3176. Do Red and Green Mix?

By Herman Daly, Great Transition Initiative, December 2018

Herman Daly

Those of us old enough to remember the Cold War know that it was basically a contest between Socialism and Capitalism to see who could grow faster, and thereby accumulate more wealth and military power. The audience was the uncommitted countries of the world who would supposedly adopt the economic system of the winner of the growth race. What happened? Basically, Socialism collapsed, and Capitalism won by default. The losers (Russia, China, Eastern Europe) got back in the growth race by adopting State Capitalism, and China has become the growth champion. The present system of world growthism, in the broadly capitalist mode, is triumphant. But growthism itself has turned out to be a false god because growth in our finite and entropic world now increases ecological and social costs faster than production benefits, making us poorer, not richer (except for the top few percent). Recognition of this reversal is obscured by the fact that our national accounts (GDP) do not subtract the costs of growth, but effectively add them by counting the expenditures incurred to defend ourselves from the unsubtracted costs of growth. Even more egregiously, GDP counts the consumption of natural capital as income. Growthism is consuming the life support capacity of the ecosystem for the benefit of a small minority of the present generation, while shifting the real but uncounted costs on to the poor, future generations, and other species.1

Ecosocialists, ably represented by the distinguished scholar Michael Löwy, seem to recognize this disaster, so environmentalists and ecological economists are inclined to be glad of their help in opposing rampant growthist capitalism. We certainly need help. But how much help in developing a workable green economy are red ecosocialists likely to be? Maybe not much, for reasons suggested below.

Marx himself was overwhelmingly a perceptive critic of capitalism, and hardly at all an architect of socialism, which remained for him a vague prophetic vision. Marxist socialist states have an impressive historical record of economic failure, political oppression, and abuse of human rights and religious freedom. The net flow of refugees was decidedly away from, not toward, socialist countries. How does Löwy deal with this well-documented and very negative historical experience? First by frankly recognizing it, and then by asking us to simply ignore the “actually existing socialisms of the twentieth century” and focus on Marxist theory instead. This reminds me of the growth economists who ask us to focus on the elegance of neoclassical optimization theory and downplay the massive external costs and monopoly concentration of wealth and power of actual corporate capitalism. Theory is always neater than reality—for both capitalism and socialism. While Scandinavian socialism is an example from which we can benefit, Marxist socialist economies no longer exist (except for North Korea). Our given starting point for reform is rampant growthist capitalism. If socialism had won the disastrous growth race, then we would be starting our reforms from socialist initial conditions, and Marxist theory would have been more relevant. But that did not happen, however much Marxists may regret the fact.

If one believes that Marxist theory is nevertheless true, then it would be worth starting over on that basis. But it contains basic errors that would likely lead to a repeated failure. Marxists have been very slow to recognize the reality of limits to growth, in spite of Marx's now oft-quoted prescient paragraph about “metabolic rift”—a paragraph certainly worth building on. Furthermore, there are some basic reasons for Marxists' unwillingness to identify growth as the core problem. Marx dismissed any appeal to morality or sharing as “utopian socialism.” The "new socialist man" would emerge from his bourgeois greed only on the basis of overwhelming material abundance, emerging under historically determined scientific socialism, “guided” by the dictatorship of the proletariat. Overwhelming abundance requires growth to the point that scarcity is objectively overcome, and therefore the moral demands for sharing scarce goods, emphasized by the “utopian” socialists, become unnecessary in “scientific” socialism.

Löwy has a section on growth, in which he opines that “[t]he issue is not excessive consumption in the abstract, but the prevalent type of consumption” dominated by fashion and advertising. I agree with his criticism of advertising, but the basic problem is the actual, not abstract, level of per capita resource consumption, mainly of the wealthy, not just the frivolous things they consume. And of course the number of consumers. There is no discussion of limiting resource consumption, much less limiting population growth—the latter a topic which Marxists, as well as the capitalist cheap-labor lobby, go far out of their way to avoid. With the exception of post-Maoist China, Marxist regimes have generally thought that more people are better than fewer, a view that environmentalists would actually agree with, as long as the people are not all alive at the same time! Marx’s hatred for Malthus and his dismissal of overpopulation are well known, and continue to mute Marxist attention to limits to growth.

Löwy, and Marxists in general, take a very dim view of markets and a very rosy view of central planning. There is plenty of need for both markets and planning, depending on the type of good in question. Goods are either physically rival or non-rival, and either legally excludable or non-excludable. My shirt is a rival good—if I am wearing it, you can’t wear it at the same time. It is also excludable because I have the right to keep you from wearing it, or to allow you to. Goods that are both rival and excludable are market goods that can be, and usually are, allocated by markets. Goods that are non-rival and non-excludable are pure public goods, like a just legal and ethical code or the Pythagorean Theorem, for which there can be no market. Goods that are rival but non-excludable, like fish caught on the high seas or water pumped from an aquifer, are subject to the tragedy of the open-access commons and require collective action to avoid overexploitation. Goods that are non-rival but excludable, like patented knowledge or information, are inefficiently allocated, and the revenue from their artificial price is unjustly distributed by markets. For the last three categories, markets work poorly or not at all, and consequently, collective planning is necessary. That should provide plenty of opportunity for ecosocialists’ contributions! For market goods, a large category including the basics of food, clothing, and shelter, market allocation usually works better than planning, if governments can limit or regulate monopoly. Since three of the four categories require government planning, it is doubly important to avoid overloading government capacity for needed collective planning by unnecessarily imposing it on the large first category as well.

