299. RICHARD HEINBERG: JUST ANOTHER POSER
Yesterday, peak oil maharishi Richard Heinberg released his latest effort -- another blather salvo on the "population problem" called Population, Resources, and Human Idealism.
I can't say I was really surprised when Heinberg quoted the peak oil fascist manifesto by William Stanton which Colin Campbell printed in the ASPO Newsletter (see 29. COLIN CAMPBELL LETS THE MATTER REST):
In a more recent essay, "Oil and People," published in the ASPO newsletter #55 (July 2005) , Stanton writes:Just to be clear, note that Stanton isn't advocating car pooling, better urban planning or ethanol as sensible responses to peak oil. He's advocating the wholesale murder of the elderly, handicapped and other "burdensome" humans. This would be the British equivalent of the Nazi T-4 program, which didn't go over too well even in Nazi Germany:
So the population reduction scenario with the best chance of success has to be Darwinian in all its aspects, with none of the sentimentality that shrouded the second half of the 20th Century in a dense fog of political correctness. . . . The Darwinian approach, in this planned population reduction scenario, is to maximise the well-being of the UK as a nation-state. Individual citizens, and aliens, must expect to be seriously inconvenienced by the single-minded drive to reduce population ahead of resource shortage. The consolation is that the alternative, letting Nature take its course, would be so much worse.
The scenario is: Immigration is banned. Unauthorised arrives are treated as criminals. Every woman is entitled to raise one healthy child. No religious or cultural exceptions can be made, but entitlements can be traded. Abortion or infanticide is compulsory if the fetus or baby proves to be handicapped (Darwinian selection weeds out the unfit). When, through old age, accident or disease, an individual becomes more of a burden than a benefit to society, his or her life is humanely ended. Voluntary euthanasia is legal and made easy. Imprisonment is rare, replaced by corporal punishment for lesser offences and painless capital punishment for greater.
The Murder of the HandicappedWhat does Heinberg have to say about all this? Well... he definitely doesn't distance himself from it. He quotes Stanton with respect -- calling him a "thorough and proud Malthusian", and even claims that Stanton isn't a fascist: "The proponents of fascistic "solutions" (I'm not suggesting that Stanton is in that category, by the way)".
Wartime, Adolf Hitler suggested, "was the best time for the elimination of the incurably ill." Many Germans did not want to be reminded of individuals who did not measure up to their concept of a "master race." The physically and mentally handicapped were viewed as "useless" to society, a threat to Aryan genetic purity, and, ultimately, unworthy of life. At the beginning of World War II, individuals who were mentally retarded, physically handicapped, or mentally ill were targeted for murder in what the Nazis called the "T-4," or "euthanasia," program.
The "euthanasia" program required the cooperation of many German doctors, who reviewed the medical files of patients in institutions to determine which handicapped or mentally ill individuals should be killed. The doctors also supervised the actual killings. Doomed patients were transferred to six institutions in Germany and Austria, where they were killed in specially constructed gas chambers. Handicapped infants and small children were also killed by injection with a deadly dose of drugs or by starvation. The bodies of the victims were burned in large ovens called crematoria.
Despite public protests in 1941, the Nazi leadership continued this program in secret throughout the war. More than 200,000 handicapped people were murdered between 1940 and 1945.Source
Kind of makes you wonder what you have to do to be a fascist in Heinberg's book.
Apparently it isn't enough to advocate the elimination of human rights, medical slaughter of the elderly and handicapped, abortion at gunpoint and the death penalty for animal rights advocates.
Yup, Heinberg has crawled into bed with Stanton, and they're having a cute little spooning session, but your know what? Who cares? Stanton, Campbell and Heinberg are all just a bunch of peripheral, wannabe vermin who have no pull whatsoever in the real world.
Obviously, Heinberg wants to attract attention and create a sort of "good cop/bad cop" effect. Listen up, he says, if you don't cooperate and do what I say, we're going to loose the dogs like Stanton on you. We need to get that population down, by hook or crook, and we can do this the easy way (which Heinberg doesn't specify) or we can fire up the ovens. The choice is yours.
