Sane Action On Climate Change, In Brief
Yes, that means a revolution is necessary - and one that is non-violent, and empowers and renews local communities, freedom, human rights and constitutional democracy
Gandhi was asked, when he was seeking independence for India, if he wanted India to have the same material standard of living as Britain, to which he replied, “It took a whole world to give Britain its standard of living. How many worlds would it take to give India the same standard of living?”
The central problem is one of simple over-consumption. That is the difficult fact that many people still refuse to admit. There are other elements as well, a few of which we will examine here, but that remains the overarching perspective which we need to keep in mind, and act upon.
The environmental or ecological crisis which we face has many components, and will require many facets of response. In some areas, it is a matter of replacing one way of doing things with another - replacing petrochemical industrial agriculture in the growing of cotton for textiles and clothing, with organically grown hemp, is one good example. But the bigger problem is simply that we consume far too much. We can have a higher quality of life, if we shift from a focus on quantity of money and material goods, to quality of life and non-tangible things, such as community, creativity, culture and spirituality. In short, the primary answer is what both Gandhi and Thoreau urged: in Thoreau’s words, “Simplify, simplify.” And we can begin by reading the single best critique of the modern world, which is Thoreau’s, Walden.
But while voluntary simplicity is the primary thing that must be done, at least in the more affluent parts of the world, there are other actions and other questions that need to be considered. As always, we should start with the big picture, lest we get stuck in the rut of not being able to see the forest for the trees.
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There are three main views that are predominant on climate change, or global warming.
A) It’s a hoax. (Untrue, it would seem to me.)
B) It’s real, and reduction of fossil fuel use is the answer. (Overly simplistic.)
Both of these views are inadequate. As to the first, let’s take the precautionary principle. If we err on the side of caution, we may avert a cataclysm. And if we were wrong, and it wasn’t an anthropogenic climate change, caused by carbon and methane emissions and other greenhouse gases, then we will have made the necessary transition away from factory farming, and from smog-producing energy and transportation systems, which are currently killing seven million people a year, just from air pollution alone. Therefore, acting on the assumption that anthropogenic climate change is real, makes sense, while inaction means a continuation of air pollution and smog, as well as the horrifically cruel, ecologically destructive, deeply inhumane, and profoundly unhealthful practice of factory farming, both of which need to be overcome anyway - so, inaction simply makes no sense. (I’ll get to the second point later.)
To these two views, are added in the agenda of the Davos, World Economic Forum billionaire corporate elite, which is:
C) Climate change is real, and catastrophe is imminent; therefore, eco-fascism is necessary and justified. The Davos billionaire oligarchy wants to depopulate the rural countryside, round the people up into authoritarian “smart cities”, and, they say, use robotized, automated industrial agriculture to feed humanity. (The absolutely insane view on the matter.)
(Chomsky seems to have signed onto this deeply psychotic view recently, horrifyingly, as indicated by his support of police state measures in response to covid.)
In philosophy, this last view would be called a teleological suspension of the ethical - which means, it is an assertion of the view that the ends justify the means. But that is an extremely dangerous notion, which can easily be abused. It has been used by everyone from the Nazis to the Bolshevisks, the Leninists and Maoists, and every emperor who ever lived, to justify and rationalize every form of atrocity and crimes against humanity - all, of course, “for the greater good”. The Soviet Union used forced mass migration in an effort to make agriculture more “efficient”, and 10 million people starved to death in Ukraine alone, while vast stretches of Russian farmland were destroyed, and turned to desert. Are we really so sure we want another elitist and authoritarian plan as the way we deal with issues of food, agriculture or the environment? Think again. We tried that. It was a catastrophic failure. But now the Davos elite want to try the same thing again, only on a global scale.
The corporate elite have proven that they can’t stop themselves from pillaging the planet and destroying the Earth’s ecosystems, whenever it is profitable to do so. How on Earth does anyone imagine that giving the same corporate elite absolute power is going to somehow miraculously solve our ecological problems? Clearly it is not.
Of course, eco-fascism is not the answer, and will not heal the planet - no more than fascism will make the coronavirus go away. It is also ethically intolerable, and positively dystopian. But make no mistake: this is what the Davos billionaire elite are driving for, and are zealously and aggressively pushing down the throats of humanity, world-wide - right now, as we speak.
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Excellent argument, that economic anthropologist Jason Hickel makes here (the link to the article is below) - basically saying what I wrote in my first two books; except that I make it clear that we need a non-violent democratic revolution now, if any of this is to be anything more than wishful thinking.
