Extinction 2018 Quotes

In a biological sense, a fruit is the developed ovary of a plant (the vessel that holds the plant's eggs), and examining a fruit gives clues about its past struggles. Before humans, the red flesh of strawberries was a decoy for flyby nibbles from birds. Avocados appealed to elephant-like creatures called gomphotheres, which had intestines wide enough for the animals to swallow the fruit and excrete its hefty seed somewhere else. The day gomphotheres went extinct, thankfully no one told avocados. Nine thousand years passed before the Aztecs invented guacamole. As for what constitutes a fruit in 2018, sweetness has little to do with it. Tomatoes are fruits, but so are eggplants, peppers, and olives. Peanuts and almonds and walnuts are fruits. So are parts of the world's six top crops---wheat, corn, rice, barley, sorghum, and soy. Oftentimes, things that masquerade as vegetables, like pea pods, are definitely fruits. Which is not to cast shade at vegetables; they are, by definition, almost fruits. To botanists, vegetables are any other edible part of the plant that doesn't contain seeds. Roots, such as carrots, potatoes, and parsnips, are vegetables. Lettuces are seedless, so they're vegetables, too, as is garlic.

Information technology has grown from roughly a $50 billion industry in 1980 to a $3.8 trillion industry in 2018.22 It is expected to reach $4.5 trillion by 2022.23

Since The Great Recession, the global financial crash of 2008-09, the debt-fuelled post-recession recovery has been the weakest in the post-war era (since the end of World War Two). Whereas total outstanding credit in the US after the Wall Street Crash grew from 160% to 260% of GDP between 1929 and 1932, the figure rose from 365% in 2008 to 540% in 2010. (And this does not include derivatives, whose nominal outstanding value is at least four times GDP).[34] A long depression and rising right-wing populism have followed, including the stunning ascendency of property tycoon and TV celebrity demagogue Donald Trump as the President of the US in 2016.[35] The British public’s vote in June 2016 to leave the EU delivered another shock of global significance. A chronic drift towards trade wars and protectionism is accelerating and in January 2018, US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said that “great power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of US national security”, putting Russia, China and – yes – Europe in the crosshairs of the world’s long-time dominant economic and military power. Adding to this age of anxiety is the accelerating automation revolution. What should be an emancipatory and utopian development only generates insecurity at the prospect of unprecedented mass unemployment. It can be no coincidence that all these crises are converging at exactly the same time. They cannot be explained away by cynical and shallow generalisations about ‘human nature’. In the course of this investigation we will see that in fact all of these crises have a common root cause: the decaying nature of capitalism and its tendency towards breakdown. Indeed, average Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates in the world’s richest countries have fallen in every decade since the 1960s and are clearly closing in on zero. Rates of profit, manufacturing costs and commodity prices are also trending towards zero. Drawing on Henryk Grossman’s vital clarification of Karl Marx’s methodology, we shall see that capitalism is heading inexorably towards a final, insurmountable breakdown that is destined to strike much earlier than a zero rate of profit. Indeed, we shall also see that the next, imminent economic crash will result in worldwide hyperinflation. We will also show that the economic crisis is intensifying competition between nation-states, forcing them into a situation which threatens the most destructive world war to date.

At 2°C “the ice sheets begin their collapse”.[13] Wallace-Wells says that while “most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving … most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them [to rising sea levels] within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade”. More than 600 million people live within 30 feet of sea level. At just 3°C sea levels would rise by 50 metres.[14] London, Brussels, New York, Buenos Aires and Mumbai, to name a few, would be permanently under water. The climate change crisis is an extremely serious existential threat. Before the IPCC’s 2018 report, it could feel as if the topic barely seemed to register with politicians, the media or the general public, either in collective denial or complacent about its supposedly distant effects. But now a collective eco-consciousness is taking hold – the effects are already being felt and can no longer be ignored. Since 2005, the number of floods has increased by a factor of 15, extreme temperature events by a factor of 20, and wildfires sevenfold; the 20 warmest years since records began have been in the past 22 years.[15] Since 1980, the planet has seen a 50-fold increase in the number of places experiencing dangerous or extreme heat.[16] The number of heatwaves affecting the planet’s oceans tripled in the past couple of years, having already jumped by more than 50% in the three decades to 2016, killing swathes of sea-life “like wildfires that take out huge areas of forest”, according to the Marine Biological Association.[17] This is adding to ocean acidification, whereby the CO2 in the oceans rises at the expense of oxygen, suffocating the coral reefs that support as much as a quarter of all marine life. Meanwhile, 95% of the world’s population is breathing dangerously polluted air, killing at least nine million people a year, damaging our cognitive ability and respiratory systems and even our DNA. Pollution itself “endangers the stability of the Earth’s support systems and threatens the continuing survival of human societies”, according to the Commission on Pollution and Health.[18