Well, here's my choice, Richard. I'm going to completely ignore you, like the skinny, impotent, milk-toast liberal you are. When you make up your mind what you stand for, I'll pay attention. If you want to advocate for voluntary population control measures which respect the human rights of the persons concerned -- who cares? Nobody disagrees with that. If you want to go further and push authoritarian one-child programs, or start killing retards with Willie Stanton, be my guest. Go on CNN with your "program". You'll be razzed and ridiculed as a lunatic. Personally, I don't think that'll happen though. I don't think you've got the nards for anything more than vague generalities and poetry readings.
-- by JD
posted by JD @ 6:43 PM
17 comments
17 Comments:
Heinberg typefies the peak oil view in a nutshell: that humans should give up, roll over, and play dead.
A recent commenter on Black Sun Journal had the following to say:
"All of the above options will only delay the end of the energy-intensive modern technological civilization. A day will come when humans will run out of options and have to accept the reality that our lifestyle is over."
"Struggling to preserve a failed system will only prolong the suffering. It is best for humans to end the war against nature by surrendering."
This pretty much sums up peak-oil doomthink. It's wishful thinking propounded by many who also consider humans to be a "plague" upon nature. They don't see their obvious fallacy of separating humans from nature--when humans are in fact a part of nature.
That aside, Heinberg and his bed-buddies are trying to create a Utopia in reaction to their perception of the negatives of modern society. Their primitivism is a religion. Peak-oil and economic ruin are their savior. Technology that could easily solve the energy problem is their devil.
Like other religions, theirs is completely immune to reason.
It is worth reading the (pretty bland, boring, relatively content-free) Heinberg article itself (JD kindly provides link at top), to get an extra good feel for just how over-the-top JD has gone in this posting.
The dissing really makes the post, I think ("skinny, impotent, milk-toast liberal"!). JD clearly missed his calling as a gansta rapper, or talk radio impresario.
energyspin,
"Who came up with such a rule and when?"
Take a gander here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
No one said history wasn't relevant. Only that once a thread reaches Hitler or Nazi, the thread has no further value.
bye...
JD must know the traditional rule that invoking Hitler and the nazi's in a discussion automatically disqualifies one from further debate.
Hi jev. Yes I am quite familiar with Godwin's Law, and couldn't give a whiz about it. The fact that you invoke it is just further evidence that the "population control" advocates are nothing more than a bunch of apolitical dweebs playing a game of circle-jerk on the internet.
JD demonstrates he has fallen in with the anarchist crowd, the same people who would call Kofi Annan one of the ringleaders of a 'Global Government' seeking to kill 80% of the population. The Club of Rome and the UN, the New World Order, etc.
I don't recall saying anything about anarchism, Kofi Annan, the UN or the New World Order.
To JD, anyone who would suggest humanity as a whole *could* be guided in any way towards a 'brighter future' is a Nazi.
No, actually I use the term very narrowly to refer to people who think we should gas the retarded and elderly.
JD prefers 'natural' population controls such as famine and pestilence over 'fascist' engineered controls such as birth control and immigration regulation.
I don't recall saying that birth control or immigration regulation are fascist. In fact, birth control is fine by me as long as the affected persons are free to refuse it. Immigration regulation isn't a problem either provided its fair and you can pass it democratically.
What I said was that calls to jettison human rights and exterminate retarded/elderly people are fascist. Do you disagree? Or word you rather hide behind juvenile internet games like Godwin's Law?
Tell me JD: is family planning a fascist policy?
Not at all -- provided it's voluntary and the affected persons have the right to refuse. I clearly stated my agreement with such measures in the original post.
jev, people like yourself truly are a crew of pathetic internet mastubators. Your tales about the impending famine/pestilence die-off don't faze me in the least because I don't believe them. They're just a product of your overstimulated imagination. Malthus predicted die-off 200 years ago, and we're still here, flipping him the bird. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich informed us that: "By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth's population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people." He was wrong too. You people have always been, and always will be, wrong.
