Economic and industrial data released today by the Chinese government’s statistical agency indicates the country’s carbon emissions likely fell by around 3%.

It also shows the contraction of key heavy industry sectors and the continued expansion of renewable energies are driving a wedge between total energy demand and coal use.

According to the data, China’s coal output fell by 3.5% in 2015, thermal power generation by 3%, coal imports by 30%, pig iron output by 4%, coking coal output by 7%, and cement by 5%.

All this suggests that both power sector coal consumption and total coal consumption probably fell by more than 4%. Total oil consumption grew only 1.1% in the first eleven months, gas consumption by 3.7% while cement production (which releases CO2 directly) fell by 4.9%. This indicates a fall of 3-4% in China’s fossil CO₂ emissions – roughly equal to Poland’s total emissions.

This is now China’s second year of declining pollution. As  reported last year, 2014 carbon emissions were down about 0.7% and the country’s coal burn was down some 3%. That was the first fall in China’s emissions since the Asian economic crisis more than 15 years ago.

Key drivers …

The main factors driving China’s declining carbon emissions include:

• Shrinking heavy industry. Nobody knows for sure how much China’s economy grew in 2015, but what seems clear is that heavy industry declined while services and private consumption grew significantly.
• Debt overhang. In response to the global financial crisis, China created the largest credit boom the world has ever seen, which ultimately led to the massive energy overcapacity and rapidly growing debt that are now weighing down on the economy.
• Booming renewable energy generation. China was able to reduce fossil fuel fired power generation by 3% while overall power demand increased 0.5% by adding 30GW of wind power and 17GW of solar capacity – a new world record for any country ever.
• Airpocalypse. The war on pollution continued to impact industry, and it’s reasonable to expected that action will be amplified following the horrendous air pollution episodes Beijing experienced this winter. As reported on Energydesk, the notorious China smog was 10% less intense in 2015 than it was the year before.

China has also acted this year to clamp down on coal mining, closing many smaller mines and banning new ones. in an effort to prevent over-supply. Over 1,000 small mines will be closed and the ban on new mining permits will last for three years.

But the new economic reality is not without challenges: the fight between dirty and clean power for space on the grid has only got worse as coal overcapacity continues to grow. New coal fired power stations are still being built owing to perverse economic incentives.

Meanwhile the debate over whether China’s high polluting industrial sectors would return to growth was essentially settled last year: They won’t. The economic bulls and bears are now divided on whether the service sector and high-end manufacturing can fill the gap left by shrinking state-owned heavy industry sectors, or whether the economy is headed for an outright stagnation.

Though the difference between these two scenarios would have significant consequences for China’s citizens, carbon emissions are likely to fall in either case since they come almost entirely from heavy manufacturing.

China’s 2016 goals – cut over-supply

The key drivers mentioned above will only intensify in 2016 – last year was just the beginning.

A lot of heavy industry companies have continued to operate despite lack of market demand and making losses. Allowing these ‘zombie’ operations to wind down, termed’ supply-side reform’ and ‘overcapacity reduction’ in Chinese political jargon, is the number one economic policy goal for the coming year, and an inevitability in any case.

Similarly, the growth in public and corporate debt continued to far outpace economic growth in 2015 as the government tried to stimulate the economy through credit expansion. This is clearly an unsustainable trend, and as China begins to deleverage its debt – another key policy goal set in the Economic Work Conference in December – energy intensive investment spending will fall further and reduce energy demand.

Basically, China’s CO₂ emissions are still on track to to peak and decline well ahead of the government’s official targets and projections. Another promising sign for the historic Paris climate agreement finalised late last year.

Lauri Myllyvirta is an author with Greenpeace Energydesk. She tweets @laurimyllyvirta.

This article was originally published by Greenpeace Energydesk. Some additional reporting by The Ecologist.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is dangerously and unaccountably distorting the direction of international development.

With assets of $43.5 billion, the BMGF is the largest charitable foundation in the world. It actually distributes more aid for global health than any government.

As a result, it has a major influence on issues of global health and agriculture.

The charges are laid in a new report by Global Justice Now: ‘Gated Development – Is the Gates Foundation always a force for good?‘ The report argues that what BMGF is doing could end up exacerbating global inequality and entrenching corporate power globally.

Global Justice Now’s analysis of the BMGF’s programmes shows that the foundation’s senior staff are overwhelmingly drawn from corporate America. As a result, the question is: whose interests are being promoted – those of corporate America or those of ordinary people who seek social and economic justice rather than charity?

According to the report, the foundation’s strategy is intended to deepen the role of multinational companies in global health and agriculture especially, even though these corporations are responsible for much of the poverty and injustice that already plagues the global south.

It concludes that the foundation’s programmes have a specific ideological strategy that promotes neo-liberal economic policies, corporate globalisation, the technology this brings (such as GMOs) and an outdated view of the centrality of aid in ‘helping’ the poor.

