The End Of Consumerism

An interesting article below from The Ecologist.

Note the main missing issue - IMMIGRATION.

Anyone with a brain realises that you cannot have a sustainable environment, sustainable economics and a sustainable nation without regulating population numbers.

An open borders of policy on immigration, an open borders policy on asylum seekers and an open borders policy on allowing in economic migrants to drive continual economic growth means that the goal of a Green Energy Revolution, a sustainable environment and an economic system based on sustainable economics cannot be created.

To have a nation, such as the British Isles, allowing in hundreds of thousands of new immigrants a year and thereby in 20 years have a population around 80 million requiring 6 new cities the size of Birmingham to house them is the politics of the madhouse.

The greatest betrayal of the 20th century has been the betrayal of the Green movement as regards the fundamental issues of immigration and human population control.

The failure of the Green Movement to accept the fundamental reality that mass immigration equates to the death of national environments and that the human population is the primary cause of 'climate change', as opposed to the facile science of 'global warming which seeks to blame 'industrial development' when industrial development is merely the growth of industry to supply the needs and demands of rising human populations with their foods and consumer trinkets, means the Green Movement have been the perpetrators of the primary problem.

The Red / Greens merely divert youth and environmentalists into the fake solution of the system controlled Red / Green Pseudo-Environmentalism.

As long as people like Zac Goldsmith run The Ecologist, red liberals run the WWF, Greenpeace and other environmental groups and idiots like Carol Lucas and her cabal of nonces and communists run The Green Party then each of these groups and organisations are a part of the problem - they can never be part of the solution.

The solution is clear - before the Green Movement takes another step it must first state that ;

1) All immigration into the UK has to end and voluntary repatriation policies be imposed to assist all those economic migrants who have entered the UK over recent decades to return home. This will apply to everyone regardless of race, creed, religion, colour or nationality.

2) Compulsory repatriation policies be imposed on all foreign criminals, illegal entrants to the UK, people smuggled into the UK, those whose asylum status has been refused, those whose asylum status needs to be reviewed in light of changing national and social circumstances in their own homelands, those who are here on invalid visas, those who did not declare their criminal convictions before they came into the country, those who status as economic migrants has changed and those whose presence in the UK is detrimental to our national security. These have to be Compulsory Repatriated and deported. This will apply to everyone regardless of race, creed, religion, colour or nationality.

That way the British national population level can stabilise and we can start to then put in place the structures that will support the Green Revolution.

Until then the Green Movement, or the Red Greens as they should be known as they are communists and liberals and not Greens, will continue to assist Consumerism and Socialism in its war against our national environment and the global environment.







http://www.theecologist.org/pages/archive_detail.asp?content_id=2214



The end of consumerism

Jules Peck 16/04/2009

Last month my friend Satish Kumar said in Sustained magazine that the happiest people are those who live close to the land and use their hands – craftspeople and farmers. As a naturalist, keen gardener and soon-to-be vegetable-plot devotee, this resonates with me.


It also tallies with the evidence from wellbeing studies which show that people who live their lives framed around extrinsic values of self-focus, image, greed and acquisition, and are suffering from ‘affluenza’, are diminishing their own wellbeing as well as those around them. They also tend to have far higher environmental footprints than others. Conversely, those whose lives are focused on intrinsic values such as personal (not economic) growth, emotional intimacy and community involvement, have far higher levels of wellbeing and lower footprints.

It’s more complex than saying they are ‘happier’, but they certainly experience far more ‘flow’ in work and play, better relationships and balance – things to which we could all aspire. The philosopher Aristotle had lots to say about wellbeing. In his view, to be a flourishing individual – one who experiences high levels of ‘meaning’ and wellbeing – you should aspire to be an active participant in the flourishing of community. So Thatcher had it all wrong: there really is such a thing as society, and it matters that we are active citizens striving for the good of the wider community, not just in an enlightened self-interest manner but in a deeper manner that respects the lives of all.

In www.citizenrenaisance.com, an online e-draft wiki book that I am currently writing with a friend, Robert Phillips, we call for a shift in societal values away from the consumer in us all to citizen values and advocacy for change. In short we are saying you are not what you buy. But it’s hard to get that message heard amid the cacophony of background noise and brainprint of the advertising world.

These are things I take as self evident – but don’t just listen to me: others have said it far more eloquently. Playwright Dennis Potter said in 1994 in Seeing the Blossom: ‘The commercialisation of everything means of course you’re putting a commercial value on everything. And you turn yourself from a citizen into a consumer’. Booker Prize-winning novelist Ben Okri said in the Times in October 2008: ‘The meltdown in the economy is a harsh metaphor of the meltdown of some of our value systems. Individualism has been raised almost to a religion, appearance made more important than substance. The only hope lies in a fundamental re-examination of the values that we have lived by in the past 30 years’.

