Climate Links: September 2018 #2

Ho Hum. 6th IPCC Report Says World Is Headed For Existential Crisis. What Else Is New? Steve Hanley, Clean Technica. Sep. 27, 2018.

Drew Shindell, a Duke University climate scientist and a co-author of the report, tells The Guardian that meeting the under 1.5º C goal will require a massive change in how humans behave and how they derive the energy they need to maintain their accustomed lifestyle. 

Emissions from transportation, electricity generation, and agriculture will need to be slashed dramatically or eliminated entirely in order for there to be any hope of meeting the goal, Shindell says. “It’s extraordinarily challenging to get to the 1.5º C target and we are nowhere near on track to doing that. While it’s technically possible, it’s extremely improbable, absent a real sea change in the way we evaluate risk. We are nowhere near that.” 

Even assuming carbon emissions can be greatly reduced, the world will have to remove massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to meet the 1.5º C goal. That will be a problem. “The penetration rate of new technology historically takes a long time,” Shindell says. “It’s not simple to change these things. There aren’t good examples in history of such rapid, far reaching transitions.”

World 'nowhere near on track' to avoid warming beyond 1.5C target. Oliver Milman, Guardian. Sep. 27, 2018.

Exclusive: Author of key UN climate report says limiting temperature rise would require enormous, immediate transformation in human activity

A massive, immediate transformation in the way the world’s population generates energy, uses transportation and grows food will be required to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5C and the forthcoming analysis is set to lay bare how remote this possibility is.

“It’s extraordinarily challenging to get to the 1.5C target and we are nowhere near on track to doing that,” said Drew Shindell, a Duke University climate scientist and a co-author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which will be unveiled in South Korea next month. 

“While it’s technically possible, it’s extremely improbable, absent a real sea change in the way we evaluate risk. We are nowhere near that.”

New Evidence That Climate Change Poses a Much Greater Threat to Humanity Than Recently Understood Because the IPCC has been Systematically Underestimating Climate Change Risks: An Ethical Analysis. Donald Brown, Ethics and Climate. Sep. 21, 2018.

Three papers have been recently published that lead to the conclusion that human-induced climate change poses a much more urgent and serious threat to life on Earth than many have thought who have been relying primarily on the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This paper first reviews these papers and then examines the ethical questions by the issues discussed in these papers.

Climate study ‘pulls punches’ to keep polluters on board. Robin McKie, Guardian. Sep. 23, 2018.

‘True risks’ of warming played down to placate fossil-fuel nations

Warnings about the dangers of global warming are being watered down in the final version of a key climate report for a major international meeting next month, according to reviewers who have studied earlier versions of the report and its summary. 

They say scientists working on the final draft of the summary are censoring their own warnings and “pulling their punches” to make policy recommendations seem more palatable to countries – such as the US, Saudi Arabia and Australia – that are reluctant to cut fossil-fuel emissions, a key cause of global warming. “Downplaying the worst impacts of climate change has led the scientific authors to omit crucial information from the summary for policymakers,”

New Climate Debate: How to Adapt to the End of the World. Christopher Flavelle, Bloomberg. Sep. 26, 2018.

While economic growth continues we’ll never kick our fossil fuels habit. George Monbiot, Guardian. Sep. 26, 2018.

There may be more bicycles but there will also be more planes. We’re still in denial about the scale of the threat to the planet.

We’re getting there, aren’t we? We’re making the transition towards an all-electric future. We can now leave fossil fuels in the ground and thwart climate breakdown. Or so you might imagine, if you follow the technology news. 

So how come oil production, for the first time in history, is about to hit 100m barrels a day? How come the oil industry expects demand to climb until the 2030s? How is it that in Germany, whose energy transition (Energiewende) was supposed to be a model for the world, protesters are being beaten up by police as they try to defend the 12,000-year-old Hambacher forest from an opencast mine extracting lignite – the dirtiest form of coal? Why have investments in Canadian tar sands – the dirtiest source of oil – doubled in a year? 

