 1966 and discovered an island strewn with reindeer skeletons and not much lichen. Only 42 of the reindeer survived: 41 females and 1 not entirely healthy male. There were no fawns. By 1980 or so, the remaining reindeer had died off. Like the deer on St. Matthew Island, we too are overconsuming our natural resources.

Overshoot leads sometimes to decline and sometimes to a complete collapse.

It is not always clear which it will be. In the former, a remnant of the population or economic activity survives in a resource-depleted environment. For example, as the environmental resource base of Easter Island in the South Pacific deteriorated, its population declined from a peak of 20,000 several centuries ago to today's population of fewer than 4,000. In contrast, the 500-year-old Norse settlement in Greenland collapsed during the 1400s, disappearing entirely in the face of environmental adversity.

As of 2005, some 42 countries have population that are stable or declining slightly in size as a result of falling birth rates. But now for the first time ever, demographers are projecting population declines in some countries because of rising death rates, among them Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, and Swaziland.

In the absence of an accelerated shift to smaller families, this list of countries is likely to grow much longer in the years immediately ahead.

The most recent mid-level U.N. demographic projections show the Earth's population increasing from 6.1 billion in 2000 to 9.1 billion in 2050. But such an increase seems highly unlikely, considering the deterioration in life-support systems now under way in across the face of the Earth.

We thus face two urgent major challenges: restructuring the global economy and stabilizing the Earth's human population.

Even as the economy's environmental support systems are deteriorating oil is being pumped with reckless abandon. Leading geologists now think oil production may soon peak and turn downward. This collision between the ever-growing demand for oil and the Earth's finite resources is but the latest in a long series of collisions. Although no one knows exactly when oil production will peak, supply is already lagging behind demand, driving prices upward.

"One of the realities global inhabitants face but don't seem to realize is oil depletion. The world is currently using about 3% of the remaining oil supplies annually. If global oil usage remains constant over the next 10 years, the annual worldwide depletion rate will rise to 4.5% just because of the diminishing oil reserves. Some say the usage rate would rise because of the increased demand in China and India. Others say it would fall because of the increasing difficulty and expense of extracting the remaining oil. In either case, pressure for reduced U.S. oil usage will be great." - Dwayne Deets

In this new global order, the price of oil begins to set the price of food, not so much because of rising fuel costs for farmers and food processors but more because almost everything we eat can be converted into fuel for cars.

The International Monetary Fund recorded a world wide 23% rise in food prices between January 2006 and June 2007.

In this new global order of high oil prices basic food commodities such as wheat, corn, soybeans and sugarcane will also become major energy sources.

Wheat going into the commodities market can be converted into bread for food or ethanol for gas stations. Soybean oil can go onto market shelves or it can go to gas stations to be used as diesel fuel.

In effect, owners of the Earth's 800 million cars will be competing for food resources with the 1.2 billion people living on less than a dollar a day.

"The government is overspending on the defense budget and underspending on more effective ways to bring peace and stability to the Earth. Why are we fueling what looks to be an unending "war on terror" when we could spend a fraction of it on helping people struggling with extreme poverty, people living on less than $1 a day? What people don't realize is that, by helping the poor, we create stability and promote democracy in Third World countries without shedding any blood." - Jackie Steinle

Faced with a seemingly insatiable demand for automotive fuel, farmers will want to clear more and more of the remaining tropical forests to produce sugarcane, oil palms, and other high yielding fuel crops. Already, billions of dollars of private capital are moving into this effort.

In effect, the rising price of oil is generating a massive new threat to the Earth's genetic diversity.

As the demand for farm commodities climbs, it is shifting the focus of international trade concerns from the traditional goal of assured access to markets to one of assured access to supplies. Countries heavily dependent on imported grain for food are beginning to worry that buyers for fuel distilleries may outbid them for supplies. As oil security deteriorates, so, too, will food security. As the role of oil recedes, the process of globalization will be reversed in fundamental ways. As humanity turned to oil during the last century, the energy economy became increasingly globalized, with the people of Earth depending heavily on a handful of countries in the Middle East for energy supplies.

Now as humanity turns to wind, solar cells, and geothermal energy in this century, we are witnessing the localization of the global energy economy. The globalization of the Earth's food economy will also be reversed, as the higher price of oil raises the cost of transporting food internationally.

In response, food production and consumption will become much more localized, leading to diets based more on locally produced food and seasonal availability.

The Earth is facing the emergence of a geopolitics of scarcity, which is already highly visible in the efforts by China, India, and other developing countries to ensure their access to oil supplies.

