{"id":68350,"date":"2015-12-28T12:00:06","date_gmt":"2015-12-28T12:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=68350"},"modified":"2015-12-28T08:22:32","modified_gmt":"2015-12-28T08:22:32","slug":"terror-climate-chaos-financial-crisis-are-the-costs-of-doing-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/12\/terror-climate-chaos-financial-crisis-are-the-costs-of-doing-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Terror, Climate Chaos, Financial Crisis Are the Costs of \u2018Doing Business\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Nafeez_Ahmed\"<\/a>The techno-narcissism of predatory neoliberal capitalism is locked into an endless war with the bastard monster of its own creation – Islamic State.<\/em><\/p>\n

24 Dec 2015 – <\/em>Fifteen years into the 21st<\/sup> century, humanity has made little progress in addressing major threats to civilisation. In fact, on terrorism, climate change and the economy, we\u2019re not making progress at all, but making things worse.<\/p>\n

The “war on terror” has been waged for 14 years since 9\/11, but far from terror being defeated, it has metastasised into a regional quasi-state occupying parts of Iraq and Syria.<\/p>\n

Despite the much-lauded “binding” climate accord<\/a> agreed in Paris, the governments most responsible for carbon emissions are still avoiding the reductions necessary to prevent us breaching crucial tipping points into dangerous climate change.<\/p>\n

Governments have tried every neoliberal trick in the book to kick-start prosperity, but the legacy of the 2008 banking collapse lives on through tepid growth, astronomical global debt even higher than pre-crash levels, and the perpetual risk<\/a> of another financial crisis.<\/p>\n

At first glance, these failures appear unrelated.<\/p>\n

In reality, ineffective hysteria in fighting terror, chronic inertia in tackling climate change, and impotence in the face of looming capitalist meltdown are part of the same structural problem: our civilisational paradigm.<\/p>\n

Mind the Gaps<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thanks to scientific and technological advances, information has never been so voluminous, and so accessible, to so many people.<\/p>\n

But the epistemological gap between our perceptions of the world and how we are affecting it remains as wide as ever.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, the gap is manufactured for political convenience. Senior US military commanders, for instance, have deliberately massaged<\/a> intelligence to promote an image of victory in the war on the Islamic State (IS) \u2013 fabrications reminiscent of intelligence manipulation on weapons of mass destruction during the 2003 Iraq War.<\/p>\n

The gap is also related to deep-rooted geopolitical structures integral to the way the West interacts with the Muslim world. At the forefront of the US-led war on IS is a coalition of regional powers who over the past half-decade had siphoned arms and funds<\/a> to the very militant groups in Syria that coalesced into IS.<\/p>\n

Declassified intelligence documents reveal that despite knowing full well that their own allies \u2013 the Gulf states and Turkey \u2013 were empowering the most extremist Syrian rebel factions, Western governments continued to support them.<\/p>\n

No wonder Alain Chouet, former head of the Security Intelligence Service of the French Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE), has described<\/a> the “war on terror” as a “sham” concealing an ongoing “military alliance” between “Western governments and the financial sponsors of jihad \u2026 [W]e remain allies with those who have sponsored this terrorism for the last 30 years.”<\/p>\n

Addicted to Oil<\/strong><\/p>\n

A core reason for this self-defeating alliance is oil addiction. Since the Second World War, the US has fostered alliances with autocratic regimes across the Muslim world to access regional fossil fuel energy sources deemed critical for the very survival of global capitalism.<\/p>\n

US Central Command (CENTCOM) documents<\/a> from the 1990s until today justify a permanent US combat presence in the Gulf to defend “US and free-world interests,” especially “critical economic interests,” which include guaranteeing “the free \ufb02ow of oil at stable and reasonable prices” along with “freedom of navigation and access to commercial markets”.<\/p>\n

This thinking did not change after 9\/11.<\/p>\n

A 2013 CENTCOM document promises that \u201coil and energy resources that fuel the global economy\u201d will \u201ckeep US attention anchored in this region\u201d.<\/p>\n

