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Scientists Warn the UN of Capitalism's Imminent Demise

#1
C C Offline
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/artic...ent-demise

EXCERPT: Capitalism as we know it is over. So suggests a new report commissioned by a group of scientists appointed by the UN Secretary-General. The main reason? We’re transitioning rapidly to a radically different global economy, due to our increasingly unsustainable exploitation of the planet’s environmental resources.

Climate change and species extinctions are accelerating even as societies are experiencing rising inequality, unemployment, slow economic growth, rising debt levels, and impotent governments. Contrary to the way policymakers usually think about these problems, the new report says that these are not really separate crises at all.

Rather, these crises are part of the same fundamental transition to a new era characterized by inefficient fossil fuel production and the escalating costs of climate change. Conventional capitalist economic thinking can no longer explain, predict, or solve the workings of the global economy in this new age, the paper says.

[...] The amount of energy we can extract, compared to the energy we are using to extract it, is decreasing “across the spectrum—unconventional oils, nuclear and renewables return less energy in generation than conventional oils, whose production has peaked—and societies need to abandon fossil fuels because of their impact on the climate,” the paper states.

The shift to renewables might help solve the climate challenge, but for the foreseeable future will not generate the same levels of energy as cheap, conventional oil.

[...] The scientists refer to the pioneering work of systems ecologist Professor Charles Hall of the State University of New York with economist Professor Kent Klitgaard from Wells College. [...]

Hall and Klitgaard are highly critical of mainstream capitalist economic theory, which they say has become divorced from some of the most fundamental principles of science. [...] “For the last century, all we had to do was to pump more and more oil out of the ground,” say Hall and Klitgaard. Decades ago, fossil fuels had very high EROI values—a little bit of energy allowed us to extract large amounts of oil, gas and coal.

But as I’ve previously reported for Motherboard, this is no longer the case. Now we’re using more and more energy to extract smaller quantities of fossil fuels. Which means higher production costs to produce what we need to keep the economy rolling. The stuff is still there in the ground—billions of barrels worth to be sure, easily enough to fry the climate several times over.

But it’s harder and more expensive to get out. And the environmental costs of doing so are rising dramatically, as we’ve caught a glimpse of with this summer’s global heatwave. These costs are not recognised by capitalist markets. They literally cannot be seen by prevailing economic models. [...] Most observers, then, have no idea of the biophysical realities pointed out in the background paper commissioned by the UN Secretary-General’s IGS—that the driving force of the transition to postcapitalism is the decline of what made ‘endless growth capitalism’ possible in the first place: abundant, cheap energy.

[...] capitalist markets will not be capable of facilitating the required changes – governments will need to step up, and institutions will need to actively shape markets to fit the goals of human survival. Right now, the prospects for this look slim. But the new paper argues that either way, change is coming. Whether or not the system that emerges still comprises a form of capitalism is ultimately a semantic question. It depends on how you define capitalism. “Capitalism, in that situation, is not like ours now,” said Järvensivu....

MORE: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/artic...ent-demise
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#2
Syne Offline
Except that many European countries, especially Scandinavian/Nordic, have turned back toward capitalism as their unsustainably expensive socialist experiments have failed them.
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