To sum up, scaremongering by people like you and Heinberg simply doesn't scare me. I live in a country where the population is already declining, so your hysterical worries don't play well here. There was no pestilence, no famine and no need for harsh measures of any sort. IMO, that is the path that the rest of the world will soon follow, so I'm not concerned.
Don't waste everybody's time by posing and pretending you disagree with me. If you want to push sensible measures like birth control and women's rights, we have no disagreement, except maybe that you're pissing yourself with worry, and I'm not. If you advocate "hard" measures (murdering people, sterilizing people, authoritarian government etc.), than tell us what they are, and sign your real name to them, you chickenshit.
... unless we find some way to share the dwindling carrying capacity of the world more evenly and more justly.
jev, I hate waste, and I am certainly no advocate of the current state of affairs where the U.S. and other first world nations are wasting important resources on things like sprawl and obesity.
However, you are still dodging the question: Do you consider calls to exterminate the handicapped and elderly to be fascist?
I ask you that because you seem to be very eager to avoid and hush up discussion on that key point.
Dear Energyspin,
Please note: you asked "Who came up with such a rule and when?" All I did was point you to a reference detailing this.
I then suggested that history is relevant in any discussion. I also suggested the use of 'Hitler' or 'Nazi' generally renders a thread dead. Not necessarily in this case in particular.
Although clearly a giant in the pursuit of intellectual rigor, you may have mistaken the point I was hoping to make. For that I apologize. Simply the result of the almost pointless brain power ROI I posses. Should never have made the effort. But then, you already knew that. In fact, you already knew Godwin's Law. Grand Netizen that you are.
So, thank you for your compliments, but in future, please don't feel compelled to share them. Your far greater intellectual superiority is sadly overshadowed by an incredibly crass manner of presentation.
Actually, that's "milquetoast", but why spoil a good rant? :-)
I would like to propose a corollary to Godwin's Law that goes something like
Whenever a proposed action or policy can, in fact, be shown to have been adopted by the Nazis, Godwin's Law no longer applies because the proposer is in fact behaving as a Nazi.
jev, with respect to your "Stanton argues obviously from a vista" point, you should take a moment and read the original article.
He is not hypothesizing about an unfortunately necessary "Darwinian approach" in some distant time, he is advocating it, as a plan of action. He worries that "the Western world’s unintelligent devotion to political correctness, human rights and the sanctity of human life" will get in the way.
This is one scary dude, and it would not surprise me at all if his closet included a snappy brown wardrobe.
jev, like most if not all doomers, you've given up any hope that things can get better in the world. I've spent way too much time already arguing with your type. Why don't you go hang out over at Deconsumption, LATOC, Kunstlerfuck, or other places where they serve the die-anide laced kool-aid?
You're rather happy about there being no famine, no pestilence on your doorstep. Good for you: you were born in the right place at the right time, like me. You don't know how lucky you are.
Yeah right. It's hardly luck. Actually, we are benefitting from the actions of our ancestors who were smart enough to actually develop this world and deal with things like starvation, infant mortality, and preventable disease.
Your tired attacks on all manner of professionals who are openly and honestly trying to debate and formulate a plan of action of sorts
What plan of action? Wealth redistribution by force?? Forced relinquishment of northern hemisphere living standards? You whine and wail about the inequality. Grow the fuck up. Would you rather the ENTIRE world be starving instead of a billion people? In essence, that's another BIG part of the doomer religion--righteous indignation over human injustice: "Waaa. We haven't been fair to the impoverished masses, so we should all suffer--especially those who've benefitted the most."
It's simply Marxist rhetoric about class struggle dressed up in new clothes.
Preparing to implement death by decree due to failure of human imagination is nothing if not a finger in the eye of every creative and productive individual who's ever lived.
What you are really saying is equal opportunity death is better than living under inequality. Careful, you live in a rich country--it may be your own demise you're planning.
working at ways to lift up not just urban dandies like yourself, but a larger, broader part of the global community.