Vaclav Havel has stated beautifully the fundamental shift that is needed: ‘What could change the direction of today’s civilization? It is my deep conviction that the only option is a change in the sphere of the spirit, in the sphere of human conscience. It’s not enough to invent new machines, new regulations, new institutions. We must develop a new understanding of the true purpose of our existence on this Earth. Only by making such a fundamental shift will we be able to create new models of behaviour and a new set of values for the planet’. For Havel, our refreshingly outspoken bishops and many others, the environmental crisis is ultimately a crisis of the spirit.

One of my heroes, Aldo Leopold, the father of the land ethic, wrote to a friend that he doubted anything could be done about conservation ‘without creating a new kind of people’, and in the must-read A Sand County Almanac, from 1949, that ‘a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it… it implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such’. And as Professor Tim Jackson says, ‘the transition to a sustainable society cannot hope to proceed without the emergence or re-emergence of some kinds of meaning structures that lie outside the consumer realm’. Brilliant thinkers such as Dr Tom Crompton at WWF are doing crucial work on these questions. We must urgently spread the conversation.

Right now there is a terrifying vacuum of values, vision and leadership in our political discourse and from our politicians. And it’s hard for business to do the right thing when it’s designed to make money and little else, and when the market is set up so perversely. Our politicians are (to borrow a phrase from the wonderful Thomas Homer-Dixon) like drunk drivers in the fog. Harvard Professor John Quelch’s 2008 study Too Much Stuff says: ‘The mass consumption of the 1990s is fast fading in the rearview mirror. Now a growing number of people want to declutter their lives and invest in experiences rather than things’.

And Jeremy Paxman has told us that we are witnessing the ‘end of capitalism’. Our current form of corporate-consumer-capitalism has been shown to be what many of us knew it was: a fundamentally flawed system.

Luckily just the kind of citizen renaissance we need is beginning with groups like CRAGs and Transition Towns – described by Jeremy Leggett as ‘scalable microcosms of hope’. And online digital democracy is giving individual citizens and collectives a new voice and real power in politics. Moveon.org, Getup.org, Dosomethingaboutit.org.uk, Localeyes.org and 38degrees.org.uk are names that if you have not heard of you soon will have. What do I think all this citizen power needs to call for? Well, it’s nothing short of a radical updating of our current operating system – no sticking plaster will do. We urgently need a Green New Deal to act as a transition phase to a steady state, economic development (not growth) paradigm that aims to maximise the wellbeing of people and planet, not the bank balances of the rich. And we must beware the snake-oil salespeople trying to flog us the dead-ends of green consumerism and cheatneutral ‘offsets’. Those are phoney solutions just as dangerous as what most of our current myopic flock of politicians would sell us.

Wake up, get angry (in a positive way), unite and become a citizen. It’s our only hope. Oh, and take a look at my book I would love your feedback.

Jules Peck is a freelance writer and citizen with 20 years experience advising NGOs, government and the corporate world.


This piece first appeared in the Ecologist March 2009

Peak Oil and the Media

An interesting article in the Times concerning the issue of Peak Oil and its looming threat.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article3207311.ece

The article states ;

Doom-laden forecasts that world oil supplies are poised to fall off the edge of a cliff are wide of the mark, according to leading oil industry experts who gave warning that human factors, not geology, will drive the oil market.

A landmark study of more than 800 oilfields by Cambridge Energy Research Associates (Cera) has concluded that rates of decline are only 4.5 per cent a year, almost half the rate previously believed, leading the consultancy to conclude that oil output will continue to rise over the next decade.

Peter Jackson, the report's author, said: “We will be able to grow supply to well over 100million barrels per day by 2017.” Current world oil output is in the region of 85million barrels a day.

The optimistic view of the world's oil resource was also given support by BP's chief economist, Peter Davies, who dismissed theories of “Peak Oil” as fallacious. Instead, he gave warning that world oil production would peak as demand weakened, because of political constraints, including taxation and government efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. "

Yet again this article reveals how issues as important as Peak Oil should not be left to journalists to discuss. Most journalists are just gullible muppets, they are sent by their editors to a conference, scribble a few notes and then return to write the story. Their editor then tweaks it so that it fits the newspapers political stance (in that it agrees with their sponsored political party that they propagandise) and then the story is printed.

The facts are rarely printed.

Fact 1 ) The Cambridge Energy Research Associates group is funded by the oil companies and also ancillary companies linked to the oil companies such as their accounting firms. Oil reserves for oil comapnies are like cash reserves for banks. The more oil an oil company says it has, then the higher its shares are worth. Therefore any research published by any organisation funded by the oil companies has to be further investigated and its findings confirmed before its reports can be accepted.

Fact 2 ) There are in fact 5 peaks in the Peak Oil scenario, not just one.

