The Oceans Are Dying

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

I am an admirer of Dahr Jamail’s reporting. In this article, Oceans In Crisis, Jamail tells us that we are losing the oceans. http://truth-out.org/news/item/29930-oceans-in-crisis-one-woman-will-cross-the-pacific-to-raise-awareness He reports on the human destruction of the oceans. It is a real destruction with far-reaching consequences.

That fact is indisputable.

From my perspective the human destruction of the oceans is yet more evidence of the ruinous nature of private capitalism. In capitalism there is no thought for the future of the planet and humanity, only for short-term profits and bonuses. Consequently, social costs are ignored.

Capitalism can work if social or external costs can be included in the costs of production. However, the powerful corporations are able to block a socially functioning capitalism with their political campaign contributions.

Consequently, capitalists themselves make the capitalist system dysfunctional. We may have reached the point where the external costs of production are larger than the value of capitalist output. Economist Herman Daly makes a convincing case that this is the fact.

While the powerful capitalists use the environment for themselves as a cost-free dumping ground, the accumulating costs threaten everyone’s life. It appears that nothing can be done, because the oceans are “common property.” No one owns them, so no one can protect them and their contents.

What we are faced with is the most destructive force in history: the short-sightedness of humans. Humans are willing to destroy the environment that sustains them, the law that sustains them, the truth that sustains them. Indeed, humans will destroy everything that sustains life if they can raise their incomes for another quarter or another year.

I have a friend who regales me with stories that humans are aliens on planet earth, exiled here by an intergalactic government that unwittingly disposed of its criminal wastes on a planet teeming with life. The inhumans, not humans, have been busy at work ever since their arrival exterminating one another, other species, and the life of the planet itself.

In the Western World truth is dying. Corporate and government money has purchased many scientists along with the media and politicians. The independent scientists who remain have great difficulty obtaining funds for their research, but the corporate scientists have unlimited funds with which to lie.

Scientists, like journalists, advance their careers by lying for the Establishment.

Truth-tellers and whistleblowers are defined as “domestic extremists,” “terrorists,” and are on watch lists. Some have been arrested on suspicion that they might commit a crime in the future. Here in the US we have Jeremy Bentham’s policy of arresting “suspects” before they commit a crime on the basis that they might in the future commit a crime.

All the while the US and UK, Australian and Canadian, governments are committing heinous crimes against other countries in the world whose peoples, like those of Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Palestine, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Ukraine don’t count. These peoples are disposable, unexceptional, like the Vietnamese, Laotians, Cherokees, Sioux, Apaches . . .

These peoples don’t matter. It is we Americans who matter. We are “exceptional.” We are “indispensable.”

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Hope
Hope

Pure fucking bull crap.

1) The worst polluters on planet Earth are not free-market based capitalistic societies but the rat-commie-bastard-crony capitalism of CHINA AND RUSSIA.

You don’t shit where you eat if you want to 1) keep your customers happy and 2) have resource for your business.\

2) The countries he claims we are being so “mean” to are the very countries engaged in actively killing Westerners, brutalizing women and children, starving their own people and prosecuting minorities or dissidents.

YES, America is the indispensable nation and we are exceptional. We are not perfect but the principles this country was founded on created a degree of wealth, peace and opportunity unparalleled in human history.

I sure as fucking hell do not see people running to emigrate to the shit holes of Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Palestine, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Ukraine.

Paul Roberts can kiss my big Texas Ass. He hates it here so much, get the fuck out and stop taking up valuable real estate and oxygen.

You want to see the world without America? Good, cuz you’re gonna, real quick.

Riddle me this Batmen and Batgirls. Who is first on the scene of any major disaster with aid and help? Which country lets just about anybody in and gives them housing/medical care/education/blah blah? Which country doesn’t throw homo’s from rooftops or mutilate little girls? Which country can you become a millionaire in the FIRST generation????

I could go on here.