The answer is, growth. There may be more electric vehicles on the world’s roads, but there are also more internal combustion engines. There be more bicycles, but there are also more planes. It doesn’t matter how many good things we do: preventing climate breakdown means ceasing to do bad things. Given that economic growth, in nations that are already rich enough to meet the needs of all, requires an increase in pointless consumption, it is hard to see how it can ever be decoupled from the assault on the living planet.

When a low-carbon industry expands within a growing economy, the money it generates stimulates high-carbon industry. Anyone who works in this field knows environmental entrepreneurs, eco-consultants and green business managers who use their earnings to pay for holidays in distant parts of the world and the flights required to get there. Electric vehicles have driven a new resource rush, particularly for lithium, that is already polluting rivers and trashing precious wild places. Clean growth is as much of an oxymoron as clean coal. But making this obvious statement in public life is treated as political suicide.

Satellite images show 'runaway' expansion of coal power in China. Adam Vaughan, Guardian. Sep. 26, 2018.

Extra 259GW capacity from coal in pipeline despite Beijing’s restrictions on plants

The Energy 202: Something strange is happening with Arctic lakes. Chris Mooney. Wa Po. Sep. 25 2018.

What does that mean? Well, so far, Walter Anthony is working from the hypothesis that at least in this location -- but perhaps others, too -- long-buried fossil fuels are being exposed to the atmosphere, thanks to the thawing of permafrost which had previously sealed them below the ground. 

If this turns out to be widespread -- it could only occur in areas where thawing permafrost sits atop older fossil fuel reserves -- then the fear is there could be another source of greenhouse gas emissions that is tied to permafrost thaw, but is actually in addition to it.

Space Station Earth. Andy Miles, Clean Technica. Sep. 22, 2018.

Living in the Future's Past. trailer via youtube.

contributors include:
Jeff Bridges — Actor, Artist, Producer
Dr. Piers Sellers — Director of the Earth Science Division at NASA Meteorologist and Astronaut (IN MEMORIAM)
Wesley Clark — General, US Army (Ret.) former NATO Supreme Allied Commander
Oren Lyons — Environmental Activist Professor of American Studies
Dr. Timothy Morton — Philosopher; Professor, Rice University; Texas Author, Humankind and Dark Ecology
Bob Inglis — Former (R) Congressman, South Carolina; Founder, Enterprise and Energy Initiative
Dr. Rich Pancost — Head of School of Earth Sciences; Professor of Biogeochemistry (Earth Systems); Director of the University of Bristol Cabot Institute, Bristol, UK
Dr. Ruth Gates — Marine Biologist; Director, Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, The University of Hawaii at Manoa
Dr. Renee Lertzman — Author, Environmental Melancholia
Dr. Leonard Mlodinow — Physicist and Author, The Upright Thinkers
Dr. Bruce Hood — Professor of Developmental Psychology, University of Bristol; UK Author, The Self Illusion
Dr. Mark Plotkin — Ethnobotanist President, Amazon Conservation Team
Dr. Amy Jacobson — Evolutionary Anthropologist, Human Behavioral Ecologist
Daniel Goleman — Psychologist; Science Journalist; Author, Emotional Intelligence
Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky — Professor of Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol, UK DR.
Nathan Hagens — Director, Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future; Co-Founder, Bottleneck Foundation; Ph.D., Natural Resources; Reality 101, University of Minnesota Honors Program
Dr. Joseph Tainter — Professor of Anthropology; Author, Collapse of Complex Societies
Dr. Ugo Bardi — Professor of Physical Chemistry, University of Florence, Italy
Paul Roberts — Journalist; Author, End of Oil and The Impulse Society
Dr. Ian Robertson — Cognitive Neuroscientist; Co-Director, Global Brain Health Institute Professor Emeritus, Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience

Post-Truth World

Truth Is Evaporating Before Our Eyes. Paul Craig Roberts. Sep. 24, 2018.

Truth is evaporating before our eyes. Does anyone notice? 

On September 17, I posted my column, “Evidence is no longer a Western value.” I used as an example the blame that has been put on Russia for the shot down Malaysian airliner. No evidence whatsoever exists for the accusation, and massive evidence has been presented that the airliner was shot down by the neo-nazis that seized power as a result of the Washington-organized coup in Ukraine.