However, Löwy, and Marxists generally, have an ideological antipathy to markets—to supply and demand, and prices, and especially to profit. They prefer central planning, or as Löwy calls it robust “democratic ecological planning.” If Löwy means economic planning in the light of ecological limits, then we would need much more discussion of limits. The historical failure of War Communism with its direct physical requisitioning of goods was corrected by Lenin's New Economic Policy, which reinstated considerable reliance on markets. That socialist lesson seems to be ignored. Likewise ignored are the theoretical criticisms of even socialist economists, such as those of Oskar Lange, who in his On the Economic Theory of Socialism demonstrates how markets can efficiently serve socialism as well as capitalism. Löwy dismisses criticism of central planning as “conservative fearmongering.” Instead, he tells us that “the core of ecosocialism is the concept of democratic ecological planning, wherein the population itself, not ‘the market’ or a Politburo, make the main decisions about the economy.”

Imagine the consequences of market goods (food, clothing, and shelter, plus a whole lot more) being “freely distributed, according to the will of the citizens.” The democratic will of the citizens is to be expressed by voting. How much steel shall we produce? Citizens vote. How much of that steel will go to the production of, say, wood screws, for example? The citizens vote again. Of the wood screws how many will be round head, how many flat head countersunk, slot head, or Phillips head? How many cadmium-plated; how many chrome-plated? And some screws are made of brass or aluminum, not steel. And how many of each length and diameter, etc.? And who shall receive how many of each type? The citizens robustly and democratically vote again and again as conditions change, although most have no idea of the myriad special uses of different types of screw, and may not even know which end of a screwdriver to hold.

Meanwhile those people who actually use screws and know their uses are not able to “vote” with their money in markets and thereby convey reliable information to producers about what mix of the nearly infinitely many types of screw is most needed, and would be most profitable to produce. Instead we have all citizens spending absurd amounts of their time “democratically” voting, mostly about things they don’t understand, while those with the most information about actual use-values of screws are “disenfranchised” by the absence of markets. Yet Löwy claims that in a planned ecosocialist economy, “use-value would be the only criteria for the production of goods and services.” Use-value as judged mostly by non-users—what could possibly go wrong?

With so much effort wasted on attempting to plan the allocation of market goods, there will be little capacity left to plan the use of true public goods, to avoid the tragedy of the commons and the larcenous market enclosure of non-rival goods. Of course, the humble wood screw is only one of millions of market goods that would be grossly misallocated by “democratic ecological planning.” If one thinks my example of the wood screw is too trivial, then ask the same questions about a more complex commodity of your choice. Löwy expects that “as the ecosocialist transition moves forward, more products and services critical for meeting fundamental human needs would be freely distributed, according to the will of the citizens.” Overwhelming material abundance and the “new socialist man” will apparently have arrived, along with the abolition of scarcity. But with little discussion of growth or its costs.

Without markets (supply and demand, prices, and yes, profit), there could be no self-employment. Everyone would be a salaried employee of the state, giving the state monopsony power in the labor market. No one could identify a needed good or service and make a living by providing it. Happily, Löwy at least would allow small shops and artisan enterprises to escape the planner.

Ecosocialism aspires to be egalitarian and ecologically sustainable. But nothing is said in this essay about proper limits to the range of inequality in the distribution of income and wealth. Should the richest citizen be four times as wealthy as the poorest, as Plato thought? Ten times? A thousand times? And what do ecosocialists think about macro limits to growth of resource throughput? Many of the ecosocialists’ objections to market allocation would disappear if the underlying degree of inequality of wealth and income distribution were more formally and tightly limited, and if the aggregate scale of throughput of energy and materials were restricted to some level of ecological sustainability. Instead of correcting excessive throughput scale, and excessive distributional inequality, which of course are reflected in market prices and allocation, ecosocialists just attack market allocation itself, as if underlying scale and distribution problems could be solved by breaking the mirror that reflects them. What are ecosocialists’ policies for directly limiting throughput scale and distributional inequality? Voting is indeed required at this point, but there must be some policy to vote on. And in the three categories where planning has long been recognized as necessary, what policies are recommended for providing and financing public goods, for avoiding overexploitation of the commons, and for protecting non-rival goods from illicit privatization?

3175. A Highway Megaproject Tears at the Heart of New Guinea’s Rainforest

By William Laurance, YaleEnviroment360, January 19, 2019

The Indonesian military clears trees for a segment of the Trans-Papua Highway in northern Papua. Photo: Daniel Beltra/Greenpeace.

The Pacific island of New Guinea, which harbors one of the world’s largest and most intact tropical rainforests, is the epicenter of Australasia’s tropical biodiversity. The island’s unique denizens, including tree-kangaroos and birds of paradise, are representative of regional flora and fauna so fantastically diverse that Charles Darwin once mused such creatures must have been made by a “separate Creator.” Today, researchers are still merely sampling its primeval intricacies.

New Guinea is also among the most culturally and linguistically diverse places on earth, with human populations that are genetically distinct from all others alive today. Not until the 1930s did the Western world discover many hundreds of unique indigenous societies in New Guinea’s vast mountains and highlands. And only in the 1950s did European colonists, miners, and loggers begin to exploit the region.

