NWF types provide this analysis of the situation:

The root cause of our environmental problems—our ecological crisis—is infinite planet economic theory, the rules and axioms of a discipline that tells us that it is possible to have infinite economic growth on a finite planet.

So, our problem is that economic theorists are tricking us all into doing the wrong things?

Poppycock.  GDP counts most because our main problem is the cold, hard, in-the-flesh dominion of corporate capitalists over the whole of modern life.  GDP is a mere expression of that actual, material dominance.  All the special pleading in the world isn’t going to change either capitalism or the way it gets described in the corporate media/corporate politics.  This isn’t tiddly-winks.

But such is the state of the greens:  So well-indoctrinated and craven, they think hopeless language games are going to flip us toward survival.

And, to add insult to injury, the NWF feather jousters are proposing to count what isn’t countable — particular qualitative states of matter, a.k.a. the remaining unspoiled bits of nature here on middle-aged Earth.  GDP counts human labor.  No amount of human labor is going to turn smoke, heat, and ashes — or a pack of Charmin Ultra asswipes — back into an old growth tree.  That “greens” don’t get this speaks volumes about how very far away we remain from having proper leadership.

Capitalism, we now know, is a pipe-dream, an ecological suicide mission.  But it is a suicidal pipe-dream backed by the richest and most ideologically and organizationally powerful overclass in human history.  These people are not going to agree to start counting and reporting their destruction.  Unless and until those who hope to leave our children a decent world get honest with ourselves and direct with others about what we’re up against, we are simply f—ed.  Circumlocution and feigned naivete are not going to cut it.  Not by a long shot.

Check it out, and don’t miss the underlying report.

Draw your own conclusions.

Reality is that the earth is a summary of innumerable coincidences creating conditions of stability upon which life formed and now rides.  The variations of life have had sufficient opportunity to produce an adaptation manifesting the most minutely possible principles of a new system of order riding on (or in if you like) a single species.  The magnificence of this occurrence is beyond beyond.  The functioning of this adaptation is problematic given the nature of its origin, and now it is a toss up as to whether the carrier species will discover how to manage such a powerful adaptation before its more dangerous expressions destabilize the conditions that allow it to exist.

FWIW, I replied thusly:

If you are going to appeal to big history, I would suggest you stick with it. 5,500 years ago, permanent elites figured out how to keep surplus wealth for themselves as “property.” That, as you note, was the beginning of the end for egalitarian kinship societies.

Fair enough.

But when did anybody start making a serious attempt to check ruling classes and their stories of biological superiority? 1776/1789. Less than 250 years ago, on a 5,500-year timeline.

And when did socialists start trying to extend democracy to economic affairs? 150 years ago. And they also did so while making the mistake of dismissing existing democracy as mere bourgeois illusion. So, socialism 2.0 has barely started, here in the latest 20 years on that 5,500-year timeline.

And here you are, talking about the naturalness of elites? I don’t buy it, either as history or strategy.

The point of leftism is not absolute monetary equality. It is the extension of democracy over macro-economic choices.

Of course, the impending energy/eco crash is going to make modern wealth levels and our range of macro-economic options a lot smaller.

Capitalists, meanwhile, are militant ostriches and obstacles, like it or not, because they are trying to retain what is utterly unkeepable. Al Gore thinks electric cars are a sufficient answer.

Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Ali Dibadj saw in the third quarter a “decoupling” of the luxury and prestige markets, also including LVMH and Elizabeth Arden, from the mass marketers. And the results extended beyond beauty, as Macy’s and Nordstrom showed increases in customer traffic year over year last quarter even as the U.S. Walmart division last week reported continued year-over-year declines in traffic for the quarter ended Oct. 31, albeit improvements from the prior quarter.