You want to see the world without America? Take a real good look at the ME, Africa and China. Cuz THAT is your future without America.

duckhunter
duckhunter

The most important take away from orwells 1984. “Do it to julia”. The rest of the world is julia, in fact everyone who is not you may as well be julia. Do whatever you will to anyone else so long as it aint me.

Pirate Jo
Pirate Jo

Humans are destroying the oceans because there are too many humans.

Hope
Hope

@PirateJo: Yes, and your point? We have too many humans, way beyond the supportive capacity of the planet.

Your solution?

Who cares?

Nature always bats last and Mother Nature is a Bitch. We have reached the level of exponential growth, the end of the stationary phase and are poised for the big Die Off.

Bacteria or People. It’s the same in every biologic system on the planet:

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=image+of+exponential+growth+curves&view=detailv2&&qpvt=image+of+exponential+growth+curves&id=820589F19AE412D60C0A96E41B2FD5BE576846FD&selectedIndex=27&ccid=nuAAzOaL&simid=608027242030957756&thid=HN.608027242030957756

Hope
Hope

oops,

comment image

Hope
Hope

I give up. jhttps://www.bing.com/images/search?q=image+of+exponential+growth+curves&view=detailv2&&qpvt=image+of+exponential+growth+curves&id=820589F19AE412D60C0A96E41B2FD5BE576846FD&selectedIndex=27&ccid=nuAAzOaL&simid=608027242030957756&thid=HN.608027242030957756ust go look at it here.

Iska Waran
Iska Waran

Since liberals hate humans more even than they love Gaia, you’d think they’d be happy to see the oceans dying. Yay, more starvation.

Chicago999444
Chicago999444

Pirate Jo’s “point” is that you are not doing the world any favor by breeding, contrary to the pablum issued by our right wing and our religious nuts.

And I agree with her. Why have kids in a world poised for steep contraction and drastic die-off of the human population due to terminal resource depletion and environmental degradation? Will all those kids support you in retirement when they can’t even scare up a not-decent meal, let alone a paying job?

DRUD
DRUD

Two thoughts:

1) Ocean destruction (and soil depletion/destruction) are FAR greater problems and bigger risks than Global Warming, even if the worst case scenario thought up by its biggest pundits were actually not blowing smoke. Water, soil, sunlight. These are the fundamental building blocks of ALL life on Earth. No matter how many scientists are/become on board with Climate Change BS, it is ALWAYS a political issue. It is meant to divide the populace and extract ever more money from a dying system.

2) Capitalism/capitalist has been used incorrectly for so long, that the connotation has shifted. PCR really means corporatism/corporatist. True capitalism simply means Free Markets. Corporations are all about unfair benefits (besides economy of scale) being given to the biggest players (biggest DONORS). I believe a truly free market could, and would, be far more environmentally conscious, as well as forward looking than the BS Corporatist system we have now (and is wrongly called capitalism). Unfortunately, I doubt we will ever see such a system. As corporatism is far too deeply entrenched and corporate oligarchs have far too much power.

Billy
Billy

Fuck all you suicidal pieces of shit…

“There’s too many people! Dwindling resources! Don’t reproduce! Fuckin’ WAAHHHHH!”

Fucka-ALLA-yoo!

1. Populations in the West – The US, Europe, Russia, etc, are shrinking.

2. Populations in the shitholes of the world are exploding. Much thanks to do-gooder assholes in the West, who keep sending “aid” in the form of damn near everything – from modern medicines to shiploads of food. We are, in effect, paying these do-nothing, low-IQ fuckers to reproduce. Or at least rewarding them.

3. Artificially sustaining populations of anything at levels way above their carrying capacity will always end in Bad News.

4. The Chinks, the Dot Heads, Africans – they have BILLIONS of motherfuckers. And every time some poor bunch of ass-scratchers have a famine, who rides to the fucking rescue? WE do. Look at Ethiopia. A generation ago, there were 3 million starving motherfuckers there.. remember Band Aid and their crappy song?

Yeah, NOW lookit – there’s 30+ million starving motherfuckers, and the little urchin we sent aid to 20-some years ago is now a Kalashnikov-toting hearty raping and looting and fathering bastard children as and when the mood strikes him… and let’s not forget that he HATES our guts…

Everything is cute when it’s young… and then it grows up.

