Governments across the planet are preparing for a surge of violent protests from economic upheaval. Wars may follow.
The global economic meltdown has already caused bank failures, bankruptcies, plant closings, and foreclosures and will, in the coming year, leave many tens of millions unemployed across the planet. But another perilous consequence of the crash of 2008 has only recently made its appearance: increased civil unrest and ethnic strife. Someday, perhaps, war may follow. As people lose confidence in the ability of markets and governments to solve the global crisis, they are likely to erupt into violent protests or to assault others they deem responsible for their plight, including government officials, plant managers, landlords, immigrants, and ethnic minorities. The riots that erupted in the spring of 2008 in response to rising food prices suggested the speed with which economically-related violence can spread. While most such incidents are triggered by an immediate event -- a tariff, the closure of local factory, the announcement of government austerity measures -- there are systemic factors at work as well. While economists now agree that we are in the midst of a recession deeper than any since the Great Depression of the 1930s, they generally assume that this downturn -- like all others since World War II -- will be followed in a year, or two, or three, by the beginning of a typical recovery. There are good reasons to suspect that this might not be the case -- that poorer countries (along with many people in the richer countries) will have to wait far longer for such a recovery, or may see none at all. Even in the United States, 54% of Americans now believe that "the worst" is "yet to come" and only 7% that the economy has "turned the corner," according to a recent Ipsos/McClatchy poll; fully a quarter think the crisis will last more than four years. Whether in the U.S., Russia, China, or Bangladesh, it is this underlying anxiety -- this suspicion that things are far worse than just about anyone is saying -- which is helping to fuel the global epidemic of violence. Banks and corporations in the wealthier countries will cease making investments in the developing world, choking off whatever growth possibilities remain; and that food costs will rise uncomfortably, while the use of farmlands for increased biofuels production will result in diminished food availability to hundreds of millions.

In a short period of months, the entire system of global capitalism has screeched to a halt. No one knows what happens next.

Chinese manufacturing declined in each of the last five months. More than 20 [million] rural migrant workers in China have lost their jobs and returned to their home villages or towns as a result of the global economic crisis. The UN estimates that the downturn could claim 50 million jobs worldwide. The global economic crisis had become the biggest security threat facing the United States, outpacing terrorism. The model of economic globalization that's dominated during the past 40 years is, if not dead, at least in critical condition. Few progressives will mourn its demise -- it was both a proximate cause of the economic meltdown in which we find ourselves today, and one of its victims. But if we are reaching the end of an era, questions arise about not only what will replace it, but also how we'll finance the government spending that most economists agree will be required to stave off a long, painful depression. Among the wealthy countries, nowhere was this truer than in the United States, with its fealty to a mythic “free market” and its elites’ scorn for a robust safety net. After union-busting, global trade deals have done the most damage to workers’ bargaining power. Whereas companies used to negotiate with their employees in relatively good faith, those negotiations are now overshadowed by the threat -- ubiquitous in labor disputes today -- to simply move the whole plant to Mexico or China. The result was an illusion of prosperity. Corporate profits rose (in 2004, corporate profits took the largest share of national income since they started tracking the data in 1929 and wages took the smallest), and high earners did very well too. When the oil shock hit in 1973, those in the top one percent of the income ladder took in just over 9 percent of the nation’s income; by 2006, they grabbed almost 23 percent. In the intervening years, their average incomes more than tripled. After that, we started financing our lifestyles through debt -- mounds of it. Consumer debt blossomed; trade deficits (which are ultimately financed by debt) exploded and the government started running big budget deficits year in an year out. In the period after World War Two, while wages were rising along with the overall economy, Americans socked away over 10 percent of the nation’s income in savings. But in the 1980s, that began to decline -- the savings rate fell from 11 percent in the 1960s and ‘70s, to 7 percent in the 1980s, and by 2005, it stood at just one percent (household savings that year were actually in negative territory). After the collapse of the dot-com bubble and the recession that followed it, the economic “expansion” of the Bush era was the first on record in which median incomes never got back to where they were before the crash. Fortunately for Wal-Mart shoppers, a massive housing bubble was rising. Americans started financing their consumption by taking chunks of equity out of their homes. The result: in 2005, long before the housing bubble crashed, the average amount of equity Americans had in their homes was already the lowest it had ever been. We hear a lot of chatter about a “credit crunch” being at the root of our economic woes -- that banks aren’t lending to otherwise qualified individuals and businesses. The truth, however, is that before the housing (and stock) markets crashed, the average American household already had 20 percent more in debt than it earned in a year. Already deeply in the hole, when the markets crashed, consumers stopped spending, and that's fueled millions of layoffs, led to a mountain of foreclosures, and left state budgets decimated. The connection between decades of false prosperity, the piles of household debt that resulted, and the degree to which that left American families vulnerable to the bubble’s crash is not difficult to see. China became an export engine by keeping wages down through repressive union-busting and by drawing on an almost endless supply of poor rural peasants to work its production lines. While global trade flows have exploded, much of that trade has been between multinationals based in the advanced economies and their own offshore units. They ship production overseas, but the goods produced end up back in domestic markets; it’s a means of avoiding “first-world” wages, public interest regulations and environmental restrictions. China and the U.S. have developed a precariously symbiotic relationship. With its reserve army of cheap labor unmatched by any country in the world, China became the ‘workshop of the world,’ drawing in $50 billion in foreign investment annually by the first half of this decade.” To survive, firms all over the world, "had no choice but to transfer their labor-intensive operations to China to take advantage of what came to be known as the ‘China price,’ provoking in the process a tremendous crisis in the advanced capitalist countries’ labor forces. It was always an unsustainable model; the United States’ annual trade deficit with China -- financed by debt -- was $6 billion as recently as the mid-1980s; by last year it had exploded to $266 billion. Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged that the world economy is anything but decoupled, all but begging the Chinese to continue to buy our debt. According to Agence France Presse, “Clinton and Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi largely agreed to disagree on human rights,” while “she focused on the need for China to help finance the massive 787-billion-dollar US economic stimulus plan by continuing to buy US Treasuries.” In a moment of clarity -- one that shone a light on the rot of the global economic system that has prevailed for the past 40 years, Clinton explained to the Chinese media, "We have to incur more debt … the US needs the investment in Treasury bonds to shore up its economy to continue to buy Chinese products."

