Decline of the Empire

Thoughts On The "Collapse" Of The West Antarctic Ice Sheet

I first realized about 16 years ago that the loss of the Earth's most vulnerable ice sheets (West Antarctica, Greenland) was inevitable and irreversible. And so here it is.

The collapse of large parts of the ice sheet in West Antarctica appears to have begun and is almost certainly unstoppable, with global warming accelerating the pace of the disintegration, two groups of scientists reported Monday.

The finding, which had been feared by some scientists for decades, means that a rise in global sea level of at least 10 feet may now be inevitable. The rise may continue to be relatively slow for at least the next century or so, the scientists said, but sometime after that it will probably speed up so sharply as to become a crisis.

“This is really happening,” said Thomas P. Wagner, who runs NASA’s programs on polar ice and helped oversee some of the research. “There’s nothing to stop it now. But you are still limited by the physics of how fast the ice can flow.”

It will take several centuries for the "collapse" to play out, but the process will likely be complete a thousand years from now. Sea level will eventually rise about 4 meters (~13 feet) from this event alone.

Economic Growth Is Not Negotiable

Reader Alexander Ač of the Czech Republic (blog here) put a question to European commissioners discussing climate change adaptation and mitigation: key messages from the IPCC's 5th Assessment Report and implications for policy and decision making.

Whew! — a long title, but very official sounding.

There is a video at the website linked-in above, but I can not embed it. This Q&A took place at the 2:44:20 mark. If you watch the video, you can jump ahead to that point. Here is a partial transcript.

Alexander Ač  —  I have a very short question. The Club of Rome told us 40 years ago that growth is not sustainable. It's a shocking result. And another one is that we know that ... we are in ecological overshoot. So why are we still speaking about economic growth?

The Net Neutrality Scam

Folks in D.C. are surrounded by their own bubble. A bubble where there are lots of telecom lobbyists walking around who describe net neutrality as politically toxic
   — Marvin Ammori, a lawyer who has been vocal in his support of net neutrality

Today's subject is net neutrality, which is basically what we've got today. In our likely future, the big ISPs (internet service providers) will give most of the internet bandwidth they control, which is 70% of it, to "content" providers (like Disney, ABC, NBC, etc.) who will pay for privileged access to their data pipes.

Source

Sometimes the ISP (Comcast) and the "content" provider (NBC) are the very same assholes. 

By implication, everybody else (like DOTE) will become the Little Sisters of the Poor. You may be able to access poor bastards like me once in a Blue Moon, or perhaps not at all.

Got it? This ain't Rocket Science.

Once again, there is Much Confusion in America. There shouldn't be. We all know The Drill.

Hope Changes Nothing

Hope springs eternal in the human breast
   — Alexander Pope, An Essay On Man

This post is not for the faint-hearted, because I am going discuss "hope" honestly without illusions. This post was prompted by a TED talk by Lawrence Lessig (brief discussion and video below).

First, what is "hope"? Common definitions include—

wanting something to happen or be true and thinking that it could happen or be true

or

a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen

The Progressive Dream Dies Hard

Lately, here in the United States, we have witnessed an astonishing socio-economic trifecta which tells us where we stand. Unfortunately for progressive thought, we are not in a good place, to wit—

1.  In the McCutcheon decision, wealthy campaign donors were given the go-ahead to buy political candidates and elections by the "conservative" majority on the Supreme Court. This decision follows on the heels of the Citizens United ruling, which got the ball rolling vis-a-vis dismantling the 1974 Federal Election Campaign Act. The court's four liberal justices understood the consequences.

In their dissent, the court's four liberal justices called their colleagues' logic "faulty" and said it "misconstrues the nature of the competing constitutional interests at stake." The dissent continues, "Taken together with Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, today's decision eviscerates our Nation's campaign finance laws, leaving a remnant incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy that those laws were intended to resolve."

Unfortunately for democratic legitimacy...

2.  A Princeton/Northwestern study found that there isn't any democratic legitimacy to defend in so far as "the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy." The study found that policy in the United States is created at the behest of an economic elite.

And we have recently learned just how small that elite group is...

3.  The work of University of California-Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman and others has recently come to the attention of our mainstream media. It turns out the Occupy folks got it wrong. It wasn't the top 1% of earners which posed a problem for democratic legitimacy. It was the top 0.1%, and within that smaller group, the top 0.01% who received most of the income gains of the last 30 years. And with the publication Thomas Piketty's Capital In The 21st Century, those paying attention have come to understand that the grotesque inequities of 19th century capitalism will likely be repeated in the 21st.

All these events or findings are of a piece. Taken together, they document the ongoing failure of the classic liberalism which dominated 20th century economic thinking.

The progressive dream dies hard, but before I get to that, permit me to pound the final nails into the liberal coffin.