Brilliant. How do you expect to lift them up without sustainable and cheap energy? And if so, doesn't that also mean that the rest of the world isn't doomed?? Technology must be allowed to do its work. This can only happen without destroying the environment, by making capitalism sustainable through market pricing of externalities.
Whether governments decide to mandate this (such as enacting a widespread carbon tax), and how soon, will have a great deal to do with the depth and severity of any economic crisis or climate backlash we experience. But people will never stop eating, fucking, making war, or consuming.
And here's comes the fire and brimstone as a result. Doomers always hang themselves with their own rhetoric:
May chaos punish you to the extent that you did nothing to prevent it.
That sounds to me suspiciously like a curse or a prayer. All hail the church of doom....
What will happen to the world will happen because of millions of tiny individual decisions. jev, people want to live, and they want to prosper--and they're very good at it: put that in your crystal ball.
Feelingweird--
What you're saying sounds about right. We may need figure out how to live on, say 1/3 to 1/2 of the energy we have been used to.
So there will be a period of adjustment where we may have to get by with less. But then we will end up with better lives because we will have figured out how to be more efficient. Probably healthier, too.
You are totally correct, we are spoiled rotten. As far as all the mechanisms of debt, consumerism, etc. These are separate issues to be solved, and really have nothing to do with the energy transition.
Once we figure out sustainability, I'd conjecture that people will consume even more. After all, if it doesn't hurt the environment, then why not?
Consuming in and of itself is not a moral issue. It is the side effects that have been and continue to be the problem.
@Jev: You sum up my approach to PO, as well as other challenges in life in your last sentence. Hard work never killed anyone. In fact, it may be what the doctor ordered for this society in general. We've grown accustomed to a push-button mentality to problems. Once confronted with reality however, there will be no viable option but to work together and do the hard work that needs to be done to attain social stability in the face of the new energy paradigm, whatever that may turn out to be...
Again with the cement/concrete garbage? I'd like to see JD work this one over with a pair of pliars and a blowtorch at some point. I'm getting sick of seeing it.
YES, there's a major concrete shortage and a huge gap in the supply/demand paradigm in the states. YES, China is willing to pay more and has caused a boom market for the material.
And most of all, YES, there are still a few hundred thousand bloated construction contracts being floated in the United States right now. People building shit for the sake of building it, running up the market costs and ignoring the potential for retrofitting older structures with new, energy-efficient features.
Apply some basic reason to the situation, for cripe's sake. If the government NEEDS concrete to build reactors, it's going to get it. Not fight for scraps along with contractors in Houston and Las Vegas who feel like building a new casino or fifty-square-mile housing patch. The United States produced 83 MILLION TONS of the shit last year ALONE, while greedily pipe-sucking up projects for 160 MILLION TONS OF IT.
There's your shortage. Idiotic planning, suburban sprawl, and the same, generally myopic "screw the markets, we're America and we need new shit" attitude that's going to bury us in a PO crisis.
You want a fix? Watch prices continue to skyrocket. Less building, less concrete usage, and MAYBE a more focused attention on alternative building materials and renovations.
This "Peak Concrete" bullshit is a page right out of Savinar's book, and I'm getting so tired of seeing it as an argument for for doomsday. It ain't happening. Find a new switch to flip.
Oh. And the "Peak Copper" thing. Another one of Savinar's juba-juice mantras.
Depending on the chart, the United States is either the first or second-largest producer of copper in the world, tied with Chile at 18%. Who's next? Canada. Who I believe we have one or two invested interests in.
Now, how the hell anybody believes that we'd rather sell our resource cards out to another country rather than ration in a severe situation is way beyond my comprehension, but hell. Paranoia, hording instincts and raw human panic aren't common traits with objectivity. It doesn't serve the apoplepsy of POD to consider things like emergency rationing, project reapportioning, or market realignments.
Nope, we just barrel on until we're extinct. Hoo-rah.
A severe market upskein due to booming economies does not equate a shortage and the end of days, no matter how many times some Doomhead falls back on it. Sorry.
t's ironic that our supposedly energy enlightened folks amoung us forget that there is a long-long-longass way between squandering energy on needless driving and starving in the streets.