In the future, the issue will be who gets access to not only Middle Eastern oil but also Brazilian ethanol and North American grain. Pressures on land and water resources, already excessive in most places, will intensify further as the demand for biofuels climbs.

This geopolitics of scarcity is an early manifestation of civilizations in an overshoot and collapse mode, much like the one that emerged among the Mayan cities competing for food in that civilization's waning years. You do not need to be an ecologist to see that if recent environmental trends continue, the global economy eventually will come crashing down.

It is not knowledge that we lack.

At issue is whether national governments can stabilize population and restructure the economy before time runs out.

Looking at what is happening in China helps us to see the urgency of acting quickly.

For many years environmentalists have pointed to America as the Earth's leading consumer, noting that 5 percent of the Earth's people were consuming nearly a third of the Earth's resources. Although that was true for some time, it no longer is.

China has replaced America as the leading consumer of basic commodities.

Among the five basic food, energy, and industrial commodities— grain and meat, oil and coal, and steel—consumption in China has eclipsed that of America in all but oil. China has opened a wide lead with grain, consuming 380 million tons in 2005 versus 260 million tons in America. Among the big three grains, China leads in the consumption of both wheat and rice and trails America only in corn.

Although eating hamburgers is a defining element of the American lifestyle, China's 2005 meat consumption of 67 million tons is far above the 38 million tons eaten in America. While American meat intake is rather evenly distributed between beef, pork, and poultry, in China pork totally dominates. Indeed, half the Earth's pigs are now found in China.

With oil, America was still solidly in the lead in 2004, using more than three times as much as China - 20.4 million barrels per day versus 6.5 million barrels. But American oil use expanded by only 15 percent between 1994 and 2004, while use in China more than doubled.

Having recently eclipsed Japan as an oil consumer, China now trails only America.

Energy use in China also obviously includes coal, which supplies nearly two thirds of the China's energy.

China's annual burning of 960 million tons easily exceeds the 560 million tons used in America.

With this level of coal use and with oil and natural gas use also climbing fast, it is only a matter of time before China's carbon dioxide emissions match those of America.

Then the Earth will have two major countries driving climate change.


China's consumption of steel, a basic indicator of industrial development, is now nearly two and a half times that of America: 258 million tons to 104 million tons in 2003.

As China has moved into the construction phase of development, building hundreds of thousands of factories and high-rise apartment and office buildings, steel consumption has climbed to levels never seen in any country.

With consumer goods, China leads in the number of cell phones, television sets, and refrigerators. America still leads in the number of personal computers and automobiles, though likely not for much longer.

That China has overtaken America in consumption of basic resources gives us license to ask the next question.

What if China catches up with America in consumption per person?

If the Chinese economy continues to grow at 8 percent a year, by 2031 income per person will equal that in America in 2004. If we further assume that consumption patterns of China's affluent population in 2031, by then 1.45 billion, will be roughly similar to those of Americans in 2004, we have a startling answer to our question.

At the current annual American grain consumption of 900 kilograms per person, including industrial use, China's grain consumption in 2031 would equal roughly two thirds of the current world grain harvest.

If paper use per person in China in 2031 reaches the current American level, this translates into 305 million tons of paper—double existing world production of 161 million tons.

There go the Earth's forests.

And if oil consumption per person reaches the American level by 2031, China will use 99 million barrels of oil a day.

The Earth is currently producing 84 million barrels a day and may never produce much more.

This helps explain why China's fast-expanding use of oil is already helping to create a politics of scarcity.

If China one day should have three cars for every four people, as America now does, China's fleet would total 1.1 billion vehicles, well beyond the current world fleet of 800 million. Providing the roads, highways, and parking lots for such a fleet would require paving an area roughly equal to China's land in rice, its principal food staple.

The inevitable conclusion is that there are not enough resources for China to reach American consumption levels.

"We are shipping our middle class jobs to countries that make almost no products for their citizens; instead, they export back to us. Meanwhile, all we can sell them is our means of production. Farmers call what we have been doing "eating our seed corn." As our depleted middle class reaches a tipping point, we will no longer be able to support the trade imbalances.: - Larry Severson

The western economic model - the fossil fuel based, automobile centered, throwaway economy - will not work for China's 1.45 billion in 2031. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India either, which by 2031 is projected to have even more people than China. Nor will it work for the other 3 billion people in developing countries who are also dreaming the "American Dream."

And in an increasingly integrated global economy, where countries everywhere are competing for the same resources—the same oil, grain, and iron ore - the existing economic model will not work for industrial countries either.