Today, these unique rainforests are being carved up by a massive, ill-advised, and exceptionally risky road-building scheme. The Trans-Papua Highway will sprawl like a massive spiderweb over much of the Indonesian-ruled, western half of New Guinea, known as Papua or West Papua. Totalling 2,700 miles in length, this highway network will penetrate deeply into densely forested or remote mountainous regions to increase access to minerals, fossil fuels, timber, and land for agri-business ventures, including vast palm oil plantations. Many road segments will traverse precariously steep, virgin terrain. Recent analyses conducted by my research team suggest major new hotspots of deforestation will be created by the roads, along with sharp increases in forest fragmentation, biodiversity loss, and greenhouse-gas emissions.

Work on the Trans-Papua Highway has proceeded in fits and starts since 2013. Nearly nine-tenths of the total road route has been bulldozed, but the project is far from complete, with much road paving, earthworks, and hundreds of bridges — totaling more than 4 miles in length — yet to be constructed. The most difficult terrain has yet to be traversed, leaving the road network fragmented and discontinuous. The government says the Trans-Papua Highway will bring jobs, badly needed infrastructure, and improved living standards to the people of the region. But many indigenous Papuans fear that the highway will primarily benefit agribusiness and mining interests, as well as large numbers of settlers from other parts of Indonesia. Work on the highway is currently suspended because of a deadly attack on road workers last month.

In political terms, New Guinea is deeply schizophrenic. Its eastern half comprises the nation of Papua New Guinea — a loosely governed state where indigenous groups have well-established legal rights to their traditional lands. Indonesian-ruled Papua is another story. Since assuming control in the 1960s, Indonesia’s Jakarta-based government has pursued two goals: exploiting Papua’s resources while consolidating top-down control. Both objectives have been advanced by vast logging, mining, oil palm, and agri-industrial projects that have flattened tens of millions of acres of forest — often while running roughshod over the land claims of its indigenous peoples.

But as bad as Indonesia’s exploitation of Papua’s priceless forests has been to date, the Trans-Papua Highway is bringing a whole new level of destruction, essentially tearing the heart out of a damaged but not yet decimated tropical paradise. Among the worst impacts of the Trans-Papua Highway will be three major new deforestation hotspots. One of these, in central Papua, will abut the world-famous Lorentz National Park, a World Heritage Site, bringing forest disruption right into the park. Lorentz is a global jewel, recently ranked 13th out of more than 173,000 protected areas worldwide in terms of its biological uniqueness and irreplaceability.

Lorentz is so highly valued because of its rare Australasian biodiversity, its size (at over 900,000 square miles it is the largest protected area in Southeast Asia), and its massive elevational and geological variety; the park stretches from the southern coast and lowland rainforests to the snow-capped peaks of Papau’s central mountain range. As a result, Lorentz should be relatively resilient to climate change because species could migrate along its varied elevations and find local refuges during droughts or other extreme events. The park’s biodiversity is renowned, harboring 80 percent of Papua’s native mammals, two designated endemic bird areas, 34 distinct vegetation types, and many relict species of great evolutionary significance dating to the time more than 180 million years ago when all the Southern Hemisphere’s landmasses were joined in the supercontinent, Gondwana.

As part of the Trans-Papua Highway, roughly 120 miles of new roads will cut across Lorentz, greatly increasing human access to 124,000 acres of designated mining concessions inside the park. In environmental terms, this is a giant red flag: Indonesia has a long history of downgrading or downsizing its protected areas to allow access to minerals, timber, or other resources. Increased roads inside Lorentz will surely intensify pressures to exploit the park and its adjoining forests.

As is always the case, the construction of an extensive road system spells the beginning of the end of these wild areas as roads open the way for illegal deforestation, poaching, wildfires, and land investors bent on encouraging a building boom. Unfortunately, the Trans-Papua Highway is just one small part of a global tsunami of infrastructure expansion. By 2050, the earth could accumulate another 15 mil­lion miles of paved roads, according to the International Energy Agency — enough to circle the planet more than 600 times. Around nine-tenths of all new infrastructure is slated for developing nations, which are home to nearly all of the world’s tropical and subtropical forests.

As part of its development scheme for Papua, Indonesia has used a massive transmigration program to attract upwards of a million settlers to Papua from elsewhere in Indonesia. Most settlers are aligned with Indonesia’s Muslim-majority rulers, and so have been ceded large land holdings and many economic and political opportunities. This has ignited conflicts between the migrants and indigenous Papuans — tensions that are palpable today. Papuan independence and protest movements flare up sporadically but are heavily suppressed by the Indonesian police and military.

In addition to the Trans-Papua Highway’s incursion into Lorentz National Park, a second deforestation hotspot is in southeastern Papua, an area with extensive lowland forests and vast tropical peatlands that have built up over thousands of years. The habitat complexity and species diversity of this region is remarkable, with rainforests, towering wet-sclerophyll forests, riparian forests, peatlands, and mangroves all comprising some of the world’s great remaining intact forest landscapes. The high prevalence of acid-sulfate soils makes it an economic calamity for most crops, but that has not stopped Indonesia’s central government from undertaking wildly ambitious schemes, such as a massive rice and oil palm venture that could span 4 million acres. If these schemes proceed, toxic runoff from acid-sulfate soils, fertilizers, pesticides, and gold mining could devastate some of the world’s richest coral reefs and coastal fisheries just offshore.

Globally, the burning and decomposition of carbon-rich peatlands is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions from land use change. In Indonesia, peat fires also generate most of the choking haze that has repeatedly plagued much of Southeast Asia, forcing widespread closures of schools and airports and sharp increases in respiratory distress. One study suggests that haze from Indonesian fires could have caused the premature deaths of more than 100,000 people in 2015 alone. Indonesian President Joko Widodo has pledged to reduce haze, but it is difficult to imagine how this will be achieved if massive peat-fires in Papua are added to peatlands burning in Sumatra and Indonesian Borneo.