Give up my basic human rights to a 5-mph roadboat with gold-plated rims and shaped diamonds for headlights?
BACK TO RUSSIA, COMRADE!
Robert, the only thing that motivates change for the human condition are ultimately greed and survival.
While researching the facts about copper wiring, I found that there's a widespread agreement that aluminum alloys could work just as well as the current industry standards. It would just take research to get it done, creating a market parity.
But it doesn't happen, because there's no money to be made by it. Copper's cheap. Gas is cheap. Plastics are cheap.
The only thing that's going to kickstart innovations and second looks at our living standards are increased prices and economic competition. It's already happening, despite the doomer belief that suburbia should be burned down tomorrow for tomato crops. Slowly, yeah. Gradually, sure.
But here's the cold water for the one-day armageddon theory.
Apparently, according to CNN.com, gas prices went down by nearly two dollars today. Did Iran produce more fuel? Did the ethanol changeover end? Did Saudi Arabia find a vast new field, and crack the valve on it?
No. People got their wallets threatened, and they adapted. The transition from foolish, wasteful usage to awareness and conservation caused a dip in demand, which affected the price of supply.
That's it works. All of it. You can't afford to build a new Wynn casino, you don't. The market dictates possibilities to humanity at large. Concrete, copper, uranium, gas. You can't get them cheap, you suddenly want to hear all about fuel cells and ethanol and solar power and thermal depolymerization. In a stable, feed-cattle market, these ideas have no place due to the fact that nobody thinks they NEED them, but tighten the thumbscrews a bit, and the entire mood shifts.
Once the transition in gas prices effects the pumps, people are going to get stupid and lazy again. But not all of them. If just 10% of those who made conscious efforts to roll back their fuel usage over the last few weeks stick with their guns, then it did something for the greater good. And this effect is only going to continue rippling as we see $4 and $5 gas this summer.
And hell, this comes from the biggest pessimistic, anti-social motherfucker you'll ever have the displeasure of sharing coffee with.
Heya, Robert-
Chances are that you've moved on, but I did want to say that I agree with you wholeheartedly on these points. I think the ultimate remedy to fears about doomsday, die-off and the end of times is the same petty, stupid shit that got us into this mess in the first place. For me, it isn't the idea of advancement and innovation: it's simply that mankind's innate self-preservation instincts are so utterly dominant--mainfested in the current era by profits, the need to breed and own and keep up with the Jonses--that there's no way we can backslide into the Roman days. Peak Oil is a once-on-this-planet event, but I read six million articles a day about who's got the next big technology and who's pouring millions into it, and it makes me realize that it's also a chance for every grossero in the market to cram their way into a new mode of portfolio-fodder.
Look at the ethanol hustle. Is it part of a bigger solution for our problems? Maybe, depending on whose numbers you trust. But the motivation for politicos and major corporations to push into it ISN'T environmental concern OR national security. These are simply cute little decorative words that they're using to sell the public on it. And when the time comes for it to reach the pumps, we will buy. Our conscience will scream "we're saving the planet!" while we plod on into the next dumb fucking problem.
But for me, dieoff is giving people way too much credit. It's assuming that the global economy will simply balk and shrivel and not find a way to sell new beads to the natives when the clouds start to form, when everything in our history as a species contradicts that. We persevere because we're inherently grabby, weird, emotional things that strive endlessly for comfort. Not because we're a race of slackjawed quitters.
But I sincerely pray that we will learn to trim some of the fat, and that the cure for our ailments won't simply allow this socioeconomic freakshow to continue. We haven't done anything to earn it, and as long as that remains a foundation point, we'll just find new ways to fuck up everything we've been given.
I wish you the best of luck in your continuing conclusions on the issue.
Personal attacks on people with other view points simply diminish you and your view point. Argue the merits of the case for or against Peak Oil. I for one am trying to sort it all out and it's deflating when the debate about Peak Oil turns into some Holy War. If Richard Heinberg is wrong then argue the case, don't attack the man, attack his ideas. Anything else is juvenile and pointless.
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