Blame was fixed on Russia not by any evidence but by continuous evidence-free accusations that began the moment the airliner was shot down. Anyone who asked for evidence was treated as a “Putin apologist.” This took evidence out of the picture. 

Wherever we look in these times, we see evidence-free accusations established as absolute facts: Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” “Iranian nukes,” “Russian invasion of Ukraine,” the Trump/Putin conspiracy that stole the 2016 US presidential election, Syrian use of poison gas. Not a scrap of evidence exists for any of these accusations, but the truth of the accusations is established in many minds worldwide. 

Science gave the world the principle of evidence-based fact, which did away with the burning of witches and political decisions based in superstition. Truth became a force.

But truth can get in the way of agendas, and as elites recovered their power from the social, political, and economic reforms of a previous era, truth was divided into categories and cut so fine that it disappeared. For the elite truth became identical to their economic interests, and Identity Politics stripped truth of its universal meaning and reduced truth to self-pleading race and gender truth.

The result is that today truth is established not by evidence but by repetition of accusations and falsehoods. 

This made it easy to destroy people and countries by lies alone. Who remembers Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund and at the time the likely future president of France? Strauss-Kahn was out of step with Washington which wanted its puppet Sarkozy reelected. Strauss-Kahn came to New York and was accused by a hotel maid of sexual assault. He was arrested and jailed. The New York district attorney and media whores pronounced him guillty. Simultaneously, on cue, a French woman made the same claim. Case closed. No evidence. Just claims. Then it emerged that the hotel maid had just had very large sums of money far above her income level deposited to her bank account. Even more damning, it was revealed that Sarkozy knew of Strauss-Kahn’s arrest before the police announced it. The case fell apart, and the New York district attorney publicly apologized. But Strauss-Kahn had been forced to resign as Director of the IMF and was out of the French presidential election. So Washington won. 

Today it is a common, routine tactic for both US political parties to produce a woman to bring accusations of sexual harassment, abuse, or assault against any heterosexual male appointee or nominee that either party regards to be out of step with its agenda. It happens so regularly that no sentient person can possibly believe the woman. Sexual assault has been reduced to one of the dirty tricks of politics.

As hard as false accusations can be on individuals, they destroy entire countries. Just consider the destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, currently Yemen, and Washington has not given up on the same fate for Syria and Iran. Based on nothing but Washington’s endlessly repeated false accusations, millions of peoples have been murdered, maimed, orphaned, widowed, displaced, and sent as refugees overrunning Europe. 

There is not a scrap of evidence anywhere that justifies Washington’s enormous crimes against humanity. Yet, these crimes that in a truth-conscious world would have resulted in several entire governments of the United States standing accused in the International Criminal Court, or the War Crimes Court, or whichever court, and perhaps in all of them, are ignored, because accusation alone against the destroyed countries and peoples sufficed to justify Washington’s war crimes against humanity. 

What I have described is a truth-free world. There is no place for truth in the world that the West has created. The Western hostility to truth is overwhelming. As I write truth-tellers are being banned from Facebook, Twitter, and PayPal. Google makes their sites almost impossible to find. Throughout the Western World truth has been redefined as “Conspiracy Theory.” 

Elites such as George Soros and innumerable tax-financed government agencies, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, spend taxpayers’ money discrediting those who tell the truth. Many in governments want truth-tellers locked up as enemies of the state, by which they mean “enemies of the self-interests of the ruling elites.” 

You don’t need to believe me. Here are four books written by honorable persons, meticulously documented, full of evidence that make it clear that American elites have no respect whatsoever for truth. Truth is something that is in their way.

One of the books is Charlie Savage’s Takeover. Savage shows how Dick Cheney used the George W. Bush regime and 9/11 to destroy the separation of powers and the civil liberties in the US Constitution. When you read Savage’s book you will discover that the America that you think is here is not here. In its place is a dictatorship available to any president clever enough to use it. Savage’s book is one of the best pieces of investigative reporting that I have read. 