The third deforestation hotspot is in central-eastern Papua, and will consume some of its most remote and least explored ecosystems. These include both lowland forests and high-altitude cloud forests, as well as alpine regions that are bastions for relict Gondwanan species, such as marsupials, cassowaries, and many archaic plants. The region also is home to diverse indigenous peoples. By slicing through the traditional lands of so many different indigenous groups, especially in the remote highlands, the new roads will almost certainly provoke anti-government sentiment.

Last month, anti-government rebels killed nearly two dozen road workers along a stretch of the Trans-Papua Highway in eastern Papua. The rebels, affiliated with a militant wing of the Free Papua Movement, say that more attacks are coming, while the Indonesian police and military are promising rapid reprisals. Indonesia has 54,000 square miles of customary land claims currently under review, but virtually none are in Papua, indicating just how poorly the Indonesian government has treated traditional Papuan land rights.

Given the resentments against Indonesia’s heavy-handed rule, massive road building across Papua’s remote indigenous lands could be like dousing a fire with gasoline. It is often assumed that people living in remote regions welcome new roads, but in fact opinions are deeply divided, says Selwyn Moran, an indigenous social activist who lives in southeastern Papua. “Papuans feel roads are something you ought to be grateful for, but they fear the militarization, non-Papuan migrants who assume dominant roles, and extractive industries” that come with roads, Moran said.

As an analysis by my colleagues and I has shown, the Trans-Papua Highway rests on shaky financial foundations. The Indonesian government has invested tens of billions of dollars in the network, but the project has yet to surmount the most challenging terrain. Road construction in high-rainfall tropical environments is notoriously expensive, especially in steep or swampy areas where extensive bridges, culverts, and heavy earthworks are required. The planned road segments just in Lorentz National Park will require more than 50 separate bridges.

In addition to large capital costs, maintenance costs for roads in steep or high-rainfall environments are notoriously high — estimated at around 20 percent of the total road-construction cost per year by World Bank experts in Papua. And without concerted maintenance, expensive roads can quickly be rendered useless by landslides, potholes, and fissures. Further, in many developing nations, corruption in construction industries is so rife that up to half of all funding can be squandered by misappropriation and shoddy construction practices.

My concerns asbout the Trans-Papua Highway are shared by a growing number of scientists and environmental and indigenous rights groups in Indonesia and internationally. My hope is that this opposition will snowball as Papua’s development controversies increase.

The fact is that the Trans-Papua Highway’s many harmful effects and dubious financial foundations make it an exceptionally risky venture for national and international investors. Indonesian and Chinese interests are prevalent, and as history has shown, they often have a dismal environmental track record. But the entire world, including many Western corporations, consume minerals, timber, palm oil, and other agribusiness products from Papua. This is one area where conservation and non-profit groups can have some leverage over the Indonesian government as efforts grow to scale back the negative environmental and social impacts of the highway.

The World Bank has called big infrastructure projects a “blunt instrument” for alleviating poverty. Right now, the Trans-Papua Highway is looking like a very blunt instrument — one intended to dominate nature, exploit resources, and politically subjugate a remote land for hugely questionable gains.

3174. Germs in Your Gut Are Talking to Your Brain

By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times, January 28, 2019

Art: Darryl Leja, NHGRI

In 2014 John Cryan, a professor at University College Cork in Ireland, attended a meeting in California about Alzheimer’s disease. He wasn’t an expert on dementia. Instead, he studied the microbiome, the trillions of microbes inside the healthy human body.

Dr. Cryan and other scientists were beginning to find hints that these microbes could influence the brain and behavior. Perhaps, he told the scientific gathering, the microbiome has a role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease.

The idea was not well received. “I’ve never given a talk to so many people who didn’t believe what I was saying,” Dr. Cryan recalled.

A lot has changed since then: Research continues to turn up remarkable links between the microbiome and the brain. Scientists are finding evidence that microbiome may play a role not just in Alzheimer’s disease, but Parkinson’s disease, depression, schizophrenia, autism and other conditions.

For some neuroscientists, new studies have changed the way they think about the brain.

One of the skeptics at that Alzheimer’s meeting was Sangram Sisodia, a neurobiologist at the University of Chicago. He wasn’t swayed by Dr. Cryan’s talk, but later he decided to put the idea to a simple test.

“It was just on a lark,” said Dr. Sisodia. “We had no idea how it would turn out.”

He and his colleagues gave antibiotics to mice prone to develop a version of Alzheimer’s disease, in order to kill off much of the gut bacteria in the mice. Later, when the scientists inspected the animals’ brains, they found far fewer of the protein clumps linked to dementia.

Just a little disruption of the microbiome was enough to produce this effect. Young mice given antibiotics for a week had fewer clumps in their brains when they grew old, too.

“I never imagined it would be such a striking result,” Dr. Sisodia said. “For someone with a background in molecular biology and neuroscience, this is like going into outer space.”

Following a string of similar experiments, he now suspects that just a few species in the gut — perhaps even one — influence the course of Alzheimer’s disease, perhaps by releasing chemical that alters how immune cells work in the brain.

He hasn’t found those microbes, let alone that chemical. But “there’s something’s in there,” he said. “And we have to figure out what it is.”

