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Can Beijing Fool the Climate Scientists?

Internationalist Observer | 17.11.2014 15:58 | Analysis | Climate Chaos | Energy Crisis | World

This is a serious concern, despite the fact that there are much worse traps waiting for the same targets. The Chinese-American climate treaty, whose occurrence indicates that both currencies are chained to the same throne, which was sufficiently shaken by the impact of attention directed against it, proves with certainty that Jinping can fool Obama (and thereby keep his even more reactionary competitors at bay). The essence of the treaty is that each side puts a blind eye towards the other side´s accounting trick, which is in the American case the backward projection of the calculation baseline to a date before peak oil, and in the Chinese case the forward shifting of it to a date after peak coal. Of course any meaningful climate treaty would use the date of signature as the common accounting baseline for emission reduction measurements, not only to create an incentive for everyone to sign in at the same time but also to sign in as soon as possible before unavoidable reductions fall behind the entry of competition. This is not the case with the “Beijing Protocol,” and although in this one at least backward projection is not mutual, deprecating the entire treaty, the trade-off of the two different scams leaves a “fossil gap” between the two peaks of the length of one generation that mirrors the uneven consumption of the two substances due to the grotesque energy thirst of a century of militarism. It is not only that the negotiated result makes Unitedstates look stupid because they have to reach their declared targets before the other side even begins to wind down, which leaves the Chinese regime with zero risk. It also leaves the international public with the situation that there is a diplomatic framework but with no effect, because it neither involves targeted competition nor reality-based planning. Only the please-boss-do-something-crowd can spell “cool for our time” as if they had their right of political engagement delivered to them by governments and corporations.

So the analysis shall begin with an abstraction what Beijing is doing there devoid of any climate science reference. Despite the other end is outside the water, Obama has swallowed the Chinese offer hook, line and sinker because the commercial culture of the electoral system has turned against him and he can only continue to keep up the appearance of leadership by grabbing external issues even at conditions so bad a real sovereign would not even consider. But although propping up Unitedstates against an overt collapse into madcap militarism of the Sisi variety, as it is the Chinese interest to keep a wrecked Obama in place instead of seeing a NSA stooge taking his seat, and despite a political triangulation in Unitednations Securitycouncil in the form of one veto privilege stabilising the other, because it takes the carbon emission issue as a mere smokescreen for an effort to reduce the probability of nuclear war, there is no scientifically useful content in the so-called “climate treaty” – except maybe the observation that for this purpose now it does not need six-party talks involving Russia, Japan and the two sides of Korea as well any more. Since Pyongyang cancelled the armistice, even though Obama authorised technical upgrades of the arsenal, the sabre-rattling in the more reactionary fever swamps of the Washington regime apparatus has cooled down a bit. Now Beijing has placed the bet that the Korean pressure against such military expansionism remains firm enough to be tacitly relied upon for throwing this irresistible fool-fool package at the White House. With the blueprint for ending the “Saudi oil spill” outlined, and a bridgehead into the “veto circle” of the fossil system cracked up, it is now the honourable task of climate science to push tough regulation upon the coal industry which ensures that fossil emissions can be reduced appropriately to escape the crash into the planetary extinction scenario.

The first step in that generation-sized effort is the deconstruction of the illusion in the illusion, that is – once the “climate treaty” has been understood as an equivocal “trick-trick” trick – finding the situation out of which that construct has been taken, and the reason why the model of that situation which is imitated by the treaty is wrong in the first place. What the Chinese-American diplomacy is mirroring is the “over-the-brink” approach of renewable conversion: Due to the monopoly weight of the centralised electrical power grid that developed around organic and an-organic fossil mega power stations, there is an economic “inertia of investment” pushing against its natural loss of relevance due to the decentralisation tendency of renewable freedom. The financial incentive for the grid investors is the speculation that climate catastrophe inevitably were to devastate significant areas of territory, which could then be converted into renewable technology parks of the volume of hitherto fossil power supply to be connected via the monopoly grid. Hence, the worse the consequences of it, the easier the replacement of the causes, thanks to the grid. But such “milkmaid calculation” ignores that the more centralism in the infrastructure, the more vulnerable it is to the survival rivalries inevitably erupting from heavy climate catastrophe impact without the renewable freedom of decentralised circulation.