These are ;

A) The Peak Oil physical peak when the amount of oil consumed finally passes the half way point.

B) The Environmental Peak when the effect of decades of oil production and usage causes irreversible climate change that causes long term problems for the global eco-sphere.

C) The Economic Peak when the era of cheap oil ends and the debt based global petro-dollar recycling system collapses. Modern consumerism is based on cheap credit and cheap oil and the moment that the production costs of getting the oil, refining it and supplying it rises then that cost has to be passed on to the users of that oil. This price rise impacts at all points in the commodity production process at the same time as the consumer is themselves having to spend more money on energy costs both directly and indirectly. Consumerism is itself a product of the oil and energy exchange process and will be the first victim of Peak Oil.

D) The Political Peak is when nation states will no longer accept their servile status as dependents on imported oil and energy. The political peak is about ensuring national energy security, it is linked to the corporate takeover of nation states via middle eastern banks and Russian oligarchs who are buying up strategic sectors of our national infrastructure (docks, ports, banks, industries, water companies etc), and it concerns the awareness of the issue of future eco-conflicts and the oil wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

E) Peak Food which is the point when oil prices impact on food production costs and when the amount of food production dependent on oil can no longer supply all those that demand food.

http://www.moneyweek.com/file/35491/are-we-heading-for-peak-food.html

Each of these five peaks are all related to the Peak Oil issue.

Though the point when more than half the amount of oil used may be imminent, the other peaks are all imminent as well.

Climate change is increasing, energy bills are rising in the UK, the issue of energy security has become pressing due to the conflicts with Russia just as we are becoming dependent upon imported energy and Russian gas and oil supplies to fill the increasing energy gap and the number of people who are angry at the 'War For Oil' in Iraq is rising.

Oil demand is rising. An article in the Financial Times in June 2007 stated that ;

"The IEA now expects demand for oil to rise by 1.7m barrels a day this year compared to last year – an increase of about 2 per cent – and non-Opec oil supply to rise by just 900,000 b/d. That rise in demand is 167,000 b/d more than the IEA had previously estimated, while the rise in non-Opec supply is 97,000 b/d less.

The report estimated that world oil stocks could drop by 1m-1.5m barrels a day in the third quarter, which it said “would push forward stock cover down towards the low levels seen when prices accelerated higher in 2004. That is, by itself, a concern.”

The world population is rising and their expectations are rising. They all wants cars, air conditioning and DVD players and plasma televisions. They also demand more food. More people means more demands for food, fuel, energy, plastics and food – all highly dependent on oil. In the ten years from 2002 to 2012, the world population is expected to rise from 6.23 billion to 6.96 billion, an extra 12% to be fed, supplied and energised. Along with population, the other factor is the increasing use of oil in developing countries – countries which, up to now, had been contributing little to consumption.

The oil price has just reached an all time peak of $100 dollars a barrel.

The media are political in that they will only publicise problems the political parties they support think they can solve.

At the moment the media are seeking to undermine and trivialise the issue of Peak Oil as they know that the political parties they each support and propagandise ( The Times the Tories, The Guardian the Labour Party, the Independent the Lib Dems etc ) will not, and cannot , offer any long term solution to the problem.

The solution is simply Environmental Nationalism, the creation of a nation state predicated on the basis of sustainable national self sufficiency in energy, food, industry and economics.

The only party that offers that solution is the BNP.

Charles Merz, Peak Oil and Civilisational Collapse.

The basis of all life, and human civilisations, is energy. Whether that energy source be calories or oil the same energy exchange process is the basis of the existence of all living organisms and all human civilisations, nations and societies.

Political Power, simply defined is the total amount of energy available to the political class in its management and development of the nation and society.

As the amount of energy available to a nation diminishes then social entropy and anarchy increases. As the street lights flicker and fade, then the power of the State is weakened and diminished. The LAW can only function when it can be policed and imposed. When the energy in a society diminishes then the power of the state to impose order is also diminished. As the darkness grows, so too does chaos grow.

Economic activity is also itself merely an aspect of energy production. Capital is merely symbolic of imbedded energy. The entire economic process is merely an aspect of the energy production process. Without energy the the industries that produce the mining equipment cannot produce the industrial equipment to open mines, the mines cannot produce raw materials and transport it to the industries that process the raw materials, the industries that handle raw materials cannot refine those raw materials into useful materials and transport them to the factories, the factories cannot turn those useful materials into consumer goods and products to sell, the shops cannot open and employ staff to sell those goods, the consumers cannot get to the shops to buy the goods and the people do not have jobs to give them an income to buy those goods on sale in the shops.

The true power of a nation is simply its own ability to produce and satisfy its own internal energy requirements. The GDP of a nation is not related to how many bits of paper it prints or how many lumps of useless shiny metal it possesses or what its people produce, spend and consume per year - it is simply how much energy the nation is capable of producing for itself in order to maintain and develop its own internal social complexity. A` nation that produces enough of its own energy to support its own internal development and that can export that energy is a nation which has growing GDP.