5. All you ‘don’t have kids’ dumbshits are literally advocating self-genocide. US “not having kids” won’t stop THEM from having their spawn… which means your position is fucking idiotic being as self-genociding ourselves will only accomplish taking the only people capable of doing something constructive about the problem out of the equation…

And that’s fucking idiocy bordering on retardation…

You all really think that a bunch of illiterate Africans who still believe in Hoo-Doo and that showering really well will somehow “cure” AIDS will find a constructive solution for something as complicated as “our oceans are dying”? These people can’t even refrain from pissing and shitting in the village well that provides their only clean drinking water.

The Dot Heads? Fer Chrissakes, they throw dead and rotting bodies in the Ganges, and then turn around and bathe in the same water, then get their drinking and cooking water from the same river!

The Chinks? They already have established population controls, but since the overwhelming majority of families want male children, that means in about 20 years there’s gonna be a population crash in Chink-land – not enough females to go around… that is, if the pollution in Beijing don’t kill them all first.

What kind of fucked up does a mind have to be to advocate mass suicide as a solution to a problem like this?

Fucking idiots…

bb

Fucking idiots , no good worthless bastards ,human pieces of shit , sluts of the highest order..I hate this with a passion.
That felt pretty good.
Now you ask way the oceans are dying. Well they are not dying. It’s a lie.The oceans will only die after a nuclear exchange on the ocean between The US and China. Just saw today China said it was going to take back all its previous held real estate in the Oceans.
That fat rice eating North Korea say he was going to take back South Korea. Remember North and South Korea are still in a state of war.Damn communist . We should have killed them when we had the chance. I’m glad you all agree.

NickelthroweR
NickelthroweR

Greetings,

We can argue all we want but, and this is important, Nature Bats Last. We can rape the Earth for all its worth and it wont matter one bit because nature will have the last word – it always does. We may bitch and moan about soil erosion but a super-volcano or asteroid will put a stop to our foolishness pretty damn quick.

We are not separate from nature and if it is in our nature to destroy everything then I say “destroy it all”. Then, and only then, can we see how well it works out for us.

Lets get busy.

grochef
grochef

So glad to see so many of you can conjugate the word “fuck”. I am suitably impressed.

Meanwhile, speaking from facts and not from the pain in your rectums, you would actually learn something.

For Hope:
“I sure as fucking hell do not see people running to emigrate to the shit holes of Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Palestine, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Ukraine.”
That is because each of those places are used by the US military as target ranges with live targets in order to keep the profits coming for the Military Industrial Complex. So, you’re right.

For Billy:
“Populations in the West – The US, Europe, Russia, etc, are shrinking”
Just try using a search engine to look at population. The US population continues to grow. Russia is decreasing. You are partially right on this.

I must congratulate each of you, again, for being able to make so much up with such conviction. I would guess that your family members loathe the thought of entering into conversations with you about anything more complicated than who won the latest sporting event.

I await your vile response.

Pirate Jo
Pirate Jo

The human population is not shrinking. In some places it is increasing at a slower rate than in the past, but that’s because the denominator is getting bigger all the time. More than 200K people are added to the planet every day, or 140 every minute.

Iska Waran
Iska Waran

Total fertility rates are falling in most of the world. If populations in the West aren’t yet declining it’s only because of immigration and the fact that the old are living longer. It’s like Wile E Coyote running off a cliff. He hangs there for a while before plummeting. Billy’s right that in places like Mali, the fertility rate is high, but even in unexpected places like Mexico and Iran, TFR is about at replacement level. The fact is that most individuals are selfish. Reproducing and raising children to adulthood (and beyond) is mostly a selfless, thankless and expensive task. The welfare state has eliminated the “need” for children to take care of us in old age. Therefore the most developed countries are seeing their fertility rates fall, while the least developed see their fertility rates stay high. So the global human population is adversely selecting for intelligence. Great.

bb

Westcoast , where do you really get you facts.You must read the National Enquirer( I think that’s the way you spell it ).Maybe Playboy.

bb

Groche ,fuck you dip shit.

