Peak Oil & Ecological Overshoot raised in SA Constitutional Court Media Corruption case

Constitutional Court, Johannesburg (21-Jan-2011): On 19 January 2011 the Concourt Registrar Mr. Delano Louw issued the Concourt Reference Number CCT 06-11, in the matter of Radical Honesty SA and others vs. SA National Editors Foundation (SANEF) and others.

The Concourt had been submitted with Proof of Service documentation proving that Radical Honesty SA had provided all the respondents with their Notice of Motion and Founding Affidavit documentation.

The Applicants in the matter are Lara Johnstone and Radical Honesty SA, who filed an Application with the Constitutional Court for direct access, as a Pauperis Propria Persona / Litigant in Person; for a [I] writ of Habeus Mentem and [II] writ of Certiorari/Review.

The Application was filed against 88 respondents: (a) three administrators of the SA Press Council; (v) SANEF and its chairman: Mr. Makhanya, (c) 36 SANEF and related media publications and their respective editors, managerial officials; (d) eight Media Professors from Univ. of Rhodes and Wits Journalism faculty departments; (e) Media Monitoring Africa: Mr. William Bird; and finally (f) Projourn Steering Committee.

Among others the Constitutional Court is being asked to review the South African media’s repudiation of scientific journalism; namely its censorship of root cause problem solving regarding overpopulation colliding with scarce and depleting resources.

Radical Honesty SA Population Policy Common Sense TRC Fraud Amicus Curiae

The complainants were originally approved to file an Amicus Curiae in the Constitutional matter of The Citizen v. Robert McBride (CCT 23-10), where they argued in support of a Population Policy Common Sense Interpretation of the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation (TRC) Act. Essentially Radical Honesty SA argued that the Truth and Reconcilation Commission had committed fraud, because of its failure to address the population growth factors which contributed both to the establishment of Apartheid (whites fear of the ‘swart gevaar’/black peril), as well as to much of its racial resource war violence (a consequence of the ANC’s ‘breeding war’ policies, resulting in huge demographic youth bulges).

Radical Honesty SA’s TRC Fraud arguments were founded on what it refers to as its Population Policy Common Sense Ecolaw principle: “any legislation or jurisprudence such as the TRC Social Contract, which professes to advocate on behalf of human rights, peace and social justice, while ignoring their ecological basis – a stable human population at slightly less than the eco-systems carrying capacity – is endorsing and practicing legal dishonesty and hypocrisy; i.e. fraud. It is legislation and jurisprudence deliberately indifferent to the laws of sustainability, advocating misery.”

The Radical Honesty SA Amicus was supported by the expert witness statements of (i) Dr. T. Michael Maher, author of the study: How and Why Journalists Avoid Population – Environment connection; and (ii) Dr. Brad Blanton, founder of the Radical Honesty movement, former candidate for Congress in Virginia in 2004 and 2006 and author of the Radical Honesty series of books.

The South African media totally censored the argument in the Radical Honesty SA Amicus Curiae, in all its news reports, about the Citizen/McBride case before the Constitutional Court. Radical Honesty SA filed complaints to the Press Council Ombudsman against all the publications, all the way up to the Press Appeals Panel; all of whom endorsed the media’s censorship of the Radical Honesty SA Amicus, and its arguments from the South African people’s right to know.

Radical Honesty SA vs. SA National Editors Forum (SANEF)

Radical Honesty SA then filed an application for direct access to the Constitutional Court to review the rulings of the Press Council’s decisions, which endorsed the media’s censorship of the Amicus and its Population Policy Common Sense arguments.

Radical Honesty SA allege the media’s Cover-up and Censorship of Ecological Overshoot is and will Encourage Instability & Anarchy.

If the State of the System is ‘Brink of Ecological Overshoot into Anarchy and Collapse’; and the media’s ‘act’ is (a) censorship of root cause problem solving, while (b) encouraging the factors (population growth, resource consumption) towards Anarchy and Collapse; then the conclusion is that the Media’s Actions are deliberate and intentional on behalf of Anarchy and Instability.

Where is Society in the Act of Understanding Exponential Population Growth colliding with Exponentially Declining Resources? What is the role of the Media in Society’s Ignorance? What is the role of the media in deliberately keeping Society Ignorant, by means of Environment Population Connection censorship? Where is Ecological Societal System, in terms of Exponential Population Growth colliding with Exponentially Declining Resources? Is the Media Aggravating Instability by encouraging Population Growth and Increased Resource Consumption? Is the Media Encouraging Stability in favour of Population Stabilisation & Reduced Resource Exploitation?