The delusional “fossil freedom” of the grid operators is insufficient to cope with such threat and even worse, the incentive to speculate upon an assumed usefulness of uninhabitable areas leads into a dangerous temptation to reignite the energy-expensive militarism whose extent opened up the “fossil gap” in the first place. In the worst case, that business model would worsen climate change by waging war for keeping up a waning centralism that is only useful to compensate itself for the predictable consequences of its effects. Such as there are common features of an-organic and organic fossil energy, there are common features of organic and an-organic renewable energy, and one of them is the vulnerability of monoculture. What in one case could be insects or bacteria, in the other might be storms or cooling impossibilities. Since the centralised grid with its standardised voltage, frequency and plug design is a legacy of the coal age, the proper shut-down of the power grid to a mere dispatcher of surplus and deficit capacities between overwhelmingly self-sufficient communities is the necessary precondition for supplementing renewable freedom with renewable energy. Only when that is being achieved, a market for renewable energy can develop without distortion from monopoly speculations on climate losses that makes any conversion effort bite itself into the neck. And of course any distortions through subsidy programs can easily be rolled back either once fossil energy is at its actual cost.

Renewable conversion before grid decentralisation has the disadvantage to instigate unsustainable climate speculations, such as missile defence before nuclear disarmament instigates military aggressions. Hence the qualitative aspect of the conversion – how far has the dependency on energy transportation been reduced – must precede the quantitative aspect of it – how far has the dependency on fossil resources been reduced – or else the conversion effort might risk to economically run hot speculating on particular revenues from its own overall failure. There is another mirror image in the shadow of this “climate treaty.” Such as the market now keeps the WMD-trigger-happy morons at a safe distance to the Unitedstates presidency, through the Chinese sway, science in capitalism is a servant of the market as well and that has serious degrading effects on its content. Such as there are sub-prime investments there is sub-prime science. Climate scientists use to be the first ones to notice and let everyone know, as the “mental waste-water” of denial that emanates from dumped sub-prime scientists worshipping the lies of their investors out of fear of losing or resentment of having lost their income, these days is usually being directed into this direction.

It is self-evident that this is a matter of economics, not merely of individual susceptibility to corruption. The more corporations are corrupting family doctors with lavish trips to decadent Japanese hotels or frivolous American restaurants in exchange for unscientific prescriptions, the more resentment and denial there will be when these people lose or fear to lose their employments, and it will be directed by the economic interests of these employers. So there is “scam science” with a double-edged meaning: Science that is scam, and when corporations and institutions leak in economic meltdown produces outbursts of denial, and the science of scam that aims for rational explanations what is happening in the scam and what brings it about. If the theory on the financing of science is supplemented with a definition of what is a scientist as a person who is not dumb enough for playing the lottery then it becomes obvious that in capitalism science is not economically self-reliant but to a decisive extent financed by capitalists who play it like a lottery, i. e. the entirety of science is dumber than the sum of the individual scientists. Only this can explain, to put it into Albert Einstein´s idea of a “temple of science” sought by human minds tired of fiction, that there are scientists in all echelons of leadership who, when it comes to the economics of energy, behave more superstitious than a Tibetan celebrity surrounded by billionaires.

In the Einsteinian tradition the subject matter is to be illustrated with a thought experiment. For the non-scientist climate change is like a landslide on a road that can cause great harm if not acted upon sufficiently ahead of an expected collision, and science is the row of side-posts helping to keep the foresight. In this image, climate denial is the patrol car that gets in front of you, slows down and begins serpentine driving. Can you overtake that with a straight face, or would you play with it and get fined even though not drunk? Of course such a patrol is as little of a contribution to traffic risk reduction as sub-prime science is to human reason, yet it is economically attractive for the monopoly corporations completely regardless of content to maintain a certain percentage of sub-prime science, let off for the military-industrial complex. Only this provides them access to the ethics vacuum of genetic manipulation, animal experimentation and human surveillance which – if science as a whole was more intelligent than the sum of individual scientists – would remain untouched. The climate treaty merely introduces a new form of sub-prime science, namely that of a brand of climate science bribed into the “three apes” (Obama, Jinping and you) framework of it. Once again, the scientific approach to such an economic challenge is the direction of the attention towards the problem of speculative grid inertia, whose climate footprint is even worsened by the general accounting scams of the financial market.

Only the renewable freedom of decentralised installations can ensure a conversion process that does not slide into the side-posts before it does not crash into the valley. In a market overheated by self-fulfilling prophecies, the guessing of climate catastrophe impact as a source of profit is not a suitable means of avoiding it. On the other hand this could mean that the mathematical dampening of speculation as suggested (see Oct 24, 2014) might easily bridge the fossil gap contained in the climate treaty. And of course there is Russian gas that could still make the entire thing explode before the above question were to be answered with yes. The incredibly stupid speculation to try to harness the whole of science as a servant of an unscientific economy by containing it in stupid speculations, whose side-effect of an outpouring of denial is visible to the bare eye even for the tough nerd in the cocoon of his job, is certainly meant to burst at some point, just like any speculation bubble. The problem is not so much that science was drowning in its own success – actually it is drowning in its failure to produce a scientific consensus on the economy of science – but that just like there are failed states there is failed science which requires a paradigm change in the mind of the scientist in order to go away like a failed experiment.