‘It was considered crazy’

Scientists have long known that microbes live inside us. In 1683, the Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek put plaque from his teeth under a microscope and discovered tiny creatures swimming about.

But the microbiome has stubbornly resisted scientific discovery. For generations, microbiologists only studied the species that they could grow in the lab. Most of our interior occupants can’t survive in petri dishes.

In the early 2000s, however, the science of the microbiome took a sudden leap forward when researchers figured out how to sequence DNA from these microbes. Researchers initially used this new technology to examine how the microbiome influences parts of our bodies rife with bacteria, such as the gut and the skin.

Few of them gave much thought to the brain — there didn’t seem to be much point. The brain is shielded from microbial invasion by the so-called blood-brain barrier. Normally, only small molecules pass through.

“As recently as 2011, it was considered crazy to look for associations between the microbiome and behavior,” said Rob Knight, a microbiologist at the University of California, San Diego.

He and his colleagues discovered some of the earliest hints of these links. Investigators took stool from mice with a genetic mutation that caused them to eat a lot and put on weight. They transferred the stool to mice that had been raised germ-free — that is, entirely without gut microbiomes — since birth.

After receiving this so-called fecal transplant, the germ-free mice got hungry, too, and put on weight.

Altering appetite isn’t the only thing that the microbiome can do to the brain, it turns out. Dr. Cryan and his colleagues, for example, have found that mice without microbiomes become loners, preferring to stay away from fellow rodents.

The scientists eventually discovered changes in the brains of these antisocial mice. One region, called the amygdala, is important for processing social emotions. In germ-free mice, the neurons in the amygdala make unusual sets of proteins, changing the connections they make with other cells.

Studies of humans revealed some surprising patterns, too. Children with autism have unusual patterns of microbial species in their stool. Differences in the gut bacteria of people with a host of other brain-based conditions also have been reported.

But none of these associations proves cause and effect. Finding an unusual microbiome in people with Alzheimer’s doesn’t mean that the bacteria drive the disease. It could be the reverse: People with Alzheimer’s disease often change their eating habits, for example, and that switch might favor different species of gut microbes.

Fecal transplants can help pin down these links. In his research on Alzheimer’s, Dr. Sisodia and his colleagues transferred stool from ordinary mice into the mice they had treated with antibiotics. Once their microbiomes were restored, the antibiotic-treated mice started developing protein clumps again.

“We’re extremely confident that it’s the bacteria that’s driving this,” he said. Other researchers have taken these experiments a step further by using human fecal transplants.

If you hold a mouse by its tail, it normally wriggles in an effort to escape. If you give it a fecal transplant from humans with major depression, you get a completely different result: The mice give up sooner, simply hanging motionless.

As intriguing as this sort of research can be, it has a major limitation. Because researchers are transferring hundreds of bacterial species at once, the experiments can’t reveal which in particular are responsible for changing the brain.

Now researchers are pinpointing individual strains that seem to have an effect.

To study autism, Dr. Mauro Costa-Mattioli and his colleagues at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston investigated different kinds of mice, each of which display some symptoms of autism. A mutation in a gene called SHANK3 can cause mice to groom themselves repetitively and avoid contact with other mice, for example.

In another mouse strain, Dr. Costa-Mattioli found that feeding mothers a high-fat diet makes it more likely their pups will behave this way.

When the researchers investigated the microbiomes of these mice, they found the animals lacked a common species called Lactobacillus reuteri. When they added a strain of that bacteria to the diet, the animals became social again.

Dr. Costa-Mattioli found evidence that L. reuteri releases compounds that send a signal to nerve endings in the intestines. The vagus nerve sends these signals from the gut to the brain, where they alter production of a hormone called oxytocin that promotes social bonds.

Other microbial species also send signals along the vagus nerve, it turns out. Still others communicate with the brain via the bloodstream.

It’s likely that this influence begins before birth, as a pregnant mother’s microbiome releases molecules that make their way into the fetal brain.

Mothers seed their babies with microbes during childbirth and breast feeding. During the first few years of life, both the brain and the microbiome rapidly mature.

To understand the microbiome’s influence on the developing brain, Rebecca Knickmeyer, a neuroscientist at Michigan State University, is studying fMRI scans of infants.

In her first study, published in January, she focused on the amygdala, the emotion-processing region of the brain that Dr. Cryan and others have found to be altered in germ-free mice.

Dr. Knickmeyer and her colleagues measured the strength of the connections between the amygdala and other regions of the brain. Babies with a lower diversity of species in their guts have stronger connections, the researchers found.

Does that mean a low-diversity microbiome makes babies more fearful of others? It’s not possible to say yet — but Dr. Knickmeyer hopes to find out by running more studies on babies.

It’s possible they’ve been doing it for a long time — without knowing.

In the early 1900s, neurologists found that putting people with epilepsy on a diet low in carbohydrates and high in protein and fat sometimes reduced their seizures.

Epileptic mice experience the same protection from a so-called ketogenic diet. But no one could say why. Elaine Hsiao, a microbiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, suspected that the microbiome was the reason.

To test the microbiome’s importance, Dr. Hsiao and her colleagues raised mice free of microbes. When they put the germ-free epileptic mice on a ketogenic diet, they found that the animals got no protection from seizures.

But if they gave the germ-free animals stool from mice on a ketogenic diet, seizures were reduced.

Dr. Hsiao found that two types of gut bacteria in particular thrive in mice on a ketogenic diet. They may provide their hosts with building blocks for neurotransmitters that put a brake on electrical activity in the brain.