GDP should be replaced by EDP = Energy Domestically Produced.

Just 100 years ago the candle was the only light we had at night. The Oil Age has enlightened the earth and banished the dark. But the victory of light over darkness is about to see a dangerous reversal.

In 1916 in Great Britain their were over 500 power companies producing electricity for consumers each with their own different power supply voltage specifications and 23 different plug designs.

In 1916 Merz pointed out to Parliament that the UK could use its small size to its advantage, by creating a dense distribution grid to feed its industries electricity efficiently. His findings led to the Williamson Report of 1918, which in turn created the Electricity Supply Bill of 1919. The bill was the first step towards an integrated system.

These principles in the William Report from the 1904 paper "Power Station Design" became the template for power planning worldwide. They were embodied in the same year when the world's biggest power station opened near Newcastle upon Tyne. Using newly invented steam turbines, it generated power for the world's first electric commuter railway between the city and its seaside suburbs, also engineered by Merz and McLellan. At the same time Local shipbuilding, mining and heavy engineering industries began using electrically driven tools too.

Under Merz's direction, power stations across north-east England were connected using higher voltages over longer distances. By the start of the First World War it was the largest integrated power system in Europe supplying the cheapest and most reliable power in Britain.


Charles Merz sat on the Weir Committee, which produced the more significant Electricity (Supply) Act of 1926, leading to the setting up of the National Grid.
The Electricity Supply Act 1926 which recommended that a 'National Gridiron' was enacted in order to create an integrated national energy supply network for Britain. The act also established the Central Electricity Board that began operating in 1933. By 1938 the National Grid was operating as a national system.

Once the National Grid was established in 1938 with a standardised power supply network in operation and a standardised plug design created to use on electrical appliances connected to the electrical system, the birth of the mass production era had occurred. Mass production of consumer goods was made possible as a process only through the standardisation of the electrical power supply network and the standardisation of the plugs that allowed those electrical goods to be plugged into the main supply.

The National Grid was nationalised in 1947 by the Electricity Act 1947. The seven year plan for the creation of the National Grid with its 30,000 electricity mast network was a pivotal moment in human history.

It was not Henry Ford who is the architect of mass production, it was Charles Merz. It was the vision of Merz who created the integrated electricity generation and supply networks that allowed the creation of the basis of the consumer society.


An irregular and unreliable energy supply network, and a non-standardised specification for consumer products, meant that the process of manufacturing consumer goods could not be undertaken easily. An electric radio bought in one area with one plug design would not work in another area on another voltage with a different plug design. It was Charles Merz who saw that both had to be integrated nationally in order for demand for consumer goods to be created. The National Grid ensured that the consumer society could be created. Electrification created the advanced society we live in today.

Pioneers like Nikolai Tesla, Thomas Edison and Charles Merz were the visionaries who created the modern world. It was their technological advances, and visionary national engineering plans, that allowed the Oil Age to become the epoch of human culture.

The anthropologist Leslie White depicts human history as a progression of 'Power Shifts' whereby a country or civilisation undergoes a technological and social transformation based on its unlocking of a new energy source to power social complexity. White stated that " Culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year is increased, or the efficiency of the instrumental means of putting energy to work is increased ". Culture, when measured in relation to its ability to unlock energy, evolves every time it unlocks a new source of power. All Human Cultures are dependent upon energy.

All national cultures are manifestations of the prevalent Energy Culture which power that nations internal social complexity.

Political power increases when energy supply is increased. A nation is diminished socially, politically, internationally and culturally when it suffers a cut in national energy production. As the light begins to fade away, then the power of the nation begins to fade.

Peak Oil threatens to make our nation dependent upon the Islamic theocracies of the Middle East for our oil supplies, the Russian Empire for our gas supplies and any other foreign source of energy we can beg for.

Unless the Green Revolution is enacted then we will have surrendered our national independence just in order to keep our lights on.

Charles Hesterman Merz (5 October 1874 - 14 or 15 October 1940), is one of the greatest forgotten Britons.

It was his vision and drive that brought Britain out of the 19th century and dependence on coal, and into the 21st century and electrification.

He was the architect of a human Power Shift like no other in human history.

Today we stand at the brink of the crisis of Peak Oil and unless we begin the process of creating the Green Revolution and create the 100 % Renewable Energy Economy based on total national energy independence from renewable energy sources then we face a civilisational collapse like no other seen before in human history.

Today we need a new Charles Merz to step forward, a man with a new vision and the financial means to put it in place, before the nightmare of Peak Oil begins and Britain enters a new perpetual Dark Ages.




http://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk/stories/the_second_industrial_revolution/05.ST.01/?scene=7