OutLookingIn
OutLookingIn

Exactly one year ago I was walking the vacant great north-west beach on Lana’i in the Hawaiian Islands. This was the first time I had been back to this place in 22 years. I was deeply saddened.

Along the high water tide line and above was a solid line of a tangled mass of plastic garbage, that stretched the entire length of the beach, which is miles long. Jetsom and flotsom from every conceivable use of plastic by mankind was there. It never used to be like that.

The Pacific Ocean has become the globes biggest garbage and refuse dump. Anything and everything you may think of and even then, some things you may only darkly imagine, are ending up in the oceans of the world. Including all the highly radioactive ground water from the Fukashima disaster, which will continue to give mankind the “gift” of radioactivity for a thousand years or more!

Those that ignore or dismiss the evidence out-of-hand, have your heads stuck up your arseholes and will be blind sided one day. Ignoring reality is a mark of stupidity, but you cannot ignore the consequences of your ignorance!

llpoh
llpoh

Hope – far be it for me to disagree with you, who I admire.

But BULLFUCKINGSHIT re your opening comment re worst polluters.

The US consumes 25% of the world’s resources. Think about that – 5% of the people on earth consume 25% of its resources. The ecologic damage being done throughout the world is very significantly related to the massive consumption of the US. No one is more responsible for pollution than the US.

The US exports its nasty pollution elsewhere, you see. EPA won’t allow us to pollute, you say? Well, then, lets go fuck the Congo, the Chinese, the Thai.

The US exports its pollution. It is really that simple. Feeding the giant US consumption maw is never ending, and it requires cheap resources. It does not give a shit what it pollutes so long as those cheap goods keep flowing in.

llpoh
llpoh

Grochef – you slimy little turd.

Re population growth – just where is the US population growth coming from? Hmmm? Enquiring minds want to know. Ok ok – I will tell you.

The US population is increasing around 2 million a year. Immigrants account for about half that figure. Hey – now there is a suprise!

And guess what the birth rate is for those same immigrants? Guess which demographics are breeding like rabbits, and which are in decline?

I will let you look that up for yourself.

Grochef – come around here spouting off like you have a fucking clue will just result in a good reaming. I suspect you would enjoy that experience.

llpoh
llpoh

Iska – sorry, I did not see your comment. Makes my point to the little dickhead redundant.

Lysander
Lysander

Billy, I agree with every point you made. The British used to have a saying; “Little nits grow up to be lice”. I’ve argued the point that you made, that the little starving bastard in Africa that you ‘save’ from the consequences of reality slamming into ignorance will, more often than not, grow up to hate you and tote a AK-47 and a machete with a blood lust.

Same thing in this country. We are subsidizing the existence of our destroyers.

llpoh
llpoh

There is a story about a group that went to Africa, brought tractors, seed corn, etc., and taught the locals how to use the, how to plant, when to plant, etc. All was great.

They came back in six months to see how things went.

The population was starving. They had eaten the seed corn, instead of planting it, and pulled the equipment apart to use the metal for sundry purposes and to sell as scrap.

You cannot help these people. Africa has an average IQ of around 65.

Leave them in peace, and let them be as they are going to be. Do not feed them, do not send them aid, do not sell them arms. Leave them develop, or not, as they will. It is impossible to make a positive change on a population with an average IQ of 65. It cannot be done.

Southern Sage
Southern Sage

Spoke to a Hong Kong Chinese friend the other day. He told me that the environmental destruction in China is far, far worse than what has been published in the West. The Chinese government is terrified, as the ordinary people are waking up the fact that their “economic miracle” has made much of China unlivable. He also scoffed at people who think China will rule the world. As he said, “These assholes can produce cheap knock-off’s, steal money from each other and lie through their teeth. One day soon the whole thing is coming down.” I know this guy well and he is no b.s. artist. Time will tell.

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