Ever further, ever faster, eternal growth for ever and ever, the capitalist illusion, built on a cloud of greed and insanity. Of course now that the population at large are waking up to the environmental disaster from such a philosophy, they paint everything green in the hope of keeping the illusion alive. Where will it all end, in the elimination of the human species, or in the true awakening of the people world wide to the suicidal policies of capitalism.?
Imagine the delight! In years to come we could all be zipping merrily
across continents at almost the speed of sound through massive
low-pressure tubes! Even better, we’re talking eco-chic sustainable speed, with fossil
fuel air and motor transport reduced and the super-duper shiny new
“Hyperloop” tubes powered by a host of solar panels. Following
the stalling of plans for a Los Angeles to San Francisco route, US
entrepreneur Elon Musk reported last year that he has now received
some written authorisation to start work on a Hyperloop connection
between New York and Washington, DC. Pods travelling at 1,200 kph
(750 mph) would take passengers from one city to the other in 29
minutes, he said. The Hyperloop concept has been offered by one of
Musk’s companies as open-source technology and various businesses
have beens showing an interest.
South Korea signed a
deal to develop Hyperloop and is hoping the scheme will allow people
to replace a three-hour drive from Seoul to Busan with a 20-minute
trip. Plans are also underway in France for a 40-minute Hyperloop
connection between Paris and Toulouse, while the first operational
route could be in the Emirates, with a Hyperloop tube planned to span
the 150km between Dubai and Abu Dhabi in 12 minutes. The first
stretch is due to be launched in 2020. India, Slovakia, the Czech
Republic, Sweden and Indonesia are also said to be interested in
building their own Hyperloops.
Over the last few
years, Musk and his cheerleaders have been making much of Hyperloop’s
supposedly “green” credentials. Josh Giegel, president of Los
Angeles firm Hyperloop One told the Inverse website: “We’re
advertising, and we really believe in, a fully kind of green solution
here.”
The
techno-enthusiast Digital Trends website gushed about the “fantasy
of futuristic transportation” and declared: “The Hyperloop could
revolutionize mass transit, shortening travel times on land and
reducing environmental damage in the process.” Norway’s Green
Party also jumped aboard the “renewable” high-speed bandwagon
when it called for a Scandinavian Hyperloop connection between Oslo
and Copenhagen.
But potential
passengers should prepare to mind the gap… between hype and
reality. Christopher Laumanns of the degrowth.info web portal in
Germany warned that there were a number of questions that needed to
be asked about Hyperloop, such as “do we really want to go that
fast?”, “is this the kind of technology we want?”, “who will
profit from this?” and “what is the real, full ecological impact
of this project?”. He told Shoal: “The hyperloop is a
mega-infrastructure-project. These projects have a rich tradition of
being way more expensive than the ambitious investor says they are at
the beginning. “It will have a huge impact on the landscape,
especially if the pods have to travel in a very straight line, just
like highways and high-speed rail, which cut through landscapes,
often with tunnels and bridges”. Plans reveal that the giant
Hyperloop tubes would either run underground, as in the New York to
Washington project, or be raised above ground level on pylons – in
either case cutting swathes through vulnerable landscapes and fragile
habitats.
And what of the
steel or reinforced concrete that would be needed to construct these
continent-spanning tubes? Would this be sourced, manufactured and
transported with zero environmental impact? Not exactly. Steel
depends on iron ore mines, mainly opencast, and the production
process involves high levels of greenhouse gas emissions, wastewater
contaminants, hazardous wastes and solid wastes. Concrete, meanwhile,
is made largely from cement and that the cement industry is
notoriously one of the primary producers of carbon dioxide, a major
greenhouse gas. On top of that, all the aggregates that make up
concrete have to be quarried or dug out of the Earth somewhere, then
transported, with further use of fossil fuel and other resources and
increases in pollution. The inclusion of solar panels in the
Hyperloop marketing vision is also something of a green herring.
Enthusiasts for
solar power often seem to conveniently forget that the panels
themselves have a heavy environmental footprint, starting with the
quartz mining, which threatens miners with the lung disease
silicosis, and continuing with the caustic chemicals such as sodium
hydroxide and hydrofluoric acid used in their manufacture. The
process uses not only precious water but also large amounts
electricity and there is a problem with waste. In 2011 residents of
Haining in eastern China rioted for four days because the local solar
panel factory was seriously polluting a nearby river, dumping toxic
levels of fluoride into the water and killing large numbers of fish
and some pigs.
It is unsurprising
then, that Hyperloop’s claims to be eco-friendly have been greeted
with scepticism by environmentalists. Grayson Flory, editor of the
Earth First! Journal in the USA, told Shoal: “The Hyperloop project
is another example of dangerous greenwashing, pure and simple. “It
is a blow against a sustainable future for the planet disguised as a
solution to industry-caused climate catastrophe. Environmental claims
about the Hyperloop demonstrate the dominant culture’s obsession
with technological progress and speed over all else. “To prioritize
high-speed transport over actual necessities for survival – such as
non-toxic air, pure water, and thriving, intact ecosystems – is to
ignore the very problem proponents of the Hyperloop claim they are
trying to solve. “Increasing our reliance on and dedication to
technology and industry is not a rational or holistic approach to
problems caused by increased reliance on and dedication to technology
and industry. “High-speed travel is not sustainable, no matter what
new technology we use to make it appear so.”
Laumann, in Germany,
said the broader issue of high-speed transport was important from a
degrowth perspective: “Capitalist acceleration creates the illusion
of giving you more time, while it actually leads to a greater number
of activities in the same amount of time, thus also creating more
growth.” José Ardillo, author of books such as Les Illusions
renouvelables (“Renewable Illusions”), also agreed that the
contemporary capitalist demand for high-speed transport, which
Hyperloop seeks to meet, was the underlying problem. He told Shoal:
“The need for high-speed transport in modern industrial society
comes within a wider historical context which was already underway at
the time when the first railways were being built.
“You could say
that the first need for capitalism was to efficiently link energy
resources with the centres of industrial transformation, on the one
hand, and on the other, of course, with distribution networks. “The
first war fought by industrial society at that stage was a war
against distance. It had to nullify distance. Now contemporary
industrial society is at war with time. “Once towns and centres of
production across the territory are linked together, you have to
eliminate as far as possible the time needed to move between them.”
The great English
writer and art critic John Ruskin died in January 1900 and so never
knew the industrial insanities of the twentieth century, let alone
the twenty-first. But when he wrote in the 1870s about the madness of
the railways he could just as easily have been describing the
hyperloopiness of certain contemporary high-speed projects.
“There was a
valley between Buxton and Bakewell, once upon a time as divine as the
vale of Tempe”, he recalled. “You enterprised a railroad through
the valley – you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons
of shale into its lovely stream. “The valley is gone and the Gods
with it, and now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in
half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a
lucrative process of exchange – you Fools everywhere”.