As so often, Korea is the lens through which the fuzzy appearance of China can come to a clear view. Four decades after Mao´s death (see Sept 26, 2014), with the the next generation of the communist party having allowed the market contained in their hegemony to grow over all aspects of life, instead of limiting it to narrow spots in which it can radicalise without expanding, that “interior capitalism” brings about just as much sub-prime science as in Unitedstates. It therefore was the harbinger of a big bang for Beijing when the sovereign side of Korea untied the lines a year ago and “droned” one of its senior officials who had gone too far in his entanglement with the Chinese speculation swamp. Of course Pyongyang does not proliferate flying killer robots, but instead the man was nabbed and assassinated without complicated technology, what caused sort of an uproar from the international serial killers. But the real surprise in it was not that the North would be filling up its prisons to keep job creation promises, but that it avoided the “American way of life” in which prisons keep the country together and instead favoured the “Paris Commune way of life” in which a person has either done so grave wrong that its own oath kills it, or the matter can be resolved with some form of material resp. social compensation. This is remarkable as now with the climate treaty there is opportunity for increased attention for other shared problems of the two sides, especially such ones that also hamper the political progress, and the prison industry resp. the human rights issue in general is one of them.

In both China and Unitedstates it is common that the regime is trying to humiliate and intimidate and manipulate the population with spectacular imprisonments, so that the malicious joy of others misfortune can shout over any sigh of economic and political alienation. A prison system is the worst thing for the political climate of a society that can be imagined, even worse than a coal factory is for the environmental climate, and a political climate of fear is the fertile ground for sub-prime science. Boiled down to a very simple expression it can be said that maintaining a demand for denial of individual human rights violations does also feed a supply of climate deniers, since the deliberate climate change brought about by the political and economic scam in fact is a collective human rights violation. If Obama would have had the resolve and integrity to open the gates of Guantanamo then it would not have come to the current oil spill by means of which the remainder of the aristocratic pest is trying to put its last stranglehold on the world.

Despite the unreliability of the Beijing Protocol as a suitable means to curb emissions in a reasonable manner several predictions can be made. The mutual appeasement and containment of a failed liberal – in the same sense as Carter failed to throw off the military-industrial complex although in retrospective it does not appear he seriously intended to – is likely to bring about a flood of bribes of the kind the Arab throne is currently making – which actually are massive debts towards future generations – from its two strongest horses and further economic rivals as well. Due to their fossil origin and distorted nature, from the perspective of the individual climate scientist these bribes could take such bizarre forms as an offer of extra recreational flights for these who fly to more international conferences than others, or even the direct mutation of sub-prime science into sub-prime mortgage, in which a corporation makes a huge debt to the future to give a scientist a family home in exchange for the person working on something they would never like to appear there, such as killer robots. At least a certain share of these “science fiction careers” will come to run dry at some point, and when they crash their inmates are likely to exhaust significant bursts of denial as if they were praying for funding. The dirty industry might want to hire them to defend its emissions and slow down reductions. Given the period of the length of one generation that is to be calculated for the situation it is therefore the first interest of climate science to curb that “special emission” of “conservative soup” and seal its sources, in order for the actual problem solving effort to be unhampered by unsolicited commercial interventions.

But corruption always spreads into all directions. Just as rotten as their counterparts are sub-prime climate scientists who substitute the objective to prevent climate catastrophe by all suitable means (in the sense of Occam’s razor, not of business ties) with an authoritarian declaration that some improper means were necessary as well, such as illustrated in the above description of the tragedy of the monopoly grid, mirroring the tragedy of the indulgence trade in Christian history. There is an ugly risk that the flawed business model of “renewable monoculture” with its economic influence might attempt to bring about a monoculture of science as the last stage of it before uninhabitability. If science merely were to point at a few defused historical cases to defend its integrity such as the churches did in their sexual abuse scandals, and to avoid making a significant difference in the current, it would indeed be at risk to end up in likewise deprecated condition as Einstein said. The – with all due respect – “unscientific” answer to such a challenge is the religious account of the violent mercenary (in other reports a customs officer) who, when commanded to recruit someone whom his bosses stole everything instead deserts and equally shares his wealth. A scientific answer could be for the individual climate scientist when offered a bribe to treat it as a fragile credit from future generations before choosing what is the best thing to do in order to return it to its legitimate owners from whom the capitalist who offers it stole it. Such “scam science” could model the scam and contain it in an even futurological balance.

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