Funded by tax-dodging, close links with corporate interests

The report raises a series criticisms including:

1) The relationship between the foundation and Microsoft’s tax practices. A 2012 report from the US Senate found that Microsoft’s use of offshore subsidiaries enabled it to avoid taxes of $4.5 billion, a sum greater than the BMGF’s annual grant making ($3.6 billion in 2014).

2) The close relationship that BMGF has with many corporations whose role and policies contribute to ongoing poverty. Not only is BMGF profiting from numerous investments in a series of controversial companies which contribute to economic and social injustice, it is also actively supporting a series of those companies, including Monsanto, Dupont and Bayer through a variety of pro-corporate initiatives around the world.

3) The foundation’s promotion of industrial agriculture across Africa, pushing for the adoption of GM, patented seed systems and chemical fertilisers, all of which undermine existing sustainable, small-scale farming that is providing the vast majority of food security across the continent.

4) The foundation’s promotion of projects around the world pushing private healthcare and education. Numerous agencies have raised concerns that such projects exacerbate inequality and undermine the universal provision of such basic human necessities.

5) BMGF’s funding of a series of vaccine programmes that have reportedly lead to illnesses or even deaths with little official or media scrutiny.

“The Gates Foundation has rapidly become the most influential actor in the world of global health and agricultural policies, but there’s no oversight or accountability in how that influence is managed”, says Polly Jones the head of campaigns and policy at Global Justice Now.

“This concentration of power and influence is even more problematic when you consider that the philanthropic vision of the Gates Foundation seems to be largely based on the values of corporate America. The Foundation is relentlessly promoting big business-based initiatives such as industrial agriculture, private health care and education. But these are all potentially exacerbating the problems of poverty and lack of access to basic resources that the foundation is supposed to be alleviating.”

The report states that that Bill Gates has regular access to world leaders and is in effect personally bankrolling hundreds of universities, international organisations, NGOs and media outlets.

As the single most influential voice in international development, the Foundation’s strategy is a major challenge to progressive development actors and activists around the world who want to see the influence of multinational corporations in global markets reduced or eliminated.

The foundation not only funds projects in which agricultural and pharmaceutical corporations are among the leading beneficiaries, but it often invests in the same companies as it is funding, meaning the foundation has an interest in the ongoing profitability of these corporations.

According to the report, this is “a corporate merry-go-round where the BMGF consistently acts in the interests of corporations.”

Uprooting indigenous agriculture for the benefit of global agribusiness

The report notes that the BMGF’s close relationship with seed and chemical giant Monsanto is well known. It previously owned shares in the company and continues to promote several projects in which Monsanto is a beneficiary.

Not least among these is the wholly inappropriate and fraudulent GMO project which promotes a technical quick-fix ahead of tackling the structural issues that create hunger, poverty and food insecurity But, as the report notes, the BMGF partners with many other multinational agribusiness corporations.

Many examples where this is the case are highlighted by the report. For instance, the foundation is working with US trader Cargill in an $8 million project to “develop the soya value chain” in southern Africa.

Cargill is the biggest global player in the production of and trade in soya with heavy investments in South America where GM soya mono-crops have displaced rural populations and caused great environmental damage. According to Global Justice Now, the BMGF-funded project will likely enable Cargill to capture a hitherto untapped African soya market and eventually introduce GM soya onto the continent.

The end markets for this soya are companies with relationships with the fast food outlet, KFC, whose expansion in Africa is being aided by the project.

Specific examples are given which highlight how BMGF is also supporting projects involving other chemicals and seed corporations, including DuPont Pioneer, Syngenta and Bayer.

According to the report, the BMGF is promoting a model of industrial agriculture, the increasing use of chemical fertilisers and expensive, patented seeds, the privatisation of extension services and a very large focus on genetically modified crops. The foundation bankrolls the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in pushing industrial agriculture.

Seeds of destruction

A key area for AGRA is seed policy. The report notes that currently over 80% of Africa’s seed supply comes from millions of small-scale farmers recycling and exchanging seed from year to year. But AGRA is promoting the commercial production of seed and is thus supporting the introduction of commercial seed systems, which risk enabling a few large companies to control seed research and development, production and distribution.

In order for commercial seed companies to invest in research and development, they first want to protect their ‘intellectual property’. According to the report, this requires a fundamental restructuring of seed laws to allow for certification systems that not only protect certified varieties and royalties derived from them, but which actually criminalise all non-certified seed.

The report notes that over the past two decades a long and slow process of national seed law reviews, sponsored by USAID and the G8 along with the BMGF and others, has opened the door to multinational corporations’ involvement in seed production, including the acquisition of every sizeable seed enterprise on the African continent.

At the same time, AGRA is working to promote costly inputs, notably fertiliser, despite evidence to suggest chemical fertilisers have significant health risks for farm workers, increase soil erosion and can trap small-scale farmers in unsustainable debt. The BMGF, through AGRA, is one of the world’s largest promoters of chemical fertiliser.

Some grants given by the BMGF to AGRA have been specifically intended to “help AGRA build the fertiliser supply chain” in Africa. The report describes how one of the largest of AGRA’s grants, worth $25 million, was used to help establish the African Fertiliser Agribusiness Partnership (AFAP) in 2012, whose very goal is to “at least double total fertiliser use” in Africa.

