The recent Global Economic Hiccups of Financial Armageddon gave environmentalists their first real feeling of clawback in decades. Official human economic activity and consumption actually fell since last summer. A machete taken to the Global Financial System had more effect on mankind's carbon footprint than all the moralizing campaigns beseeching suburban housewives to use low-energy light-bulbs.
But oil prices collapsed last summer, and have stayed down. Nobody can be fooled into believing that the Global Human Economic Machine is defeated. The GHEM only choked on the ill-conceived biofuel mixture in its fuel lines. The GHEM is intact, still thriving, and without any designed alternatives.
Yes, in the continuing Age of Stupid, with the intellectual failure of academic economists now widely exposed and publicised, I notice the media are once again reminding us that the planet is staring into an environmental abyss. Today it is that the Amazon will become a local positive feedback process of ecosystem dieback from global temperature rises. (If you don't know what a "positive feedback process" is, count yourself lucky that you have lived in a bland and very controlled era, so go away and wake up before a Tim Kretschmer clone goes berserk in your neighbourhood! The Amazon is a very fragile ecosystem, and that's all you have to know.) Any number of scientists and academics are dancing around naked, waving their credentials, their scientific models, and their careful research, to draw attention to the vulnerabilities of the Amazon ecosystem. All these scientists are no more effective than the media that publicise their findings, aren't they? They are learned, intelligent, but they do not applythese two words: Carpe Diem.
Carpe Diem: Seize the Day. What use is a scientist if he/she predicts catastrophe, then stands by to analyse its progress without making any effort to halt it? What use are scientists, collectively, if they cannot seize control and prevent catastrophe?
So oil prices are low again. Too low. Carbon Economics is as yet the only notion so far driven into the thick skulls of our political Talking Heads. What to do?
Firstly, it is essential that oil prices should be driven sky high again. Secondly, scientists all over the world should be inserting Planetary Ecosystem Economics in place of either Finance, Politics, and Economics. Planetary Ecosystem Economics does not just get stuck on the gases of the element of Carbon. It takes into account all things in the Planetary Ecosystem, eg. water, light, space, habitat, air, salinity, alkalinity, species rarity. It accounts for the impact of humanity, and it costs all the effects of human economic activity. P.E.E. places a value on all things in the Planetary Ecosystem, not just those which are tritely recognized as essential for human consumption, comfort, or multiplication. Money is an essential currency for accounting in P.E.E, but unlike in ordinary Economics, values and wealth are not left to be established by markets of delusional people catering to their mass selfish wants. Values and wealth are established by specialists trained to view mankind as short-term guests of the planetary biological and physical resources. How are these values set? Now you're thinking.... They don't teach this at the London School of Economics, do they? Of course not... They who teach, cannot think original thoughts? Just see how long they were stuck on the ideas of communism!
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