Our twenty-first century global civilization is not the first to face the prospect of environmentally induced economic decline.

The question is how we will respond. We do have one unique asset at our command—an archeological record that shows us what happened to earlier civilizations that got into environmental trouble and failed to respond. As Jared Diamond points out in Collapse, some of the early societies that were in environmental trouble were able to change their ways in time to avoid decline and collapse.

Six centuries ago, for example, Icelanders realized that overgrazing on their grass covered highlands was leading to extensive soil loss from the inherently thin soils of the region. Rather than lose the grasslands and face economic decline, farmers joined together to determine how many sheep the highlands could sustain and then allocated quotas among themselves, thus preserving their grasslands and avoiding a tragic loss in value of the commons.

The Icelanders understood the consequences of overgrazing and reduced their sheep numbers to a level that could be sustained.

We understand the consequences of burning fossil fuels and the resulting carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere. Unlike the Icelanders who were able to restrict their livestock numbers, we have not been able to restrict our carbon dioxide emissions. Not all societies have fared as well as the Icelanders, whose economy continues to produce wool and to thrive.

The early Sumerian civilization of the fourth millennium BC was an extraordinary one, advancing far beyond any that had existed before.

Its carefully engineered irrigation system gave rise to a highly productive agriculture, one that enabled farmers to produce a food surplus, supporting formation of the first cities. Managing the irrigation system required a sophisticated social organization. The Sumerians had the first cities and the first written language, the cuneiform script.

By any measure it was an extraordinary civilization, but there was an environmental flaw in the design of its irrigation system, one that would eventually undermine its food supply. The water that backed up behind dams built across the Euphrates was diverted onto the land through a network of gravity-fed canals. Some water was used by the crops, some evaporated, and some percolated downward. In this region, where underground drainage was weak, percolation slowly raised the water table. As the water climbed to within inches of the surface, it began to evaporate into the atmosphere, leaving behind salt. Over time, the accumulation of salt on the soil surface lowered its productivity.

As salt accumulated and wheat yields declined, the Sumerians shifted to barley, a more salt-tolerant plant. This postponed Sumer's decline, but it was treating the symptoms, not the cause, of falling crop yields. As salt concentrations continued to build, the yields of barley eventually declined also. The resultant shrinkage of the food supply undermined the economic foundation of this once-great civilization. As land productivity declined, so did the civilization.

Archeologist Robert McC. Adams has studied the site of ancient Sumer on the central flood plain of the Euphrates River, an empty, desolate area now outside the frontiers of cultivation. He describes how the "tangled dunes, long disused canal levees, and the rubble-strewn mounds of former settlement contribute only low, featureless relief. Vegetation is sparse, and in many areas it is almost wholly absent....Yet at one time, here lay the core, the heartland, the oldest urban, literate civilization on Earth."

The New World counterpart to Sumer is the Mayan civilization that developed in the lowlands of what is now Guatemala.

It flourished from AD 250 until its collapse around AD 900. Like the Sumerians, the Mayans had developed a sophisticated, highly productive agriculture, this one based on raised plots of earth surrounded by canals that supplied water.

As with Sumer, the Mayan demise was apparently linked to a failing food supply.

For this New World civilization, it was deforestation and soil erosion that undermined agriculture. Changes in climate may also have played a role. Food shortages apparently triggered civil conflict among the various Mayan cities as they competed for food. Today this region is covered by jungle, reclaimed by nature.

During the later centuries of the Mayan civilization, a new society was evolving on faraway Easter Island, some 166 square kilometers of land in the South Pacific roughly 3,200 kilometers west of South America and 2,200 kilometers from Pitcairn Island, the nearest habitation. Settled around AD 400, this civilization flourished on a volcanic island with rich soils and lush vegetation, including trees that grew 25 meters tall with trunks 2 meters in diameter. Archeological records indicate that the islanders ate mainly seafood, principally dolphins—a mammal that could only be caught by harpoon from large sea-going canoes.29 The Easter Island society flourished for several centuries, reaching an estimated population of 20,000. As its human numbers gradually increased, tree cutting exceeded the sustainable yield of forests. Eventually the large trees that were needed to build the sturdy canoes disappeared, depriving islanders of access to the dolphins and dramatically shrinking their food supply. The archeological record shows that at some point human bones became intermingled with the dolphin bones, suggesting a desperate society that had resorted to cannibalism. Today the island has some 2,000 residents.

One unanswerable question about these earlier civilizations was whether they knew what was causing their decline.