It’s conceivable that people with epilepsy wouldn’t need to go on a ketogenic diet to get its benefits — one day, they may just take a pill containing the bacteria that do well on the diet.

Sarkis Mazmanian, a microbiologist at Caltech, and his colleagues have identified a single strain of bacteria that triggers symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in mice. He has started a company that is testing a compound that may block signals that the microbe sends to the vagus nerve.

Dr. Mazmanian and other researchers now must manage a tricky balancing act. On one hand, their experiments have proven remarkably encouraging; on the other, scientists don’t want to encourage the notion that microbiome-based cures for diseases like Parkinson’s are around the corner.

That’s not easy when people can buy probiotics without a prescription, and when some companies are willing to use preliminary research to peddle microbes to treat conditions like depression.

“The science can get mixed up with what the pseudoscientists are doing,” said Dr. Hsiao.

Dr. Costa-Mattioli hopes that L. reuteri some day will help some people with autism, but he warns parents against treating their children with store-bought probiotics. Some strains of L. reuteri alter the behavior of mice, he’s found, and others don’t.

Dr. Costa-Mattioli and his colleagues are still searching for the most effective strain and figuring out the right dose to try on people. “You want to go into a clinical trial with the best weapon, and I’m not sure we have it,” he said.

Katarzyna B. Hooks, a computational biologist at the University of Bordeaux in France, warned that studies like Dr. Costa-Mattioli’s are still unusual. Most of these findings come from research with fecal transplants or germ-free mice — experiments in which it’s especially hard to pinpoint the causes of changes in behavior.

“We have the edges of the puzzle, and we’re now trying to figure out what’s in the picture itself,” she said.

3173. Challenges Posed by the ‘Green New Deal’

By Kamran Nayeri, Socialist Action, January 16, 2019

The fanfare about the UN Conference of Parties (COP) 24 in Katowice, located in a coal-mining region in Poland, that the diplomats from some 200 countries have “struck a deal after an all-night bargaining session” that may advance the fight against the unfolding catastrophic climate (The New York Times, Dec. 15, 2018) rings hollow if we recall that just 10 days earlier the same newspaper reported that two years after the Paris Agreement  greenhouse gas emissions accelerated like a “speeding freight train” in 2018.

Two months earlier, on Sept. 9, the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, held a press conference in New York telling the world that if the world governments “do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change.” Let’s remember that is only two years from now. Clearly, the world is facing a climate emergency, and so far none of the world’s major polluters are doing anything close to what is needed to avert the impending catastrophe.

The ecological and social crises the world faces today are actually two aspects of the crisis of the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization.

To resolve the crisis, humanity must chart a course towards an ecocentric socialist future. Thus, all attempts to reform the present day civilization to address various aspects of the ecosocial crisis are bound to fail if they are not part of an ongoing and deepening struggle waged by working people ourselves—armed with an action program and a strategy to build a self-organized and self-mobilized movement—to achieve an ecocentric socialist society.

The Sunrise Movement in the United States poses an important set of opportunities and challenges for the climate justice movement and its small ecosocialist component. While its stated purpose is to combat the climate crisis, the group has not absorbed a key political lesson apparent in the spontaneous Yellow Vests protests in France—the existing political parties are not to be trusted.

Thus, the Sunrise Movement supports the agenda of Democratic Party Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez: a Green New Deal to be foraged by the formation of a Select Committee for a Green New Deal in the legislative session beginning this month. It has used lobbying, albeit through a protest at the halls of the U.S. Congress, to demand legislative action to stop the climate crisis.

Some climate justice groups and a few small labor groups, as well as two-dozen current and just-elected Democratic members of Congress, have signed onto Ocasio Cortez’s proposal.

This development is not surprising. The main groups in the labor and climate justice movements have been working through the Democratic Party all along and essentially have embraced a parliamentarian and reformist approach to climate change policy.

Again unsurprisingly, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—with its ranks swelled with thousands of new recruits, including former supporters of Bernie Sanders’ 2106 Democratic Party campaign—has decided to run candidates in the 2018 elections as Democrats. This follows the reformist tradition of the U.S. social democrats and Stalinists (mostly the Communist Party U.S.A.) since the 1930s. In their view, the task is not to overthrow U.S. capitalism but to reform it by “pushing” the Democratic Party “to the left.”

I need not remind the reader that this “strategy” has a decades-old track record of failure, as can be verified by the dissolution of all progressive movements in the United States that followed a similar course. Just consider the history of the labor, Black, and women’s liberation movements over the past several decades and how such once-powerful movements have been reduced to a shadow of their former selves, a price they paid for being in the Big Tent of the Democratic Party, attempting “to push it to the left” instead of building self-organized and self-mobilized anti-capitalist movements and a fighting labor party to pursue their respective demands.

Impervious to such lessons of the modern political history of the United States, Ted Franklin, a leader of System Change Not Climate Change (SCnCC) who is also a member of the East San Francisco Bay DSA, celebrates Ocasio Cortez’s reformist course. He writes:

“The quasi-magical arrival of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez on the political scene has given climate activists new hope that a program big enough to address the danger will become an actual subject of national debate in the time frame necessary to give us a fighting chance against climate catastrophe.

Her proposal for a Select Committee for a Green New Deal … is gaining momentum as the highly energized progressive base of the Democratic Party confronts the triple obstacles of the Republican neofascist party, the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party, and the establishment progressives who are now running to the left but still beholden to corporate interests” (Franklin, 2018).