It is incumbent on progressives to propose a realistic alternative to new coal plants -- here's our best options.

Also, while my original post focused on the key strategies of efficiency and recycled energy (i.e. cogeneration or combined heat and power), wind, and concentrated solar thermal, I left out one of the most crucial -- biomass cofiring, which is almost certainly the cheapest, easiest, and fastest way to provide new renewable baseload power without having to build any new transmission lines! So what do we do in the near term to meet the projected 1% annual increase in demand over the next decade while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions? The answer is we do energy efficiency (including cogeneration), wind power, concentrated solar power (CSP), and biomass cofiring. These are the low-carbon power sources capable of delivering power affordably and quickly -- and that means having no obvious production bottlenecks (unlike, again, say, another well-known power source, The goal is to fund technologies and boost industries that are capable of scaling up to deliver hundreds if not thousands of GWs of carbon free power by mid-century.

The predictions about what climate change may bring are pretty dire, but now it seems, they were actually underestimated

In its most recent official report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) significantly underestimated the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that would occur during the last seven years, a miscalculation that has put the planet beyond the "range of possibilities" considered by some of the world's top climatologists. The overly optimistic predictions in the IPCC's Fourth Assessment, released in 2007, appear to have been driven, in part, by the political dynamics involved in the international effort. The underestimation means that government negotiators meeting in Copenhagen later this year to write a replacement to the Kyoto Protocol will have a tougher task than previously imagined. The underestimation of greenhouse emissions occurred, Field said, because the IPCC failed to include in its scenarios the rapid increase in carbon dioxide from Asia's coal-reliant industrial expansion between 2000 and 2007. What happened is that China and India developed rapidly while rising oil prices pushed wealthy nations to use more coal, which is more CO2 intensive in its emissions. An increase in atmospheric CO2 is attributable to the steep rise in global coal use, pushed upward by accelerated Asian economic and industrial development. Not only has atmospheric carbon increased beyond the range of possibilities, but so too has effects of that increase on Earth's ecosystems. The retreat of Arctic Sea ice, the collapse of permafrost, ice sheet melt and that melting's contribution to sea level rise are occurring faster and with more intensity than expected. Atmospheric carbon dioxide, Field said, rose 3.5 percent annually between 2000 and 2007, compared with annual increases of 0.9 percent in the 1990s. Between 1993 and 2003, melting ice sheets accounted for 40 percent of sea level rise. That contribution is now estimated at 80 percent.

As the global economy melts down, so is the planet, with droughts threatening food production and industry across the world.