Did the Sumerians understand that the rising salt content in the soil from water evaporation was reducing their wheat yields? If they knew, were they simply unable to muster the political support needed to lower water tables, just as the world today is struggling unsuccessfully to lower carbon dioxide emissions?

carbon trading is just another name for carbon indulgences

These are just three of the many early civilizations that moved onto an economic path that nature could not sustain.

We, too, are on such a path.

Any one of several trends of environmental degradation could undermine civilization as we know it. Just as the irrigation system that defined the early Sumerian economy had a flaw, so too does the fossil fuel energy system that defines our modern economy.

For them it was a rising water table that undermined the economy; for us it is rising CO2 levels that threaten to disrupt economic progress. In both cases, the trend is invisible. Whether it resulted from the salting of Sumer's cropland, the deforestation and soil erosion of the Mayans, or the depleted forests and loss of the distant water fishing capacity of the Easter Islanders, collapse of these early civilizations appears to have been associated with a decline in food supply.

Today the annual addition of more than 70 million people to a world population of over 6 billion at a time when water tables are falling, temperatures are rising, and oil supplies will soon be shrinking suggests that the food supply again may be the vulnerable link between the environment and the economy.

The first big test of the international community's capacity to manage scarcity may come with oil or it could come with grain. If the latter is the case, this could occur when China - whose grain harvest fell by 34 million tons, or 9 percent, between 1998 and 2005—turns to the world market for massive imports of 30 million, 50 million, or possibly even 100 million tons of grain per year.

Demand on this scale could quickly overwhelm world grain markets. When this happens, China will have to look to America, which controls the world's grain exports of over 40 percent of some 200 million tons.

This will pose a fascinating geopolitical situation. More than 1.3 billion Chinese consumers, who had an estimated $160-billion trade surplus with America in 2004 - enough to buy the entire American grain harvest twice - will be competing with Americans for American grain, driving up American food prices.

In such a situation 30 years ago, America simply restricted exports. But China is now banker to America, underwriting much of the massive American fiscal deficit with monthly purchases of US Treasury bonds.

Within the next few years, America may be loading one or two ships a day with grain for China. This long line of ships stretching across the Pacific, like an umbilical cord providing nourishment, will intimately link the two economies. Managing this flow of grain so as to simultaneously satisfy the food needs of consumers in both countries, at a time when ethanol fuel distilleries are taking a growing share of the American grain harvest, may become one of the leading foreign policy challenges of this new century.

The way the Earth accommodates the vast projected needs of China, India, and other developing countries for grain, oil, and other resources will help determine how the world addresses the stresses associated with outgrowing the Earth.

How low-income, importing countries fare in this competition for grain will also tell us something about future political stability. And, finally, the American response to China's growing demands for grain even as they drive up food prices for American consumers will tell us much about the capacity of countries to manage the emerging politics of scarcity. The most imminent risk is that China's entry into the global market, combined with the growing diversion of farm commodities to biofuels, will drive grain prices so high that many low-income developing countries will not be able to import enough grain.

This in turn could lead to escalating food prices and political instability on a scale that will disrupt global economic progress.

Earlier civilizations that moved onto an economic path that was environmentally unsustainable did so largely in isolation. But in today's increasingly integrated, interdependent global economy, if we are facing civilizational decline, we are facing it together.

The fates of all the peoples of Earth are intertwined.

This interdependence can be managed to our mutual benefit only if we recognize that the term "in the national interest" is in many ways obsolete.

The question facing governments is whether they can respond quickly enough to prevent threats from becoming catastrophes. The peoples of Earth have precious little experience in responding to aquifer depletion, rising temperatures, expanding deserts, melting polar ice caps, and a shrinking oil supply.

These new trends will fully challenge the capacity of our political institutions and leadership. In times of crisis, societies sometimes have a Nero as a leaders and sometimes a Winston Churchill. The central challenge, the key to building the new economy, is getting the market to tell the ecological truth.

The dysfunctional global economy of today has been shaped by distorted market prices that do not incorporate environmental costs. Many of our environmental travails are the result of severe market distortions.

One of these distortions became abundantly clear in the summer of 1998 when China's Yangtze River valley, home to 400 million people, was wracked by some of the worst flooding in history. The resulting damages of $30 billion exceeded the value of the country's annual rice harvest.

After several weeks of flooding, the government in Beijing announced in mid-August a ban on tree cutting in the Yangtze River basin. It justified the ban by noting that trees standing are worth three times as much as trees cut. The flood control services provided by forests were three times as valuable as the lumber in the trees.

In effect, the market price was off by a factor of three!

With this analysis, no one could economically justify cutting trees in the basin.