As someone who has been an active member of the national SCnCC network for about three years, and came to know and respect Franklin, his embrace of Ocasio Cortez’s reformist course comes as a surprise to me. To be clear, revolutionary (eco)socialists are not opposed to reforms. Thus, I have spoken in praise of the Oakland No Coal Coalition in which Franklin has played a leading part. But reforms can only be sustained if they are won by the organized and mobilized masses of the working people as a way to enhance our self-confidence and as a stepping stone towards other victories in the direction of an ecocentric socialist future.

The political course proposed by Ocasio Cortez, and following her the Sunrise Movement, and now Franklin, is the exact opposite. It miseducates and confuses any radicalizing youth or working person by suggesting that working through the capitalist Democratic Party, not building our own bottom-up anti-capitalist organization, and eventually a revolutionary labor party based on our own transformed mass organizations, such as unions, is the way to fighting the systemic climate crisis.

Thus, while the defeat of the Democratic Party incumbent, Joe Crowley, by Ocasio Cortez in the Democratic Party primaries registered the movement of the electorate to the left, her decision to run as a Democrat and her subsequent course to campaign for reforming the Democratic Party is entirely damaging to the cause of working people to organize and mobilize independently of the American capitalism and its two-party system.

Reality vs. fantasy: the Select-Committee

Franklin seems to pitch his political support for the Ocasio Cortez’s course on the premise that short of a mass movement of the working people fighting for a program to stop and reverse the climate crisis, the next best option is to work through the Democratic Party to get a national discussion on a Green New Deal to avert the crisis. So, let us consider his argument in some detail.

Like all others in the history of labor and socialist movements who have pursued shortcuts in revolutionary politics, sometimes with disastrous results, Franklin bends reality to fit his fantasy. To begin with, he assumes that because Ocasio Cortez has floated the idea of a Select Committee to forge a Green New Deal, both of these are already facts.

It should be noted in the first place that the likely Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has already asked Florida Representative Kathy Castor to lead a “special committee on climate change” in the new Congress that will reinstate the same committee that was dissolved by the former Republican Speaker John Boehner. While both Pelosi and Castor have included references to “thousands of green jobs” they hope to create, they have set aside any mention of a Green New Deal, and it is not even clear if Ocasio Cortez would be assigned to Castor’s climate change committee.

In fact, Castor has already disputed the suggestions that representatives who have received financial contributions from the fossil fuel industry should be barred from serving on her committee, on the grounds that it would be unconstitutional because it would violate their First Amendment right to free speech, a fossil fuel industry legal argument.

Evan Weber, the political director of the Sunrise movement, responded to the announcement by saying: “Nancy Pelosi has the power to determine whether or not the Select Committee for a Green New Deal lives or dies. … Sunrise Movement’s position is and will continue to be that it’s not over until she makes it clear that it’s over” (reported in Other News: Voices Against the Tide, January 2019). This is a sad statement of utter powerlessness of climate justice activists who place their hope in the Democratic Party.

Reality vs. Fantasy: a timely national debate on climate change and a Green New Deal?

With Ocasio Cortez’s proposed Select Committee blocked by the Democratic Party leadership, it would seem the rest of Franklin’s rosy projections are also no more a possibility. But let me consider them as if they were, in fact, to materialize as Franklin hopes.

If we are to believe United Nations Secretary General António Guterres that the world’s governments will run out of time to stop the runaway climate catastrophe if they do not act by 2020, it should be abundantly clear that we are already out of time to act to stop the worst of the climate crisis.

Still, Franklin imagines not only that the Democratic Party will move swiftly to form Ocasio Cortez’s Select Committee but that this committee will hold speedy hearings and formulate a Green New Deal, and that this will ignite a national debate that presumably improves the final legislation, and a similar bill will pass the Republican-controlled Senate and will be signed by President Trump before we run out of time! That is in one year’s time!

Of course, Franklin forgets, and I do not wish to belabor the point, that the climate crisis can only be resolved on the world scale with the top polluters taking the lead. So even if this fantastic scenario plays out as Franklin imagines it, the crisis will become unstoppable if China and the European Union fail to follow. In fact, Franklin himself cites formidable obstacles to any speedy and effective legislation to become law by counting some of the obstacles, including “the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party,” its “progressive establishment,” and the “neo-fascist” Republican Party. Yet, he still presents Ocasio Cortez’s proposal as a viable option!

The Green New Deal is neither new nor a radical idea. In fact, in all its varieties it is some form of Green Capitalism, which has been criticized by revolutionary ecosocialists, including in the System Change Not Climate Change network.

The neoliberal Democratic New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman first proposed it as a way to stop the climate crisis almost 11 years ago (The Times, Jan. 19, 2007, and April 15, 2007). Friedman is a big promoter of the magic of technology and capitalist markets, around which his idea of the Green New Deal was built, and he has influenced the climate justice movement. Earth Justice interviewed him about his Green New Deal, and the Green Party picked up the idea, adding on its own formulations.

And now Congresswoman Ocasio Cortez has made the idea “her own,” and some climate justice groups and small labor groups have supported the idea.  Meanwhile, there has been no questioning of how and why the U.S. Congress, one of the three constitutional seats of power of U.S. capitalism, would somehow legislate a Green New Deal that would actually stop the crisis and the U.S. president would sign it into law without any resistance by the same economic, social, and political forces that have blocked a serious discussion of the crisis for decades without a massive mobilization of the working people!

