Ian Angus > Quotes

“The great majority of “consumption” (throughput) does not involve individual product users at all. For example, the average rate at which people produce waste, mentioned above by [Jared] Diamond, is calculated by dividing the total population into the total waste. But since 99 percent of all solid waste in the United States today comes from industrial processes, eliminating all household waste would have little effect on per capita waste. Diamond’s “average rate” is meaningless.”
― Ian Angus, Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis

“The assumption that economic expansion is driven by consumer demand—more consumers equals more growth—is a fundamental part of the economic theories that underlie the model. In other words, their conclusions are predetermined by their assumptions.

What the model actually tries to do is to use neoclassical economic theory to predict how much economic growth will result from various levels of population growth, and then to estimate the emissions growth that would result. Unfortunately, as Yves Smith says about financial economics, any computer model based on mainstream economic theory “rests on a seemingly rigorous foundation and elaborate math, much like astrology.”

In short, if your computer model assumes that population growth causes emissions growth, then it will tell you that fewer people will produce fewer emissions. Malthus in, Malthus out.”
― Ian Angus, Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis

“But the real danger is that liberal environmentalists and feminists will strengthen the right by lending credibility to reactionary arguments. Adopting the argument that population growth causes global warming endorses the strongest argument the right has against the social and economic changes that are really needed to stop climate change and environmental destruction.”
― Ian Angus, Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis

“Far from being just part of the problem, the people of the South are leading the global fight against ecological destruction. They are our allies, not our enemies, and if we are serious about working with them, then no part of our work should involve efforts to turn immigrants from their countries away at our borders.

Support for immigration controls strengthens the most regressive forces in our societies and weakens our ability to deal with the real causes of environmental problems. It gives conservative governments and politicians an easy way out, allowing them to pose as friends of the environment by restricting immigration, while continuing with business as usual. It hands a weapon to reactionaries, allowing them to portray environmentalists as hostile to the legitimate aspirations of the poorest and most oppressed people in the world.”
― Ian Angus, Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis

“On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire…. This antagonism between modern industry and science on the one hand, modern misery and dissolution on the other hand; this antagonism between the productive powers and the social relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted.”
― Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

“Our view of history . . . is first and foremost a guide to study, not a tool for constructing objects after the Hegelian model. The whole of history must be studied anew, and the existential conditions of the various social formations individually investigated before an attempt is made to deduce therefrom the political, legal, aesthetic, philosophical, religious, etc., standpoints that correspond to them.2”
― Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

“Today few can doubt that the system has crossed critical thresholds of ecological sustainability, raising questions about the vulnerability of the entire planet.”
― Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

“We know that something went wrong in the country after World War II, for most of our serious pollution problems either began in the postwar years or have greatly worsened since then. —BARRY COMMONER”
― Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

“A particularly frightening observation: even if emission levels are reduced, by 2070 Earth will be the hottest it has been in 125,000 years, which means it will be “hotter than it has been for most, if not all, of the time since modern humans emerged as a species 200,000 years ago.”
― Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

“Stage 1: The Industrial Era, from the early 1800s to 1945, when atmospheric CO2 exceeded the upper limit of Holocene variation; and Stage 2: The Great Acceleration, from 1945 to the present, “when the most rapid and pervasive shift in the human-environment relationship began.” (They also—over-optimistically, I’d say—predicted that a third stage, “Stewards of the Earth,” would begin in 2015.)”
― Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

“Without identifying the overall destination of the journey, together with the strategic direction and the necessary compass adopted for reaching it, there can be no hope of success.”8”
― Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

“Hansen et al. have made the case that we are no longer waiting for evidence of global warming. It is clearly here now, affecting a wide variety of weather and climate events, and it will continue to grow as we burn more fossil fuels…. Even the apparently normal distribution of temperature can display non-normal behavior, and this can lead to extremes of even greater magnitude than might otherwise be expected.8”
― Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

“Where capital goes, emissions will immediately follow…. The stronger global capital has become the more rampant the growth of CO2 emissions.”
― Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

“and there’s even a heavy metal album called The Anthropocene Extinction.”
― Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

“Engels suggested that “real human freedom” can be achieved only in a society that exists “in harmony with the laws of nature.”
― Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

“The tens of millions of dead in the two World Wars brought about tens of trillions of profitable investments in the huge reconstructions of destroyed homes and industries and ongoing rearmament: a million dollars or more per dead body. —DARKO SUVIN1”
― Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

“The fact that the countries with the highest birth rates generally have the lowest standard of living and produce the least pollution fatally undermines such claims - if the poorest 3 billion people on the planet somehow disappeared tomorrow, there would be virtually no reduction in ongoing environmental destruction.”
― Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

“Another basic contradiction of the capitalist system of control is that it cannot separate “advance” from destruction, nor “progress”
― Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

“We are coming to a fork in the road in human history, where the system of global capitalism is forcing an end to the Holocene Epoch of the last 12,000 years, the geological period within which human civilisation has developed, where we have to decide between ‘capitalism or the planet’. —DEL WESTON1”
― Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System