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  • From: Keith Johnson <keithdj@mindspring.com>
  • To: Permaculture ibiblio <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] More snips from Kim Stanley Robinson
  • Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2007 23:13:50 -0500

I dog-eared the corners of these pages from Robinson's third book of the climate change trilogy so that I could share them later. Here's principal character Charlie Quibler, head of the President's Department of the Environment, talking to guys from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund:

"Damage from carbon dioxide emission costs about $35 a ton, but in
your model no one pays for it. The carbon that British Petroleum
burns per year, by sale and operation, runs up a damage bill of
fifty billion dollars. BP reported a profit of twenty billion, so
actually it's thirty billion in the red, every year. Shell reported
a profit of twenty three billion, but if you added the damage cost
it would be eight billion in the red. These companies would be
bankrupt. You support their exteriorizing of costs, so your
accounting is bullshit. You're helping to bring on the biggest
catastrophe in human history. If the oil companies burn the five
hundred gigatons of carbon that you are describing as inevitable
because of your financial shell games, then two-thirds of the
species on the planet will be endangered, including humans. but you
keep talking about fiscal discipline and competitive edges in profit
differentials. It's the stupidest head-in-the-sand response possible."

The World Bank guys flinched at this. "Well," one of them said, "we
don't see it that way."

Charlie said, "That's the trouble. You see it the way the banking
industry sees it, and they make money by manipulating money
irrespective of effects in the real world. You've spent a trillion
dollars of the taxpayers' money over the lifetime of the Bank, and
there's nothing to show for it. You go into poor countries and force
them to sell their assets to foreign investors and to switch from
subsistance agriculture to cash crops, then when the prices of those
crops collapse you call this nicely competitive on the world market.
The local populations starve and you then insist on austerity
measures even though your actions have shattered their economy. You
order them to cut their social services so they can pay off their
debts to you and to your financial community investors, and you
devalue their real assets and then buy them on the cheap and sell
them elsewhere for more. The assets of that country have been
strip-mined and now belong to international finance. That's your
idea of development."

World bank guy, "I'm not going to stay and listen to this."

"That's fine," Charlie said. "You can leave now and get a head start
on looking for a new job."

I really enjoy visualizing that scene. I wish Wolfowitz had gotten his ass canned for this instead of that weird girlfriend thing.

One more and then I'll stop. Here's President Phil Chase chatting with Charlie Quibler shortly after the scene above:

PC:...climate change and environmental collapse are the start of us
hitting the limits. We're in the process of overshooting the
carrying capacity of the planet...and yet capitalism continues to
vampire its way around the globe, determined to remain unaware of
the problem its creating. Individuals in the system notice, but the
system itself doesn't notice. God knows why. It's a living I guess.
So the system cries: It's not me! As if it could be anything else,
given that human beings are doing it, and capitalism is the way
human beings organize themselves....

...The biosphere is endangered and so are humans. Meanwhile
capitalism needs undeveloped regions that are ripe for investment.
So - saving the environment IS the next undeveloped country! It's
sustainability that works as the next big investment opportunity!
It's massive, it's hungry for growth, people want it. People need it.

CQ: The coral reefs need it. People don't care.

PC: No, people care....And capital always likes a desire it can make
into a market. Heck, it will make up desires from scratch if it
needs to, so real ones are welcome. So it's a good corelation, a
perfect fit of problem and solution. A marriage made in heaven.

CQ: Phil, please, don't be perverse. You're saying the problem is
the solution, it's doubletalk. If it were true, why isn't it
happening already then?

PC: It isn't the easiest money yet. Capital always picks the
low-hanging fruit first, as being the best rate of return at that
moment. Maximum profit is usually found in the path of least
resistance. And right now there are still lots of hungry undeveloped
places. And we haven't yet run out of fossil carbon to burn. Heck,
you know the reasons - it would be more expensive to do the start-up
work on this country called sustainability, so the profit margin is
low at first, and since only the next quarter matters to the system,
it doesn't get done.

CQ: Right, and so?

PC: So that's where the government of the people, by the people, and
for the people comes into the picture!....We the people have got a
whole lot of the world's capital sloshing around, owned by us. The
GOVERNMENT is the COMMONS. Heck, we're so big we can PRINT
MONEY!...It's the power to do things. So, we the people can aim
capitalism in any direction we want, first by setting the rules for
its operation, and second by leading the way with our own capital
into new areas, thus creating the newest regions of maximum
profitabilty...

The president gets shot shortly after this (Mortally? You'll have to read it yourself).

--
Keith Johnson
"Be fruitful and mulch apply."
Permaculture Activist Magazine
PO Box 5516, Bloomington, IN 47407
(812) 335-0383
http://www.permacultureactivist.net
http://www.PermacultureTradingPost.com
Switch to Solar Power the Easy Way
http://www.jointhesolution.com/KeithJ-SunPower
http://www.PowUr.com/KeithJ-SunPower
Blog: http://kjpermaculture.blogspot.com/
also Patterns for Abundance Design & Consulting
http://www.permacultureactivist.net/design/Designconsult.html
also Association for Regenerative Culture
http://www.ARCulture.org
also APPLE-Bloomington (Alliance for a Post-Petroleum Local Economy) It's a
small world after oil.
http://www.relocalize.net/groups/applebloomington
also Bloomington Permaculture Guild


  • [permaculture] More snips from Kim Stanley Robinson, Keith Johnson, 12/16/2007

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