The AFAP project is being pursued in partnership with the International Fertiliser Development Centre, a body which represents the fertiliser industry.

Another of AGRA’s key programmes since its inception has been support to agro-dealer networks – small, private stockists of transnational companies’ chemicals and seeds who sell these to farmers in several African countries. This is increasing the reliance of farmers on chemical inputs and marginalising sustainable agriculture alternatives, thereby undermining any notion that farmers are exercising their ‘free choice’ (as the neo-liberal evangelists are keen to tell everyone) when it comes to adopting certain agricultural practices.

Undermining agroecological alternatives

The report concludes that AGRA’s agenda is the biggest direct threat to the growing movement in support of food sovereignty and agroecological farming methods in Africa. This movement opposes reliance on chemicals, expensive seeds and GM and instead promotes an approach which allows communities control over the way food is produced, traded and consumed.

It is seeking to create a food system that is designed to help people and the environment rather than make profits for multinational corporations. Priority is given to promoting healthy farming and healthy food by protecting soil, water and climate, and promoting biodiversity.

Recent evidence from Greenpeace and the Oakland Institute shows that in Africa agroecological farming can increase yields significantly (often greater than industrial agriculture), and that it is more profitable for small farmers. In 2011, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (Olivier de Schutter) called on countries to reorient their agriculture policies to promote sustainable systems – not least agroecology – that realise the right to food.

Moreover, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) was the work of over 400 scientists and took four years to complete. It was twice peer reviewed and states we must look to smallholder, traditional farming to deliver food security in third world countries through agri-ecological systems which are sustainable.

In a January 2015 piece in the Guardian, the Director of Global Justice Now said that ‘development’ was once regarded as a process of breaking with colonial exploitation and transferring power over resources from the ‘first’ to the ‘third world’, involving a revolutionary struggle over the world’s resources.

However, the current paradigm is based on the assumption that developing countries need to adopt neoliberal policies and that public money in the guise of aid should facilitate this.

If this new report shows anything, it is that the notion of ‘development’ has become hijacked by rich corporations and a super-rich ‘philanthrocapitalist’ (whose own corporate practices have been questionable to say the least, as highlighted by the report).

In effect, the model of ‘development’ being facilitated is married to the ideology and structurally embedded power relations of an exploitative global capitalism.

The BMGF is spearheading the ambitions of corporate America and the scramble for Africa by global agribusiness.

The report: ‘Gated Development – Is the Gates Foundation always a force for good?‘ is by Global Justice Now.

Colin Todhunter is an extensively published independent writer and former social policy researcher, based in the UK and India. You can support his work here.

This article was originally published on Colin’s website.

Shortly after signing my contract as a store assistant for a well known low-cost German supermarket company, I came across a nasty reality that seemed not to bother the rest of my colleagues.

Every day, at a sleepy four o’clock in the morning, a random employee has to do the ‘waste inventory’.

This consists of scanning all the products that can’t be sold anymore, one by one, and then throwing them out into a blue container.

The resulting mountain of food is impressive-around seventy bakery items, a hundred pieces of fruit, and fifteen trays of meat. Over two hundred food items start the morning at the bottom of the garbage container, every single day.

But that’s not the most surprising thing. The real scandal is that very few of these items need to be thrown away at all.

Of course, the expiry dates of food have to scrupulously obeyed, but most of the reasons for throwing things away have nothing to do with protecting our health. Instead, we get rid of items just because they’ve lost their label, or because the package is broken, or because they’ve been left outside the fridge.

In the frenzy of a regular work day, employees don’t have time to scrutinize every corner of the store, searching for items that a neglectful customer has left out of place on a shelf, or that they themselves may have forgotten somewhere.

Almost a third of the world’s food goes to waste

As a rough calculation, I’d say that food that’s unfit for consumption accounts for less than half of what is thrown away. While doing the waste inventory I can see it, but the ‘waste’ is valued at only £300 or so – less than 1% of the store’s daily income.

What happens to it? I ask the delivery guy where he takes the food. “To the incinerator“, he replies. “Why, are you hungry?”

If you’re able to imagine one ton of food and then multiply it by a hundred million you get the exorbitant amount that’s wasted in Europe every year, according to a report from the European Parliament. At the global level, the FAO calculates that this comes to 1.3 billion tons per annum, or a third of all food that’s produced. I can see a tiny part of this nonsense, day by day, in my shop.

What’s going on? At the heart of the problem is a basic lack of care, brought on by a culture of rushing, speed, and busyness-lots of people, scanner sounds, the noise of coins and trolleys-everything in a hurry. In shops like mine, everything is meant to be this way. The tills are designed for customers to be there for as little time as possible so that more people can be processed in the same number of minutes.

In some ways the till is the perfect symbol of modern slavery: immersion in this small metal cage implies an average of six hours a day sitting and doing mechanical and monotonous scanning-and-packing work with one 30-minute break. Greetings and goodbyes are identical, mechanical, pronounced a hundred times per day: the same jokes, the same comments.