“The luxury consumer is shopping again, and we are seeing our strategy contribute to … prestige beauty growing faster than mass in many parts of world,” said Estee Lauder CEO Fabrizio Freda on a conference call with analysts last month. He pointed to U.S. beauty sales in department stores and Sephora growing 4% last quarter, according to NPD Group, while sales in mass channels grew only 1%.  (Advertising Age, “Prestige, Luxury Products Thrive as Mass Market Sputters,” November 22, 2010)

Home prices in Las Vegas are down by 60 percent from 2006 in one of the steepest descents in modern times. There are 9,517 spanking new houses sitting empty. An additional 5,600 homes were repossessed by lenders in the first three months of this year and could soon be for sale.

The price declines in Las Vegas have been so brutal that most homeowners with a mortgage owe more than their home is worth. If they must sell, their only option is a so-called short sale done with the approval of the lender, which can be a lengthy and frustrating process for all concerned.

Yet builders here are putting up 1,100 homes, and they are frantically buying lots for even more.

Las Vegas is trying to recover by building what it does not need. It is an unlikely pattern being repeated in many of the areas where the housing crash was most severe.

Leave it to The New York Times to call this standard late-imperial effort to make a symptoms into a cure “unlikely.”

One such is the perfectly-named Chris Christie, the doughy, mafia capo look-alike who was recently elected by the benighted part of the New Jersey electorate to be that state’s Governor.

According to today’s New York Times, Christie didn’t get the memo that actually cutting government is not something a good government-basher actually does upon reaching power:

“Today, we are fulfilling the promise of a smaller government that lives within its means,” Governor Christie said in remarks prepared for delivery at 1 p.m. “The defenders of the status quo have already begun to yell and scream. They will try to demonize me. They will seek to divide us rather than unite us. But even they know in their hearts, if not yet in their minds — it is time for a change.”

The plan?

Over all, [Christie's] budget would shrink state spending by 9 percent from the fiscal year that ends in June, to $28.3 billion.

Upending the priorities of his Democratic predecessors, Governor Christie unveiled a budget that would hit the poor, elderly, schoolchildren, college students and inner-city residents hardest, while largely sparing the wealthy and businesses.

It remains to be seen whether Christie can get this through the New Jersey legislature, given that most office holders, including those who peddle anti-government cant, secretly know that cutting government spending in the middle of a depression is a recipe for disaster.

But, if Christie gets his way, look for New Jersey to implode even faster than the rest of this deluded and dying empire.

A hundred years later, Oliver Wendell Holmes frequently repeated the aphorism “Taxes are the price of civilization.”

Now, facing profound national and global problems in the make-it-or-break 21st century, we have numb-nutters running around dressing up like Thomas Paine (who would have hated their guts) while being pandered to by morons like Scott Brown, who defends psychotic, murdering crooks by saying “Certainly, no one likes paying taxes, obviously.”

The childishness of it all is breathtaking.  Do you like having a road on which to operate your motor vehicle?  A school for your child?  Are you one of the dupes who think “our troops” are fighting “for us”?  Do you enjoy knowing that the fire department will arrive if your house catches fire or you go into cardiac arrest?  Do you admit any contradiction between enjoying these things and Mr. Brown’s (massively dishonest — the Republican Party is never going to reduce the size of government, as doing so would draw a Depression that would make this Great Recession look like a Golden Age of prosperity) advocacy of an utterly juvenile anti-social worldview?

Not that the lying, bought-and-sold Democrats are an ounce better…

Year 2007 [was] the second highest year on record since 1913 almost equaling 1928, the record year when the top percentile share reached 23.9 percent. Even within the top percentile, the gains from 2006 to 2007 are extremely concentrated. The top .01% (top 14,988 US families, making at least $11.5m in 2007) share increased from 5.46% in 2006 to 6.04% in 2007 leaving well behind the 1928 peak of 5.04 percent.

One wonders whether the year 1928 doesn’t have rather a great deal of relevance as history repeating itself. 2007 looks an awful lot like that former pinnacle, with eerily similar effects seemingly ensuing, with the crucial difference that, behind the marketing facade, Obama is Hoover redux, not FDR II.