Secondly, it was only this year that I learned that the only way to halt and reverse global warming is through healing the soil, since healthy soil is the only method we have for safely drawing massive amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere. This means, that regenerative organic agriculture is the answer, not high tech industrial agriculture, eco-fascism, and rural depopulation.
(See Allan Savory, Geoff Lawton and Vandana Shiva; permaculture, regenerative agriculture, and holistic management; and the excellent film, Kiss the Ground.)
The scientists have not caught up with the science of ecology, which is why they focus too exclusively on fossil fuel use reduction. The environmentalists have not caught on yet, in general, either. And the elite, well, they want to turn a crisis into an opportunity - for themselves, of course - to consolidate and expand their already vastly excessive power and wealth, naturally. They want eco-fascism. That, is definitely NOT the answer.
The answer involves redistribution of wealth, and more importantly, redistribution of power, and land; along with fossil fuel use reduction, and above all, a rapid and massive shift from petrochemical industrial agriculture, to small-scale, community-based, local, regenerative organic agriculture.
That means we need a land reform movement, and now.
(That is the subject of one of my recent essays, on WordPress, and the focus of one of my two forthcoming books. Watch for them.)
To paraphrase and ad-lib on one of my favourite movie lines,
Get busy planting, or get busy dying.
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Another important note must be made here. While pollution taxes are necessary, along with a tax on great concentrations of wealth, and higher taxes on the richest 1% and large, profitable corporations, what we absolutely do not need, is a further over-centralization and hyper-concentration of power. That means, any pollution tax that is implemented should be collected solely by local communities and municipalities.
You want to drive a Hummer in Toronto, NY, Paris or London, that’s fine, but it will cost you 10% of the Blue Book market value of the vehicle, if it is a heavy polluter - and not just in terms of carbon, but also in terms of smog.
(Seven million people die from air pollution a year, versus two million from covid - even accepting the official numbers, which the CDC itself has quietly admitted, 94% of which are not deaths from covid, but are deaths with covid.)
If your vehicle is a heavy polluter, and it’s worth $50,000 USD, then you’re going to pay $5,000 a year in pollution tax, for the privilege, not the right, of driving a heavily polluting vehicle.
In the wealthiest nations, there is more than one fossil fuel-burning vehicle per person, and easily 50% of them are heavy polluters. The city of NY has eight million people - 20 million in the greater metropolitan area. That’s 10 million vehicles that can and should be taxed for heavy pollution levels. Even with a low estimate of $20,000 USD average value, that’s $2,000/year times 10 million, which comes to a staggering $20 billion PER YEAR. For most small cities and towns, and even for the biggest cities, the revenue increase would be monumental, and liberating, and absolutely transformative.
(Of course, there would be a declining pollution tax revenue over the coming years and decades, as people shifted to less polluting forms of transportation, but that is the very point.)
For perspective, note that the average city council budget for the 100 biggest US cities is a mere $152 million in spending power. (2015 figures) Imagine raising another one billion dollars a year for five years, as an average, or higher, for every major city. (Based on an average population of just one million people, with half a million vehicles on average per city that will be taxed an average of $2,000 per year.) What would that do for the cities of the world? It would transform them radically - and with freedom, constitutional democracy and human rights intact, and strengthened. Cities would become quieter, traffic and congestion would greatly be reduced, and air quality and human health would soar. (The same model applies to cities of 20 million people, or one million, or to towns of 20,000, or even smaller.) Let me explain, if this is not immediately clear.
Naturally, you immediately take that windfall of tax revenue, and invest it in an excellent public transit system, and in electric car, car-sharing co-ops, bike lanes and walking paths, and walkable neighbourhoods, so that automobile dependency becomes a thing of the past - a nicety, maybe, not a necessity.
Maybe you sign out a Lamborghini, a limo, or a Jaguar for a special occasion once a year, or a Harley or a Ducati, but otherwise, you take the clean, fast, efficient and affordable transit, or you use an electric car that you sign out of your local, community car-share co-op, the same way you would sign out a library book.
And that money will not be collected by an unelected global oligarchy of corporate billionaires and technocrats, thus further dismantling and destroying national sovereignty, freedom and constitutional democracy, but will be collected by local communities, in order to:
a) provide the funds needed to help the poor, create green, affordable housing for all who need it, create community gardens and farms to provide food for all, to fund new business and cooperative start-up projects, and to build the LOCALLY-BASED AND DEMOCRATICALLY-CONTROLLED renewable energy and clean transportation infrastructure;
b) to create real jobs, with decent pay, doing important work; and
c) to foster a rebirth and renewal of, not only community economic and social/cultural vibrancy, but also a rebirth and renewal of constitutional democracy and freedom.