Customers can pay with a new system called ‘contactless payment’ that works by simply touching a credit card to the machine. “They do that so we can spend quickly … and more”, an elderly customer says to me wisely. No time for conversations.

Internalising the culture of rush

I serve 20 people every ten minutes. That means 60 every half an hour, 120 per hour, and around 500 during a standard shift-giving each customer 30 seconds to chat. It feels kind of disturbing to interact with 500 different people during six hours without ever having a conversation.

Rushing also means that things get dropped. Glasses are broken, yogurt is scattered, or an egg from the box is broken when you’re trying to stack it up in the crammer stand. So that means throwing the whole carton away. And when the day is close to an end, tiredness sinks in. The more tired we are, the less we care.

Internalising this culture of rush makes everybody feel annoyed when something doesn’t work-for example when items pile up, plastic bags are difficult to open or barcodes won’t scan. Or when the cashier forgets a code or the customer takes too much time packing everything into their bags, exasperating the rest of the queue.

Almost without noticing, I’ve adopted a way of serving that pressurizes custumers to leave over time. When did I and my colleagues start behaving this way? None of us know.

Some mention the ‘pressure’ of the long queue, or the customers’ comments that encourage you to be quicker. Or the manager’s instructions that force you to speed up if there’s a long line or to close the till and do something else if it’s not busy, in order to avoid a single minute of inactivity. Bosses also encourage us to speed up by giving a prize to the fastest cashier every month.

As an experiment, I reduce my speed and soon I’m pressured to scan faster in order to ‘hit the store’s target.’ By the end of the shift, rushing has burrowed its way deep into my bones.

There must be another way

Do things have to be this way? Isn’t there an alternative? I want to believe that there is.

Barely two hundred meters along the street from where I work is another smaller shop called hiSbe. It calls itself an “ethical supermarket, independent and community-run”, and it has the aura of something more organic and environmentally-friendly. I go inside to take a look.

The shop looks less busy and less crowded with people and items. There are four employees with smiles that don’t look forced. Prices and quality are not reduced as much as on the crowded low-cost shelves that I’m used to stacking. Its claim to put “workers and suppliers before benefits” may not be a pose after all.

One of hiSbe’s commitments is “refusing to throw away any food that can be eaten.” How do they accomplish that I wonder? Here’s what I find out:

• they reduce the price of any surplus goods before the delivery of new stock;
• they minimize packaging and sell stuff by weight;
• they give items away for free like eggs which are about to expire;
• and they don’t discriminate against ‘ugly vegetables’ that aren’t the standard size and look.

Above all, things are done well and carefully and without rushing. It’s a small shop without too many customers, so there’s more time for chatting. Less rushing means that things aren’t dropped or broken so frequently or forgotten somewhere out of the fridge. “We barely throw any food away at the end of the day”, one worker confirms to me.

This isn’t an isolated example. There are a growing number of citizen initiatives which are fighting against unjustified waste like the ‘dumpster diving‘ movement, or the Real Junk Food Project in Brighton – a food bank that uses items discarded by local supermarkets.

In Lisbon, the Frutafeia co-operative campaigns against standardization in foodstuffs, especially vegetables, while Berlin’s ‘social fridges’ offer self-service food for free to people who are homeless.

In the current dominant system of food consumption and the culture of rush, a daily mountain of edible food that’s thrown into a bin is not considered a failure – it’s simply one of the many consequences of doing business as usual. To reverse that process, we all have to put our shopping into question.

Petition (UK): ‘Ask your MP to end food waste for good‘ (Friends of the Earth).

Diana Moreno is a Spanish journalist who focuses on human rights, workers rights and migration issues. She contributes to many newspapers and magazines including Diagonal, Eldiario.es, Global Voices and El Mundo. Follow her on twitter @_diana_moreno_.

This article was originally published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. This is a shorter version of a longer piece that can be found here.

Is the hydrocarbon economy too big to fail?

If the woefully inadequate outcome of the Paris climate conference is any indication, the answer is still a resounding ‘Yes!’

That’s because the overly optimistic agreement conspicuously ignored the core issue driving up the earth’s temperature and warping the world’s already misshaped markets.

The problem is Big Oil. Simply put, Big Oil is a bad investment fueled by irrational exuberance, chronic cronyism and an increasingly indefensible misallocation of capital.

And decades of throwing good money after bad has produced a distorted economic system that socializes risk, privatizes profits, externalizes costs and misallocates capital.

This continues because policy makers sustain it with taxpayer-funded subsidies, costly tax breaks and low-overhead access to publicly held resources.

By failing to institute much-needed cost internalization mechanisms and by completely avoiding the key problem of government subsidization, the cork-popping cadre of COP21 tacitly admitted what most cynics already knew – policy makers still believe Big Oil is far too big to fail.

But, like other distorted markets in history, the correction is coming. The growing impact of climate change is exposing the key fallacy at the heart of the hydrocarbon economy: Big Oil cannot simply exempt itself from the natural economy governing all things in this closed system called planet Earth.