There is nothing in Franklin’s essay that even hints at who could stop climate change—capitalist politicians or the U.S. and world’s working people.

Climate change mitigation as big business

To understand the capitalist climate mitigation debate, we must understand the ongoing discussion in the capitalist policymaking circles about reforming capitalism to function more efficiently. Health-care policy debates provide an excellent recent example. As a health policy scholar in the early 1990s, I had the opportunity to document and demonstrate in detail how the liberal and conservative health-care reform proposals were framed by concerns about the profitability crisis in the U.S. capitalist economy. Would the discussion on climate change in the U.S. Congress be any different?

Just as the Democratic and Republican policymakers refused to frame the health care reform debate in terms of health care as a human right, there is no reasons to believe that their debate about the Green New Deal would be any differently framed—to put humanity and life on Earth at the center of policymaking deliberations instead of better oiling the capitalist profit-making machine.

Already, a long list of luminaries from both Democratic and Republican parties have spoken out in favor of some form of capitalist climate mitigation policy. Just last September, California’s Governor Brown held the Climate Summit that came on the heels of the May 24, 2017, “Climate Change is Big Business” conference in San Francisco, in which he was its invited keynote speaker.

On Dec. 13, 2018, John Kerry, another strategic thinker of U.S. capitalism, wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times complaining about the heat waves that are “stealing 153 billion hours of labor,” about how tropical infections are moving north, and about falling crop yields in more than two dozen countries: “By 2050 the Midwestern United States could see agricultural productivity drop to its lowest level in decades.” New York State’s right-of-center Democratic Governor Cuomo has called for a Green New Deal for New York.

It is also useful to place the original New Deal in its historical context. Contrary to the reformist fantasy that it was all thanks to the presidency of FDR, “the man of the people,” similar attempts in the 1920s and 1930s were undertaken by other leading capitalist rivals. The fascist Mussolini government embarked on a public works project to recast Rome in its historical glory by building statues and arenas to help whip up Italian nationalist fervor. Hitler built the autobahn system, and when he found it empty of cars, he ordered the design and mass production of Volkswagen Beetle (“people’s car”).

Churchill oversaw the reworking of the earlier welfare programs, such as unemployment insurance, to build the British welfare state. Needless to say, all the key capitalist rivals were also busy rearming themselves to the teeth.

Today’s world is similar in important ways. The American imperialist hegemony that grew out of the ashes of World War II is ending. By some accounts, China is already the largest capitalist economy in the world, with the most modern infrastructure and cutting-edge technology, and even in military terms has become the undisputed power in the Pacific.

The rise of Donald Trump is another sign of the slow decline of American imperialist power and its leadership crisis. Thus, his “make America great again” campaign, which appeals to the nostalgia of sections of U.S. ruling class and working people. His contentious relations with the U.S. key allies and his trade war moves similarly reflect a desire by the same laggard section of the U.S. elite to use raw American imperialist power to maintain its ebbing hegemony in world affairs—but to no avail.

The more forward-looking section of the U.S. capitalist class, mostly in the Democratic Party, aims for rejuvenation of the economy based on new products and new industries, which include “green technologies.” That is what the real Green New Deal is about, the kind that Friedman talks about. Even Paul Krugman, a smart liberal Democrat and Keynesian economist, has come out in favor of redesigning the U.S. economy as a mixed-economy: “You could imagine running a fairly efficient economy that is only 2/3 capitalist, 1/3 publicly owned—i.e., sort-of-kind-of socialist” (The New York Times, Dec. 22, 2018). Is there any doubt that at best they all are talking about Green Capitalism, not the kind of ecosocial transformation that is needed to stop and reverse the climate crisis?

From the perspective of averting the climate catastrophe, as well as the Sixth Extinction and the threat of nuclear war (the U.S. rulers, both Democrats, and Republicans, are already working on a multi-trillion-dollar nuclear rearmament; don’t fool yourself into thinking they would not use it!), and the entire host of ecosocial crisis the world faces, none of these capitalist policy wonks have anything close to a solution.

Neither does Congresswoman-elect Ocasio Cortez. Otherwise, she would have made that program her election campaign platform and would have educated the Sunrise Movement activists in that program and a working-class strategy to fight for such a program.  Instead, she has decided to run as a Democrat and to spend her energy to push the Democratic Party to the left (whatever that means). And when the Democratic Party captured the majority in the midterm elections and Nancy Pelosi, who a year earlier told a student that the Democratic Party is the party of capitalism, became again the most likely candidate for the Speaker of the House, she simply set Ocasio Cortez to the side with a stroke of her pen.

A key difference between a liberal and a working-class revolutionary is this: The former sees power emanating from the “voter” while the latter sees it coming from the self-organized and self-mobilized working people.

Ocasio Cortez is a liberal, not a revolutionary. She has no program, strategy, or set of tactics informed by them to help mobilize independent working-class action to transcend the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization in the direction of an ecocentric socialist future. Franklin, on the other hand, considers himself to be a Marxist. Should he not tell the Sunrise Movement activists that to overcome the climate crisis we should not look up to the Democratic Party, the U.S. Congress, or any capitalist institution but to the power of working people ourselves?

Of course, I do not deny that humanity is staring at possible extinction if we cannot undertake a massive reversal within a very short time frame, a very unlikely outcome. But let me ask Franklin why humanity is in such a predicament if not for decades upon decades of reformist betrayal? Is it not time perhaps to confront liberalism and reformism in the labor, climate justice, and (eco)socialist movements?