What stands in our way? Everybody knows. It is the ruling 1%. Or rather, it is the ruling fraction of a percent, who hold all the levers of major economic, institutional and governmental power - the billionaire oligarchy, which has now, as of 2020, turned, not only parasitic, vampiric, predatory, sociopathic, war-mongering, ecocidal and genocidal, which they already were, but also, frankly, and literally, neo-fascist.
Remove the billionaires from their position as the de facto world government - as the leading business journal of the Western world, the Financial Times, calls their unofficial headquarters and main policy-forming centre, which is Davos, the seat of the World Economic Forum - and we can have a just and equitable, free and democratic, economically vibrant, truly sustainable, and in fact regenerative society, which is actively healing the Earth; while feeding, educating, healing and housing humanity, creating a new renaissance for humanity, and rapidly eliminating poverty from human societies world-wide.
What are we waiting for?
J. Todd Ring,
November 18, 2021
J. Todd Ring is a philosopher, social-political analyst, and author of: Enlightened Democracy, and The People vs The Elite, as well as the forthcoming book, All Hell Breaks Loose: Global Geopolitics 1945-2045. Essays are on Substack, WordPress, Blogspot, Medium and Patreon - free, with no paywall. Books are available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and at better bookstores everywhere. Support your local independent bookstore, and order now.
Another important, game-changing innovation is agrivoltaics. Brilliant idea, and revolutionary. Combine agrivoltaics with small-scale, local, community-based, regenerative organic permaculture and holistic management, and we will rapidly heal the world. See Geoff Lawton, Vandana Shiva, Allan Savory, and my own writings, for further information, vision and analysis.
There is no reason to be skittish or hesitant about regenerative agriculture. It is now amply proven to be vastly superior to industrial agriculture, in terms of ecology, social impacts, human health, and the economic viability and resiliency of farms; and to heal the soil - which, it is true, is the only way we are going to stop catastrophic climate change. (See Allan Savory, Vandana Shiva, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Geoff Lawton, and the most important environmental film yet, Kiss the Ground.) And the masses, while still generally clueless, are rapidly beginning to wake up. The regenerative organic agriculture movement is exploding in size, all over the planet, for one thing, and that is extremely positive. We are very near a cultural tipping point. The primary obstacles to regenerative agriculture, which is the primary tool we need to heal the world, are public ignorance, which is changing fast, and, it must be said, NGO co-option by big business oligarchs, along with the corporate-technocratic elites, who oppose regenerative organic agriculture, because it threatens their wealth, and more importantly, their power. But we will win in any event. It might be an ugly battle in some places, however. Get ready for the fight for our future, and for the future of humanity and the Earth. See my other essays and my books on Substack, WordPress and Amazon, for further details, vision, strategy, and global and historical analysis.
Decentralized, local, community-based, and COMMUNITY-CONTROLLED regenerative organic agriculture, agrivoltaics, solar, wind, and micro-hydroelectric systems, together, are the clear answer to the issues of food, agriculture, energy, employment and meaningful work, and the healing of our world.
Hydrogen Home Energy Storage: Could this be a game changer?
Bye-bye to coup-loving Musk's Tesla Wall dominance. Good riddance, jerk. (And yes, that IS being polite about it.)
Why are certain responses to health, food, and ecological crises favoured while others are ignored by corporate-state media and most governments? Covid response is a textbook example. Month 21 of a pandemic and still we haven’t heard any public officials talk about the benefits of eating real food, exercise, and increasing vitamin D exposure towards positive public health outcomes. Why might that be? That's because, while they work, and provide better health outcomes, they have the tragic and unforgivable flaw of not increasing the power and wealth of the billionaire corporate oligarchy, or their minions and junior partners in crime in government and the media. The same goes for the building of massive biofuel energy plants (burning exactly what biofuels, we should ask?!) along with nuclear plants and mega-dams, instead of far safer, lower impact, decentralized alternatives: it’s all about wealth and power for the right people, the elite, not human interests, or the environment.