Excerpts from Radical Honesty’s ’Ecological Footprint of Corrupt Corporate Personhood’ Argument:

Understanding Exponential Growth: Confronting the consequences of the Media’s Censorship: Society’s Denial or Ignorance of its Ecological Overshoot problems: State of the System:

As detailed in Is Humanity Suicidal? By Edward O. Wilson, in New York Times Magazine, on May 30 1993, “Earth is finite in many resources that determine the quality of life – including arable soil, nutrients, fresh water and space for natural ecosystems. Doubling of consumption at constant time intervals can bring disaster with shocking suddenness. Even when a non-renewable resource has been only half used, it is still only one interval away from the end. Ecologists like to make this point with the French riddle of the lily pond. At first there is only one lily pad in the pond, but the next day there are two, and thereafter each of its descendants doubles. The pond completely fills with lily pads in 30 days. When is the pond exactly half full? Answer: on the 29th day.”

In Revisiting The Limits to Growth: Could The Club of Rome Have Been Correct, After All?, by Matthew R. Simmons: “In the book’s chapter defining the deceptive powers of exponential growth and the apparent suddenness with which it approaches a fixed limit, the authors describe the French Riddle of the Lily Pond. In this riddle, the lily pond has a potentially virulent lily that apparently will double in size each day. If the lily grows unchecked it will cover the entire pond in 30 days, choking off all other forms of life in the water by the time it covers the entire pond. If a skeptic waited until 50% of the pond was covered before taking any remedial action to save the pond, when would he act? The answer: on the 29th day of the month! But by then, would be too late. The world can debate when corrective action needs to begin, if exponential growth suddenly shows all the classic signs of pending overshoot. But everyone should agree that waiting until the proverbial 29th day is a classic and unrepentable blunder of the first order.”

World Population Balance: Understanding Exponential Growth: “When most people talk about “growth” in our country, they consider it a completely positive and necessary thing, essential for maintaining the vitality and health of our economy and society. Our society’s most revered economic indicators are all based on this fundamental idea: that continuing growth is vital for the health and preservation of our economy and country. In fact, growth is pretty much the only thing they measure! However, natural scientists (such as biologists, chemists, and physicists) know that this assumption must be false. In order for growth to continue forever, we would need an infinite amount of space, energy, and other resources to keep the growth going… and those resources are not infinite. So what happens to steady growth in a limited space? To help explain, we’re going to use a simple example of bacteria growing in a bottle.” It asks the questions: “If you were one of the bacteria, when do you suppose you’d start to worry about overcrowding? Would that leave you enough time to do anything about it?”

Ecological Overshoot and the Importance of Waking Up to the Reality of Understanding Exponential Growth are dealt with in detail in Dr. Al Bartlett’s celebrated one-hour Lecture: Arithmetic, Population and Energy: Sustainability 101 and Dr. Chris Martinson’s Crash Course: Chapter 3 focuses on Exponential Growth.

What shall be the Consequences of the Media’s Cenrsorship and Societies inability to Confront and Plan for Mitigating Ecological Overshoot?: Anarchy and Resource Wars:

Military Predictors: According to Major Ralph Peters, The Culture of Future Conflict, US Army War College, Parameters, Winter 1995-96, pp. 18-27.

“Resource scarcity will be a direct cause of confrontation, conflict, and war. The struggle to maintain access to critical resources will spark local and regional conflicts that will evolve into the most frequent conventional wars of the next century. Today, the notion of resource wars leads the Westerner to think immediately of oil, but water will be the fundamental need of some states, anti-states, and peoples. We envision a need to preserve rainforests, but expanding populations will increasingly create regional shortages of food–especially when nature turns fickle. We are entering the century of “not enough,” and we will bleed for things we previously could buy. [.. ] Gross overpopulation will destroy fragile possibilities for progress in much of the non-Western world, and much of this problem is the West’s fault. Our well intentioned introduction of relatively crude concepts of sanitation and disease control, combined with our determination to respond generously to local famines, has allowed populations to explode. [..] Basic resources will prove inadequate for populations exploding beyond natural limits, and we may discover truths about ourselves that we do not wish to know. In the end, the greatest challenge may be to our moral order.” 

According to the Central Intelligence Agency and Pentagon Officials in Nightline, 2000 documentary with Ted Koppel; politicians refusal to confront reality, and the lack of political will, to act on exponential population growth colliding with declining resources, are the root causes of current resource wars over oil; which shall soon be manifested as resource wars over water, soil, arable land, etc.

Nightline (2000): CIA & Pentagon: Overpopulation 1/2

Nightline (2000): CIA & Pentagon: Resource Wars 2/2

As detailed in  Matt Savinar’s: Life After the Oil Crash:

Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon. This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse bible prophecy sect, or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is the scientific conclusion of the best paid, most widely-respected geologists, physicists, bankers, and investors in the world. These are rational, professional, conservative individuals who are absolutely terrified by a phenomenon known as global “Peak Oil.”

Oil will not just “run out” because all oil production follows a bell curve. This is true whether we’re talking about an individual field, a country, or on the planet as a whole. 