It’s only natural

Since Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, few ideas have captured the capitalist imagination like the notion that “an invisible hand” directs enterprising, self-interested individuals to produce a widely distributed wealth of social goods in spite of their self-serving intentions.

When the “self-serving“ butcher, brewer or baker sells quality products at a fair price, they each profit from the returning patronage of their customers. Their customers enjoy good meat, fine ale and fresh bread. An invisible hand rewards these enlightened purveyors with enough money to eat well and drink well, too.

And in the process, the whole village eats and drinks and thrives. But unenlightened sellers – those who peddle unnatural combinations of poor products at high prices – are driven out of business by the unsustainable inefficiencies produced by bad decisions and ill intentions.

This market correction happens, in no small part, because they’ve thrown the whole town – which is itself a mini financial ecosystem – completely out of balance with their bad meat and the lost wages from food-borne illnesses.

Even worse is the disruption to the ethical butcher who gets undercut by malicious pricing from unscrupulous sellers. But, according to the theory, an invisible hand restores order to the town’s financial ecosystem when consumers react and economic balance is restored.

Over time, free-market devotees transformed Smith’s original theory of “an invisible hand” into “the invisible hand.” They believe ‘the hand’ is a universal, natural force governing markets, meting out economic justice and controlling the fate of humankind.

But ‘the hand’ is not apart from nature

And they may be right. But they may also be surprised to find that ‘the hand’ is connected to the right arm of Mother Nature and she’s using it to punish one of history’s most inefficient and least ‘enlightened’ business models.

By turning up the thermostat, filling the seas, altering climactic patterns and disrupting food chains, nature’s increasingly visible hand is ‘correcting’ the shortsighted, heavily subsidized use of hydrocarbons to power an unsustainable, ecosystem-denuding industrial system.

Back in 1776, Adam Smith bemoaned the problem of unenlightened short-term thinking in investment and the distortions caused by corporate influence in politics. Like the seller of bad meat at an artificially low price, Big Oil has profited mightily from a short-term emphasis on high returns while its disproportionate political influence ensured the global village subsidized everything it’s been selling.

But Mother Nature is not a day trader.

It’s taken a while for all those bad debts and poor investments to fill up the ecological balance sheet with red ink. It started with the systematic extraction and use of coal during the Industrial Revolution. But there was a second ‘acceleration’ when the oil and gas industry quite literally took off after World War II. That hydrocarbon liftoff was charted by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) on its planetary dashboard.

Great Acceleration 2015 from International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme

Since 1950, just about everything is through the roof. This ‘great acceleration’ of both human activity and environmental degradation was fueled by the use and abuse of hydrocarbons – particularly the epic rise of the oil, gas and petrochemical industries in the post-World War II period.

The hydrocarbon economy

Big Oil is not just the drilling, shipping and refining of black gold into gasoline; it’s a complex matrix of transportation infrastructures, global military deployments, crucial currency pegs and malleable energy markets.

Big Oil needs shipping lanes secured and pipelines financed. Their massive corporate investments must be protected from geopolitical threats. That protection comes from pliable politicians running well-funded governments with strong militaries.

But resource-rich nations also have to be succored and assuaged by taxpayer-supported geopolitical maneuvers, while demand for Big Oil’s consumer products are simultaneously sustained by well-greased policy makers back home.

And the oil economy is not just the Brent light sweet crude that sets the benchmark price of oil. The larger category of ‘hydrocarbons‘ includes petroleum, tar sands, shale oil, coal and so-called natural gas. All of these foundational energy sources propel the hydrocarbon economy.

But wait, there’s much, much more.

Oil and natural gas also feed the $3-trillion-plus global petrochemicals industry. Those petrochemicals are ubiquitous in consumer products and, as detailed in this staggering list, end up in “lubricants, additives, adhesives, sealants, agrochemicals, cosmetics, food flavorings and additives, fragrances, toothpaste, cleaning agents, inks, packaging and more.”

Ironically, petrochemicals stoked the post-World War II ‘Green Revolution‘ in agriculture – which combined petrochemical fertilizers with petrochemical pesticides, herbicides and fungicides to significantly increase crop yields. These innovations were coupled with fossil-fueled farm equipment to produce a massive spike in output that catalyzed humankind’s massive spike in population.

That population spike is an important force multiplier driving the skyrocketing use of hydrocarbons over the last 50 years. And modern agriculture produces at least 25% of global carbon dioxide emissions.

The plastics menace

Petrochemicals are also the main source of the world’s plastics. From the skin-scrubbing microbeads poisoning the world’s aquatic food chains to the megatons of discarded consumer goods clogging landfills, the $650 billion global plastic industry is the basis of the cheaply made, easily manufactured and highly globalized consumer product market called ‘the global economy.’

Not coincidentally, demand for oil-generated plastic goods created in hydrocarbon-powered factories also stokes demand for the hydrocarbon-burning shipping infrastructure that moves those soon-to-be discarded products from polluted points of origin to product-hungry ports of call around the world.