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Should we immediately switch from cotton, petroleum-based plastics, and forestry products, to hemp, for our clothing, textiles, plastics and composites, paper, building materials, and more? Absolutely. Hemp is a key element in any intelligent strategy to heal the planet, save family farms, or resuscitate the economy. It’s potential is nothing short of revolutionary. And that is without even mentioning its extreme value as food and medicine (CBD).
Is hemp the answer to carbon sequestration? It will be helpful, but it is not primary.
Using indoor hemp farms & vertical gardening, on land that cannot grow food, and sequestering carbon and cleaning water in the process, while producing useful items, such as biochar, graphene, diamonds, etc, and at no or very low environmental impact, seems like another great innovation idea. That being said, sequestering carbon through healing the soil, by way of regenerative organic agriculture, has to be the number one priority, for the simple reason that it gives maximum ecological restoration, regeneration and healing of the planet in the least expensive, fastest way possible. All we need is the will and the awareness to do it on a massive scale - decentralized, with one small farm or garden at a time. Other more technologically complex methods of carbon sequestration may be helpful, but they are secondary and supplemental to regenerative organic agriculture, which remains overwhelmingly the most powerful method we have for healing the planet, and the climate. The reason we don't hear the corporate/state media, the governments, or the corporate elite who control them both, talking about and promoting carbon sequestration through regenerative agriculture, is because it doesn't increase the already vastly excessive power and wealth of the corporate oligarchs. Their plan, which focuses on a life-extension of the utterly failed model of industrial agriculture, combined with a tax carbon, to be collected by an unelected global technocracy controlled by the same banking and other corporate elites, does increase their power and wealth, and it dovetails with their now undeniably fascist agenda. We should not need to have it spelled out any clearer.
Regenerative agriculture remains priority number one, but this is extremely helpful.
Hemp conversion to graphene and diamond: Smart carbon capture?
While decentralized, distributed, locally-based solutions are best, and should be the main priority, there is room for large scale projects as well, as a transition. The new large-scale solar/wind power project planned in Morocco comes in at half the cost of building a new nuclear plant, and will deliver reliable base load power. Sea cables 3,800 km long will link it to the UK power grid. Renewable Baseload Power from a single desert location. Enough for 7 million homes.
And here is another thought-provoking video, with some hopeful, good ideas, and some very hopeful data and analysis; but, with at least one fatal flaw. Here are my thoughts on the video below: All of this sounds wonderful, except for the lab grown meat and the rejection of farming. We need to listen to Vandana Shiva, Geoff Lawton and Allan Savory: Regenerative organic agriculture is the only way we are going to draw enough carbon out of the atmosphere to halt or reverse climate change. Let that sink in. It is critical for us to understand now. And it is moreover frankly foolish to think that we will replace nature's foods with lab-created food-like substances. Our knowledge may seem impressive, but geneticist and environmental scientist David Suzuki is right: our understanding of life is still extremely limited. A little humility now could save our species. Hubris got us into an environmental crisis - it will not get us out of it. As Einstein said, A problem cannot be solved with the same kind of thinking that created it; and, to repeat the same methods, expecting different results, is the very definition of insanity. Hubris is the habit that must be broken. That, and the habits of predatory wealth-extractive economics, elitism, authoritarianism, technology worship, over-complicating everything, and a social model based in domination and submission, which, of course, is also at the root of our ecological crisis. As to passive regeneration of forests, yes, that is great, but forests will not naturally regenerate on the grasslands which make up two thirds of the earth’s landmass. What then, will draw down carbon on the all important grasslands? Only regenerative agriculture. That will be much more pivotal than letting forests grow back on the one quarter of the earth’s landmass where they naturally occur. We also need to understand the Davos corporate elites’ plan, and understand what it entails, furthermore. It is literally fascist, and it is neo-Malthusian, and it envisions a depopulation of rural areas. Re-wilding is a good idea - but not done by way of forced migrations or totalitarianism; and nor should it aim to outlaw farming. It is the farmers who will save the earth and feed humanity, by way of regenerative agriculture - not the men in lab coats and the billionaire corporatocracy.
Technology will be a supplemental element, not a primary fix. After spending over 50,000 hours and four decades of my life researching environmental issues, political-economy and philosophy, I cannot stress that point enough. Heal the soil through small-scale regenerative agriculture, and rediscover some basic humility, and we can both heal the earth and liberate humanity. Without these two elements, it is a dark age followed by collapse.
What Would It Look Like If We Treated Climate Change as an Actual Emergency? - by Jason Hickel
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/11/what-would-it-look-like-if-we-treated-climate-change-as-an-actual-emergency/