Alliances with key Gulf regimes to ratify US military access, free trade, and arms sales are pivotal to this strategy, despite them being brutal dictatorships<\/a> sponsoring the very forces the West is purportedly fighting.<\/p>\n

As General Colin Powell said<\/a> after al-Qaeda\u2019s 1998 attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, terrorism \u201cis the cost of doing business\u201d in today\u2019s world.<\/p>\n

Climate Chaos<\/strong><\/p>\n

But terror is not the only cost.<\/p>\n

Another is climate change. Over the past few centuries, the abundance of cheap fossil fuels has enabled exponential economic growth since the industrial revolution.<\/p>\n

Yet fossil fuel emissions are now overwhelming the planet\u2019s natural balance with an ever-increasing quantity of atmospheric carbon, contributing to global warming, and destabilising eco-systems.<\/p>\n

According to the UN\u2019s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the current rate of fossil fuel emissions heralds a worst-case scenario of global average temperatures rising by around four to five degrees Celsius by 2100.<\/p>\n

Most scientists agree this would render the Earth largely uninhabitable. \u201cIf global warming approaches 3C by the end of the century,\u201d writes<\/a> former NASA chief climate scientist James Hansen, “it is estimated that 21-52% of the species on Earth will be committed to extinction.”<\/p>\n

Our business-as-usual<\/a> trajectory means we are already on track to hit the worst-case scenario, even if countries comply<\/a> with national pledges to slash emissions.<\/p>\n

The worst case may also not even be the worst case. The very process of obtaining a consensus means IPCC forecasts are too conservative<\/a>\u00a0and consistently underestimate<\/a> the severity of global warming.<\/p>\n

To make matters worse, the world\u2019s major fossil fuel emitters \u2013 especially the US, China and Saudi Arabia \u2013 have repeatedly pressured<\/a> the IPCC to \u201cdilute\u201d its landmark “Summary for Policymakers” reports, to minimise policies that could undermine fossil fuel interests.<\/p>\n

Yet as even Bank of England governor Mark Carney acknowledges<\/a>, avoiding dangerous climate change requires the “vast majority” of the world\u2019s oil, gas and coal reserves to be left in the ground. In which case, fossil fuel majors are sitting on defunct “stranded assets” that put investors and insurers at major financial risk.<\/p>\n

End of Oil, Limits to Growth<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fossil fuels are implicated in global financial woe in a more direct respect. Professor James Hamilton, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, has shown<\/a> that oil price spikes helped trigger the consumer defaults behind the unraveling of mortgage debt, leading to the 2008 banking collapse.<\/p>\n

The oil spikes had been triggered by the peak and plateau<\/a> of world conventional oil production around 2005. Since then, most new production has come from more expensive unconventional oil and gas sources, such as shale gas and tar sands.<\/p>\n

Production costs for unconventional sources are far higher than for cheap crude. But the rapid depletion rate for shale gas wells has driven high drill rates, fuelling a gas glut. The resulting oversupply has helped lower the market price to a degree that threatens profitability<\/a> for the entire industry.<\/p>\n

This shift away from cheap, easy fossil fuels to expensive, difficult-to-extract energy is the biggest elephant in the room when it comes to the economic slowdown.<\/p>\n

Conventional economists, who largely failed to anticipate the 2008 crash, still fail to understand the economy\u2019s embeddedness in environmental and energy systems. They do not grasp that persistent slow growth is symptomatic of the economy\u2019s intensifying overshoot<\/a> of the natural limits of those systems.<\/p>\n

No amount of quantitative easing, deregulation, and austerity can address<\/a> the endless-growth model\u2019s dependence on unlimited exploitation of planetary resources \u2013 and the latter\u2019s accelerating depletion.<\/p>\n

Arab Spring, Arab Winter<\/strong><\/p>\n

These converging crises \u2013 climate-induced droughts, collapsing agriculture, peak oil, the decline of state revenues, accelerating debt and inequality under extreme financial deregulation and liberalisation – combined with reactionary state repression to maintain “order” \u00a0have helped induce<\/a> the string of state failures behind escalating ethnic, sectarian and political unrest across the Middle East.<\/p>\n