Shockingly, a full one-quarter of the 334.83 million tons of plastic made annually ends up as packaging, and the market for shrink-wrapping, water bottles, disposable cups and all-too-common shopping bags is forecast to hit $370.25 billion by 2020.

Yet none of this begins to account for the staggering externalities of plastic – the health-care costs from toxic leeching, the despoiling of ecosystems, the poisoning of food chains and the loss of ecosystem services.

This is not just the polluted little secret of the plastics industry, but of the entire hydrocarbon economy. Its profitability is the result of a shortsighted, unenlightened reliance upon externalizing its true costs and upon a decidedly anti-free-market reliance on direct government interference in markets through a vast array of subsidies and market-rigging government handouts.

Externalities über alles

An externality is, according to Investopedia, a “consequence of an economic activity that is experienced by unrelated third parties.” And externalities can be either positive or negative. It’s easy to identify the positive externalities of the hydrocarbon economy. Oil has powered a higher standard of living for millions of people in the global North.

Petrochemicals have generated such an agricultural bounty that the United States alone discards up to 40% of the food it produces annually without risking famine – yet. And cheap plastic manufacturing allows even many of the poorest members of rich economies unprecedented access to low-cost consumer goods.

On the other hand, the hydrocarbon economy has negatively externalized the impact of its business model by emitting greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated gases – without ever paying for the actual cost of those emissions insofar as they impact the ecosystems upon which their businesses and, increasingly, the lives of their customers depend.

Another example of a negative externality is China’s massive share of global carbon dioxide emissions. According to the Global Carbon Project, China produces roughly 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually. That’s 29% of the world’s annual total and that’s more than the next two biggest emitters – the United States and European Union – combined.

Critics cite China’s disproportionate role in global emissions as the main argument against US efforts to unilaterally curtail its emissions. But China’s responsibility for the carbon dioxide it releases is not as clear as it seems.

Although China’s emissions are twice the US total, a Harvard University study found that 25% of those ‘excessive’ emissions actually result from exports to the United States and other economies. This is externalization on a geopolitical scale. The true costs of carbon dioxide and toxic pollution get externalized by the profit-hoarding power of politically vested corporate interests in the United States, which, in turn, still get to sell their polluting products to US customers.

In other words, externalization is an accounting trick.

Offshoring production, outsourcing carbon

This trick began when the Clinton administration catalyzed the offshoring of consumer manufacturing to China. China, in turn, became the world’s leading exporter of oil-reliant plastic widgets. It also became a coal-burning behemoth. Moreover, the cost of coal has been relentlessly externalized, so it’s a win-win for US corporations.

And it also means China produces ever more carbon dioxide, and American enthusiasts of so-called ‘free trade’ now use a cudgel to beat back ‘economically dangerous’ domestic restrictions on carbon dioxide on the grounds of ‘competitiveness.’ That’s a win-win-win.

At the same time, this highly profitable, but highly polluting production in China is poisoning the air breathed by Chinese workers. Beijing is a swirling cauldron of particulate pollution and one estimate claims that 4,400 people die each day in China’s belching branch of the global hydrocarbon economy.

That pollution is, in fact, an externalized outgrowth of hydrocarbon’s distorted market. Like bad meat and a low price, it is making the local village sick and skewing the market.

Sadly, capital is being misallocated into this deadly, market-distorting enterprise by unenlightened self-interest. But Mother Nature’s invisible hand is beginning to punish the Chinese branch of the economy through pollution-related health costs, lost wages and cascading negative effects on their environment – the land and water – which they desperately need to feed their people.

But Mother Nature is also fair.

She’s also punishing the United States with rising seas around Miami, the rising insurance costs due to ‘climate risk‘ and the growing cost of military preparations for the fallout from climate migrations and climate disruptions.

These corrections are just the tip of the iceberg. Mother Nature’s increasingly visible handiwork is seen globally as petrochemicals poison increasingly scarce sources of arable land and potable water. She accounts for unenlightened palm oil agriculture by writing a major carbon sink off her books. She accounts for factory farming by disrupting oceanic food chains upon which humans depend. Some of those chains also lead back to carbon-capturing plankton.

And all of these bitter returns on bad investments were born out of unsound market practices that couple externalization of the true costs with the market-corrupting influence of government subsidization.

Crony carbonism

“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

The actual origin of the phrase is unclear, but sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein famously codified it in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966) and it quickly became shorthand for the idea that there is eventually a price to pay for everything – whether it’s inphysics or economics or government.

Nobel-winning economist and free-market evangelist Milton Friedman wrote a book titled There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch in 1977 and he was particularly fond of using TANSTAAFL to argue against government spending.

The oddity, though, is that many of the taxpayer-funded lunches served up by Uncle Sam have been handed out to well-connected hydrocarbon capitalists. They reap the rewards of tax policies, trade agreements and government subsidies provided by the politicians they support in various governments.

And the extent of those subsidies is woefully underestimated because many are ‘indirect’ subsidies like a $305 billion highway bill or the $580 million “doubling“ of the US Navy’s base in the oily emirate of Bahrain.