Oil is increasingly plentiful on the upslope of the bell curve, increasingly scarce and expensive on the down slope. The peak of the curve coincides with the point at which the endowment of oil has been 50 percent depleted. Once the peak is passed, oil production begins to go down while cost begins to go up.

In practical and considerably oversimplified terms, this means that if 2005 was the year of global Peak Oil, worldwide oil production in the year 2030 will be the same as it was in 1980. However, the world’s population in 2030 will be both much larger (approximately twice) and much more industrialized (oil-dependent) than it was in 1980. Consequently, worldwide demand for oil will outpace worldwide production of oil by a significant margin. As a result, the price will skyrocket, oil dependant economies will crumble, and resource wars will explode.

The socio-political and economic consequences of Peak Oil will be severe, as detailed in [German] Military Study Warns of Potentially Drastic Oil Crisis, by Stefan Schultz, Der Spiegel, 01 September 2010:

A study by a German military think tank has analyzed how “peak oil” might change the global economy. The internal draft document — leaked on the Internet — shows for the first time how carefully the German government has considered a potential energy crisis.

The term “peak oil” is used by energy experts to refer to a point in time when global oil reserves pass their zenith and production gradually begins to decline. This would result in a permanent supply crisis — and fear of it can trigger turbulence in commodity markets and on stock exchanges.

The issue is so politically explosive that it’s remarkable when an institution like the Bundeswehr, the German military, uses the term “peak oil” at all. But a military study currently circulating on the German blogosphere goes even further.

The study is a product of the Future Analysis department of the Bundeswehr Transformation Center, a think tank tasked with fixing a direction for the German military. The team of authors, led by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Will, uses sometimes-dramatic language to depict the consequences of an irreversible depletion of raw materials. It warns of shifts in the global balance of power, of the formation of new relationships based on interdependency, of a decline in importance of the western industrial nations, of the “total collapse of the markets” and of serious political and economic crises.

Media Conspiracy to Manipulate the Habits & Opinions of in favour of Consumerist Society, for Profit:

In How and Why Journalists Avoid Population-Environment Connection, Dr. T. Michael Maher writes:

As we have seen, both land development economists and environmental experts acknowledge population growth as a key source of environmental change. But journalists frame environmental causality differently.

Why? Communication theory offers several possibilities. First is the hegemony-theory interpretation: reports omit any implication that population growth might produce negative effects, in order to purvey the ideology of elites who make money from population growth. As Molotch and Lester (1974) put it, media content can be viewed as reflecting “the practices of those having the power to determine the experience of others” (p. 120). Since real estate, construction and banking interests directly support the media through advertising purchases, this interpretation seems plausible. A number of media critics (e.g., Gandy, 1982; Altschull, 1984; Bennett, 1988) have suggested that media messages reflect the values of powerful political and commercial interests. Burd (1972), Kaniss (1991) and others have pointed out that newspapers have traditionally promoted population growth in their cities through civic boosterism. Molotch (1976) even suggested that cities can best be understood as entities competing for population growth, with the city newspaper as chief cheerleader.

Certainly most reporters would be incensed at the suggestion that they shade their reporting to placate commercial interests. But Breed’s classic study of social control in the newsroom (1955) showed that news managers’ values are transmissible to journalists through a variety of pressures: salaries, story assignments, layout treatment, editing, and a variety of other strategies that effectively shape news stories in ways acceptable to management.

In Nicholas Partridge’s documentary ANC: VIP’s of Violence: Rev. John Gogotya describes the media’s role in glorifying political violence:

“The moderate blacks were not selling the papers. We were presenting a non-violent strategy, that did not say ‘Burn, baby Burn’. A strategy that said people must come together and sit down around a negotiating table. And this is not sensational stuff; it does not sell the papers.” – Rev. John Gogotya, ANC: VIP’s of Violence

The Radical Honesty SA Amicus before the Constitutional Court, in The Citizen v. McBride – totally censored by all the SA media — makes this point very clearly in paragraph 7:

Equity will not allow a statute to be used as a cloak for fraud: Mainstream Access-to-Discourse-Gatekeeper Editors censorship of nonviolent political grievances and problem solving activism facilitate a pressure cooker socio-political reality for their ‘If it Bleads, it Leads’ corporate propaganda profits, in knowledge application of:

‘As long as there is some possibility of getting results by political means, the chances that any political group or individual will turn violent are truly radically small, or maybe vanishingly small’

‘The exposure in the media is what gets people’s attention. People follow what is happening in the news, not what is happening in the courts’; 

‘[Editors] abuse of media power, by means of strategies whereby they abuse public discourse/free speech resources; by providing certain parties with preferential and special access to such public discourse, and severely restricting or denying others any access to such public discourse;

Mainstream media avoid addressing or enquiring into root causes of problems as reported in How and Why Journalists Avoid Population – Environment connection; and censor non-violent root-cause problem solving activism.

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