Australia, by the way, is a wheat-growing breadbasket for the world and its wheat crops have been hurt in recent years by continued drought. Meanwhile, central China is experiencing the worst drought in half a century. Temperatures have been unseasonably high and rainfall, in some areas, 80% below normal; more than half the country's provinces have been affected by drought, leaving millions of Chinese and their livestock without adequate access to water. In the region which raises 95% of the country's winter wheat, crop production has already been impaired and is in further danger without imminent rain. All of this represents a potential financial catastrophe for Chinese farmers at a moment when about 20 million migrant workers are estimated to have lost their jobs in the global economic meltdown. Some scientists warn China could face more frequent droughts as a result of global warming and changes in farming patterns. In Iraq, the worst drought in at least a decade and possibly a farming lifetime is expected to reduce wheat production by at least half; while the country's vast marshlands, once believed to be the location of the Garden of Eden, have been turned into endless expanses of baked mud. Nor is Iraq's drought a localized event. Serious drought conditions extend across the Middle East, threatening to exacerbate local conflicts from Cyprus and Lebanon to Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel where this January was reported to have been the hottest and driest in 60 years. In Latin America, Argentina is experiencing "the most intense, prolonged and expensive drought in the past 50 years," according to Hugo Luis Biolcati, the president of the Argentine Rural Society. One of the world's largest grain exporters, it has already lost five billion dollars to the drought. Its soybeans -- the country is the third largest producer of them -- are wilting in the fields; its corn -- Argentina is the world's second largest producer -- and wheat crops are in trouble; and its famed grass-fed herds of cattle are dying -- 1.5 million head of them since October with no end in sight. In the State of Texas -- 97.4% to be exact -- is now gripped by drought, and parts of it by the worst drought in almost a century. As global warming strengthens, the American southwest, parts of which have struggled with varying levels of drought conditions for years, could fall into a possibly permanent state of drought." We're talking potential future "dust bowl" here. A December 2008 U.S. Geological Survey report warns: "In the Southwest, for example, the models project a permanent drying by the mid-21st century that reaches the level of aridity seen in historical droughts, and a quarter of the projections may reach this level of aridity much earlier. And talking about drought gripping breadbasket regions, don't forget northern California which "produces 50 percent of the nation's fruits, nuts and vegetables, and a majority of [U.S.] salad, strawberries and premium wine grapes." Its agriculturally vital Central Valley, in particular, is in the third year of an already monumental drought in which the state has been forced to cut water deliveries to farms by up to 85%. California's farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century, and its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not act to slow the advance of global warming... In a worst case... up to 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital to agriculture. As for East Africa and the Horn of Africa, under the pressure of rising temperatures, drought has become a tenacious long-term visitor. Half of the world's population could face severe food shortages by the end of the century as rising temperatures take their toll on farmers' crops... Harvests of staple food crops such as rice and maize could fall by between 20% and 40% as a result of higher temperatures during the growing season in the tropics and subtropics. The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems. If global temperatures are on the rise and more heat means lower crop yields, then you're talking about more Kenyas, and not just in Africa either. You're probably also talking about desperation, upheaval, resource conflicts, and mass out-migrations of populations, even -- if scientists are right -- from the American Southwest.

To UN and G20 Leaders!

The world is confronted by crisis, its dimension is global, its character is inexperienced. This crisis is the result of obsoleteness of social-darwinist rules of politics and global economic order. They have very high ecosocial costs and they are shortsighted. Today we can choose a one of the three different ways and different responses to present challenges:

o The first way leads finally to global military confrontation and war for access to deficit resources and clean environment.
o The second way would be the "soft" continuation of social-Darwinist, "zero growth" social relations, by global Orwellian totalitarian order.
o The third way means the "three pillars" sustainable development of the world society. For this end we have to integrate human development with economic development and environment protection, and base policy on world society common interest axiology principle. This third way means ecohumanistic transformation as a partnership-based co-operation for the common good of all people (rich and poor, highly developed societies and underdeveloped countries), cooperation protecting natural environment, supported by science and high technology, including information culture.

The essence of the third way’s transformation includes creation of the new sustainable development economy, with possibility to account complex costs and effects - with social and environment components. It would allow stimulating creative (cognitive and innovative) activity, directed on common good/common interest, guided by ecosocial justice. In our opinion only the third way - oriented towards sustainable development of the world society - is rational, as the only realistic way of reversing present trends and avoiding the global catastrophe.

Two important world anti-crisis events will be held in the 2009 year: G20 World Summit (London, April 2nd) and UN General Assembly. We strongly recommend inclusion of the following proposals into agenda of both events:

[1] Creation of the UN Economic Council, together with the World Sustainable Development Strategy Center, including United Nations Information Center.
[2] Introducing THE WORLD INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT POLICY AND ECONOMY, including GLOBAL EARLY WARNING, as the new UN Program.