In the case of direct subsidies like direct government investment, tax breaks and public financing, a new report by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and Oil Change International (OCI) determined that the world’s ‘major’ G-20 economies spend a combined $452 billion each year to subsidize the oil, gas and coal industries. The biggest spenders are China ($96.51 billion), Russia ($79.16 billion), Saudi Arabia ($51.895 billion), Brazil ($49.73 billion) and the United States ($20.491 billion).

Additionally, the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) World Energy Outlook 2015 report found the total amount spent globally on subsidies was approximately $490 billion in 2014. But both the ODI/OCI and IEA tabulations pale in comparison to the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) assessment of global energy subsidies, which the IMF projected to reach $5.3 trillion in 2015. That’s a staggering 6.5% of global GDP being poured into subsidies.

Why the difference?

Because the IMF added in all of the costly market corrections that come with the use and abuse of hydrocarbons, including the high cost of global warming, chronic ‘undercharging’ for domestic environmental damage, local air pollution, vehicle externalities like traffic congestion and accidents, and World Health Organization estimates of health costs related to pollution exposure.

And the picture of this grotesquely distorted market is made even clearer by the IMF’s estimate that simply eliminating energy subsidies could:

• reduce deaths related to fossil-fuel emissions by over 50%
• reduce fossil-fuel-related carbon emissions by over 20%
• deliver a $2.9 trillion revenue windfall from the positive externalities created by ending subsides

Whether it’s the IEA’s basic accounting or the IMF’s all-encompassing total, those publicly funded amounts dwarf the total investment allocated for renewable sources of energy. According to the United Nations Environment Program, global investment in renewable energy – including both public and private investment – surged 17% in 2014 to a paltry $270.2 billion.

Despite this overwhelming misallocation of public capital to hydrocarbons, the price per megawatt hour for renewables has dropped precipitously over the last decade. In fact, solar is not just competitive with hydrocarbons in an age of artificially low oil prices, but it is beginning to beat oil economically. And this is despite the US- and Saudi-led oil glut, which has destabilized markets and spread political turmoil around the world.

An enlightened, long-term investment strategy would exploit this cheap oil to radically ramp up production and installation of solar panels and wind turbines. Instead, the persistent instability of hydrocarbon-related ‘hot spots’ sucks capital into indirect subsidies for hydrocarbon-powered military might.

To wit, the United States spends as much on defense as the next seven biggest spenders combined. And Saudi Arabia is spending more than ever to protect its petrostate, in spite of its longstanding “special role“ in the United States’ globe-spanning military protectorate.

Make no mistake – that protectorate follows the hydrocarbons

The United States’ Pacific pivot is about competition for the oil-rich areas around disputed mini-islands in the South China Sea. And like they have done for decades in the Middle East, US policy makers are charged with the expensive task of preserving gatekeeper status over oil-heavy shipping lanes into Asia.

They are also expected to exert geopolitical influence over oil-rich nations like Myanmar, Indonesia and Vietnam. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is part and parcel of that effort.

All of these geopolitical subsidies sit atop a pile of indirect domestic subsidies in the United States, including state- and federally funded infrastructure construction, publicly funded environmental remediation efforts, and stunningly low-cost leases to extract hydrocarbons from public lands.

That is the hydrocarbon economy – a case study in bad economics, socialized risk and costly, government-fueled cronyism that not only misallocates capital, but also endangers the very infrastructure upon which it depends. It’s an economic bubble fueled by irrational decisions and bad, market-altering policies.

Unlike the tech and housing bubbles, the hydrocarbon bubble has thus far avoided the massive, wholesale market correction that comes when the unsustainable force finally hits the immovable object of reality.

That is, until now.

The market correction is coming

In 2008, the great environmental thinker Lester Brown wrote about the inherent blindness of the invisible hand. Brown lamented the “fundamental weaknesses” preventing it from incorporating “the indirect costs of producing goods” into market prices and bemoaned the fact that it doesn’t “value nature’s services properly.”

In the short term, Brown was right. But he underestimated the power of an even larger ‘economy’ at work in the self-correcting system called ‘planet Earth.’

In less than a decade, Mother Nature’s ever more visible hand emerged as a force punishing the ‘market inefficiencies’ and rampant externalization of the hydrocarbon economy. The best indicator of this correction is the mounting loss of ‘ecosystem services.’

These are the common goods upon which human civilization – and, truth be told, all life – depends. Yet, humans simply take them for granted.

• It’s the clean, clear water, life-sustaining oxygen and life-giving soil.
• It’s the carbon-capturing forests and carbon-retaining power of the oceans.
• It’s the 1/32 of the planet that is arable land.

Perhaps most pressing, it’s the crucial permafrost ‘carbon banks’ found in the earth’s heretofore frozen regions. Permafrost matters because its long-frozen layers safely store greenhouse gases that slowly accumulated over the course of thousands of years. New research estimates a potential $43 trillion global economic impact should those “hundreds of billions” of tons of carbon dioxide and “billions of tons” of methane be released into the atmosphere by the rapidly warming Arctic.

