Infinity's Rainbow: The Politics of Energy, Climate, and Globalization

Ready for a dramatic lifestyle change? If mankind continues to deplete Earth''s bounteous resources at an accelerating pace, drastic changes are inevitable. Exploring the links between politics and economics, globalization, peak oil, global warming, and disastrous weather, the author shows how human values and human activity have set us on a course to calamity and calls for a profound change in how we exploit the earth s resources. Infinite as Earth''s resources have always seemed to be, the author presents evidence showing that mankind is rapidly using up many of the most necessary resources, and he draws a dire conclusion about the consequences for everything from our future food supply to global political stability. He argues that the failure of the US and other nations political systems to deal with these issues has driven the planet s ecology to the brink of collapse. This book provides an integrated assessment of current problems involving climate, ecology, energy, politics and economics. Systems theory is used in a non-technical manner to explain these linkages and the causes and consequences of human actions upon them. In addition, the author gives a detailed, clear analysis of how humans process information in order to learn to deal with the world around them and in particular how to deal with crisis situations. The book describes how and why these problems have arisen from mankind s values and actions, and serves as a call to action for radical change to set civilization on a more promising path to long-term survival. The book places particular emphasis upon the role of multinational corporations in contributing both to our ongoing political failure to respond effectively to these challenges and, also, to causing global warming and hydrocarbon resource depletion. The effects of the legal doctrine of corporate personhood upon the ability of these artificial persons ability to capture control over human political systems are carefully analyzed. The consequences of the resultant failures of corporate-subordinated political systems are shown to be both inevitable and foreseeable so long as the doctrine of corporate personhood operates. He further observes that corporatism could not have gained so much political control without the support of the public, especially the religious right, and Dispensationalists in particular who believe that we have entered into the final period of history during which the Bible s prophecies will be carried out literally. The sooner we see the destruction of our earthly paradise, the sooner they hope to get to heaven. Such beliefs are neatly exploited by those who have a more venal interest in promoting slash-and-burn technologies.