A similar situation exists with gasoline. In America, the gasoline pump price was over $2 per gallon in mid 2005 and $3 per gallon by mid 2006. But this reflects only the cost of pumping the oil, refining it into gasoline, and delivering the gas to stations. It does not include the costs of tax subsidies to the oil industry, such as the oil depletion allowance; the subsidies for the extraction, production, and use of petroleum; the military costs of protecting access to oil supplies (the war in Iraq cost up to 02/02/08 was $491 billion - total current expenditures); the health care costs for treating respiratory illnesses ranging from asthma to emphysema; and, most important, the costs of climate change. (ExxonMobil made $36 billion in 2005. In the spring the retiring CEO of ExxonMobil received a retirement package worth $398 million.)

If these costs, which in 1998 the International Center for Technology Assessment calculated at roughly $9 per gallon of gasoline burned in America, were added to the $3 cost of the gasoline itself, motorists would pay about $12 a gallon for gas at the pump. Filling a 20-gallon tank would cost $240. In reality, burning gasoline is very costly, but the market tells us it is cheap, leading to gross distortions in the structure of the economy.

The challenge facing government is to incorporate such costs into market prices by systematically calculating them and incorporating them as a tax on the product to make sure its price reflects the full costs to society. If we have learned anything over the last few years, it is that accounting systems that do not tell the truth can be costly. Faulty corporate accounting systems that leave costs off the books have driven some of America's largest corporations into bankruptcy, costing millions of people their lifetime savings, retirement incomes, and jobs. Distorted global market prices that do not incorporate major costs in the production of various products and the provision of services could be even costlier. They could lead to global bankruptcy and economic decline."

.

Plan B - A Plan of Hope



from Lester R. Brown, Plan B 2.0 Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble

"Our global economy is "driving ahead full speed". As a species we are consuming the Earth's resources and upsetting ecosystems much faster than nature can rectify the damage we inflict." - Robert Sollen


"The time is long past that we end the placing of Band-Aids on lethal wounds. We must put the same innovation and energy that we used in placing men on the moon into a sustainable future. In the balance, I have little doubt, is the survival of civilization." - Don Malvin

"America requires 8.9 million barrels of oil a day to fuel its vehicles. Replacing our cars with prize-winning vehicles would reduce consumption to about 1.8 million barrels a day. It would also slash carbon dioxide emissions. It is critical to American national interests to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. The growth of the Chinese and Indian economies increases global demand for oil. Our economic lifeblood must be immunized against the dictates of a global petroleum cartel. We must not allow our potential energy vulnerability to become our Achilles heel. The challenge before us transcends traditional ideological barriers. I hope this proposal will contribute to a much needed rethinking of our national energy policy." - Dan Lungren




See Silas Marner

See Thabo Mbeki

See Economics

See The Corruption of the American Dream

See The Subversion of American Democracy
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This website defines a new religious ideology to which its author adheres. The author feels that the falsification of reality outside personal experience has created a populace unable to discern propaganda from reality and that this has been done purposefully by an international corporate cartel through their agents who wish to foist a corrupt version of reality on the human race. Religious intolerance occurs when any group refuses to tolerate religious practices, religious beliefs or persons due to their religious ideology. This web site marks the founding of the religion aptly named The Truth of the Way of Life - a rational religion based on reason which requires no leap of faith, accepts no tithes, has no supreme leader, no church buildings and in which each and every individual is encouraged to develop a personal relation with God through the pursuit of the knowledge of reality in the hope of curing the spiritual corruption that has enveloped the human spirit. The tenets of The Truth of the Way of Life are spelled out in detail on this web site by the author. Violent acts against individuals due to their religious beliefs in America is considered a “hate crime.”

This web site in no way condones violence. To the contrary the intent here is to reduce the violence that is already occurring due to the international corporate cartels desire to control the human race. The international corporate cartel already controls the world central banking system, mass media worldwide, the industrial military complex of America and is responsible for the collapse of morals, the elevation of self-centered behavior and the destruction of global ecosystems. Civilization is based on cooperation. Cooperation does not occur at the point of a gun.

American social mores and values have declined precipitously over the last century as the corrupt international cartel has garnered more and more power. This power rests in the ability to deceive the populace in general through mass media by pressing emotional buttons which have been preprogrammed into the population through prior mass media psychological operations. The results have been the destruction of the family and the destruction of social structures that do not adhere to the corrupt international elites vision of a perfect world. Through distraction and coercion the direction of thought of the bulk of the population has been directed toward solutions proposed by the corrupt international elite that further consolidates their power and which further their purposes.

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