As Pacific Standard points out, that bill “isn’t a total cost to be spread out over several decades – it’s how much we’d have to set aside today to pay for the damage done by melting frozen soil, or permafrost, in the Arctic.”

Yet more new research shows that Arctic regions are warming twice as fast as the world average because the solar-reflecting properties of the ice and snow are diminishing with each passing year.

Mother Nature’s punishing handiwork

Also diminishing each year are the unparalleled ‘ecosystem services’ of the oceans, forests and other food webs that sustain earth’s interwoven fabric of life. Based on calculations by scientists at the United Nations University, the world forfeits a “staggering $6.3 trillion to $10.6 trillion” each year just from land degradation. That’s roughly “10-17% of global GDP.”

What are the services lost? Properly cared for land provides “food, poverty reduction, clean water, climate and disease regulation and nutrients cycling.”

Hydrocarbon-obsessed humans have long ignored these opportunity costs, but Mother Nature factors it all into her bottom line. And we are running a massive budget deficit. That’s why tabulating ‘environmental services’ is crucial to understanding the environmental deficit at the core of the hydrocarbon economy – and it’s crucial if human beings want to avoid the ultimate bankruptcy of extinction.

The most complete accounting thus far is the Earth Index compiled by BBC Earth. These stark juxtapositions represent just a small portion of wealth humans are squandering:

The value of coral reefs alone dwarfs the aggregate value of the world’s cinema ($36.4 billion) and the globe-spanning brand of Walt Disney ($48.81 billion), which also pales in basic economic comparison to both wild sea fish ($274 billion) and plankton ($222 billion). Plankton’s value is based in part on its role in capturing carbon. That is a service not provided by Disney.

But Mother Nature is tabulating the cost with each passing year as the impact of climate change compounds like bad interest. More greenhouse gases equal more warming, equals more carbon released from permafrost, equals less carbon captured by soils, plus oceans equals more warming. On it goes until nature, like theoretically free markets, eventually enforces equilibrium.

This mother of all market corrections is coming – and it will settle accounts through civilization-halting floods and famines, through population-endangering climate migrations or even through the simple loss of breathable air. This is not just irony. This is Mother Nature’s invisible hand correcting humankind’s foolish, short-term investment in the distorted hydrocarbon economy.

Of course, Lester Brown was right: The cost of greenhouse gases should not have been externalized. But the fact is that externalization is not elimination. There is no free lunch. The costs didn’t disappear. At first, they weren’t well understood. Then, they were ignored. Finally, they were systematically obfuscated by the people profiting most from the crony carbonism that drives and distorts the global economy.

But really, we’ve all been playing a dangerous game of poker with the planet. We’ve been calling Mother Nature’s bluff since the ‘great acceleration’ took off after World War II.

Now she is showing her hand.

JP Sottile is a freelance journalist, published historian, radio co-host and documentary filmmaker (The Warning, 2008). His credits include a stint on the Newshour news desk, C-SPAN, and as newsmagazine producer for ABC affiliate WJLA in Washington. His weekly show, Inside the Headlines w/ The Newsvandal, co-hosted by James Moore, airs every Friday on KRUU-FM in Fairfield, Iowa. He blogs under the pseudonym ‘the Newsvandal’.

This article was originally published by Truthout under Copyright and is reproduced here by kind permission of the author. It may not be reprinted without permission.

The US Dept. of Agriculture (USDA) has long maintained that genetically engineered (GE) crops can co-exist with traditional and organic agriculture.

According to this ‘co-existence’ narrative, if neighboring GE and traditional farmers just sort things out among themselves and follow ‘best management practices’, transgenes will be confined to GE crops and the fields where they are planted.

The latest evidence refuting USDA’s co-existence fairytale comes from a recently published study by a team of USDA scientists. The study involved Monsanto’s Roundup Ready alfalfa, which, like most GE crops in the US is engineered to survive direct spraying with Roundup, Monsanto’s flagship herbicide.

In 2011 and 2012, USDA scientist Stephanie Greene and her team scouted the roadsides of three important alfalfa-growing areas – in California, Idaho and Washington – for feral (wild) alfalfa stands. Because alfalfa is a hardy perennial plant, it readily forms self-sustaining feral populations that persist for years wherever the crop is grown.

Greene and colleagues found 404 feral alfalfa populations on roadsides. Testing revealed that over one-quarter (27%) of them contained transgenic alfalfa – that is, plants that tested positive for the Roundup Ready gene. They believe that most of these feral populations likely grew from seeds spilled during alfalfa production or transport.

Transgenes spread by bees could contaminate crops

However, the researchers also found clear evidence that the Roundup Ready gene was being spread by bees, which are known to cross-pollinate alfalfa populations separated by up to several miles. Their results suggested that “transgenic plants could spread transgenes to neighboring feral plants, and potentially to neighboring non-GE fields.”

While they did not test this latter possibility, there is no doubt that non-GE alfalfa has in fact been transgenically contaminated – not just once, but on many occasions.