In countries like Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and beyond, civil unrest was triggered or exacerbated by food price hikes.<\/p>\n

Those in turn were triggered<\/a> by unprecedented extreme weather events in food-basket regions, rapid depletion of these countries\u2019 conventional oil sources, the consequent haemorrhage of state revenues, and the inability of authoritarian states to contain popular resentments any longer.<\/p>\n

What happens when, over the next 15 years, Saudi Arabia\u2019s oil export capacity declines<\/a> to zero?\u00a0When US shale production peaks<\/a> after 2020?\u00a0When climate change increasingly disrupts<\/a> major food producing regions?<\/p>\n

We\u2019re All Monsters Now<\/strong><\/p>\n

As the economy teeters on the brink of the next crisis, as climate change intensifies, as planetary resources deplete and rates of extinction accelerate, as violent conflict and terrorism proliferate, the response of world leaders has been denial, business-as-usual, and too little, too late.<\/p>\n

We are at war with surface-symptoms: obsessed with throwing bombs at terrorists forged from a system that incubates both bombs and terrorists.<\/p>\n

That is precisely because the epistemological failure to recognise the inherent interconnections of these global crises is, itself, symptomatic of the same crises.<\/p>\n

The fragmentation in our epistemic approach \u2013 our vision of the world \u2013 reflects the fragmentation we create in the world.<\/p>\n

Based on an inherently limited diagnosis that refuses to concede the complicity of business-as-usual in generating these crises, industrial civilisation\u2019s approach is to shore-up the existing system of endless growth, premised on fossil fuel dependence.<\/p>\n

It is no coincidence that the “war on terror” is being led by a coalition of the world\u2019s major industrial consumers, fossil fuel producers and carbon emitters \u2013 in the name of defending “civilisation”.<\/p>\n

It is no coincidence that all the areas of military engagement to fight terror, including the latest in Syria<\/a>, happen to contain the bulk of the world\u2019s remaining strategic energy resources.<\/p>\n

But the projection of a civilisational divide props up the comforting delusion that the problem is not with “our civilisation” \u2013 but with “Them”: “Them” terrorists are evil, unfathomable monsters who appear out of the blue due solely to backward beliefs, and must therefore be destroyed by “Our” civilisation.<\/p>\n

This childish Star Wars-esque narrative obscures the fact that backward ideologies are becoming attractive in the context of state failures triggered by business-as-usual hitting biophysical limits.<\/p>\n

The techno-narcissism of predatory neoliberal capitalism is locked into an endless war with the bastard monster of its own creation, Islamist militant supremacism.<\/p>\n

Both ideologies believe they represent “civilisation”.\u00a0Both are merely fractured mirror images, reflecting a deeper Crisis of Civilisation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While these two barbarisms fight each other in the name of “civilisation,” it is up to people everywhere of all faiths and none to plant the seeds of the post-capitalist alternative.<\/p>\n

___________________________________<\/p>\n

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Ph.D. is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment<\/a> and<\/em> founder, editor-in-chief of<\/em> INSURGE intelligence<\/em><\/a>. He is an investigative journalist, bestselling author and international security scholar. He is the winner of a 2015 Project Censored Award, known as the \u2018Alternative Pulitzer Prize\u2019, for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his <\/em>Guardian work, and was selected in the <\/em>Evening Standard\u2019s \u2018Power 1,000\u2019 most globally influential Londoners. Nafeez has also written for <\/em>TRANSCEND Media Service<\/a>, <\/em>The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde Diplomatique, New Internationalist, Counterpunch, Truthout, among others. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Faculty of Science and Technology at Anglia Ruskin University. He is the author of <\/em>A User\u2019s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It<\/a> (2010), and the scifi thriller novel <\/em>Zero Point<\/a>, among other books. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9\/11 Commission and the 7\/7 Coroner\u2019s Inquest.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 middleeasteye.net<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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