The Roman system of government never recovered from Caesar crossing the Rubicon. I doubt that the US Constitution will ever recover from Dick Cheney. 

Two of the books are by David Ray Griffin, one of the last and most determined of American protagonists for truth. In his book, Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World, Griffin makes, a decade after Savage, the same case against Dick Cheney. When two independently minded researchers reach the same conclusion, you can bet it is on the money. If the world survives Washington’s orchestrated conflict with Russia, Cheney will go down in history as the person who destroyed American constitutional government. 

In this same book, Griffin also examines the official 9/11 story and exposes it as a total fabrication with no connection to any truth whatsoever. He takes up this case in his current, just released book with Elizabeth Woodworth, 9/11 Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation. 

Anyone who is still brainwashed by the official 9/11 story can immediately free themselves from their deception by reading this book. There is no longer any doubt that 9/11 was an inside orchestrated event for the purpose of unleashing two decades, with more to come, of American aggression in the Middle East.

Griffin does not leave a single official statement about 9/11 standing as not a single official claim is based on any factual evidence whatsoever. 

For seventeen years the world has been fed a pack of total lies based on nothing but accusations and in the face of massive evidence produced not by some collection of political hacks sitting as a 9/11 Commission, but by thousands of experts. Yet for seventeen years false accusations prevailed over heavily documented facts presented by disinterested experts called “conspiracy theorists” by those intent on covering up their crimes. 

The fourth book is Mary Mapes’ Truth and Duty. Mary Mapes is the CBS producer whose team carefully prepared for Dan Rather the 60 Minutes report on George W. Bush’s failure to perform his Texas Air National Guard duty. Her story was absolutely correct, but she and Rather were destroyed by accusation alone. The Republicans set in attack mode the right-wing bloggers, and soon the official media joined in for the purpose of elevating their ratings at CBS’s expense.

CBS was vulnerable, because it was no longer independent but a part of Viacom’s empire. Mapes was already in trouble, because she had broken the Abu Ghraib torture story just at the moment that Bush and Cheney declared: “America doesn’t torture.” As the Cheney/Bush regime put pressure on Viacom, a corporate executive told Mapes: 

“You don’t have any idea how many millions of dollars Viacom is spending on lobbying in Wasington, and nothing you’ve done in the past year has helped.” 

There you have it. The Viacom executives had no interest whatsoever in the truth, only in what advanced their lobbying interests in Washington. Mapes, a truth-teller had to go, and she did. And so did Dan Rather.

Today in America no member of the print and TV media or NPR dares to get within a hundred miles of the truth. It would be a career-ending event.
Without a media dedicated to truth, there can be no control over government.

Ask yourselves where you can read articles like this. If you do not support the remaining portals of truth, you will find yourselves bound, like the Elven-kings, Dwarf-lords and Mortal Men in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, “in the darkness” by the elites ability to control the explanations that comprise your reality. 

Identity Politics has destroyed the very conception of truth independent of race and gender. Science itself becomes discredited as does civilization: 

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/10/25/goodbye-western-civilization/

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/10/27/civilization-declared-white-male-construct/  

Never in history have humans been so near to losing all comprehension of reality as in today’s world in which there is no respect for truth.

NYT Admits That Its "Mountain of Evidence" For Russian Collusion Is Smaller Than A Molehill. MoA. Sep. 20, 2018.

Hold the Front Page. The Reporters Are Missing. John Pilger. Sep. 20, 2018.

With many if not most independent journalists barred or ejected from the "mainstream", a corner of the Internet has become a vital source of disclosure and evidence-based analysis: true journalism. Sites such as wikileaks.org, consortiumnews.com, ZNet zcomm.org, wsws.org, truthdig.com, globalresearch.org, counterpunch.org and informationclearinghouse.com are required reading for those trying to make sense of a world in which science and technology advance wondrously while political and economic life in the fearful "democracies" regress behind a media facade of narcissistic spectacle.

Climate Links: September 2018

Seven endangered species that could (almost) fit in a single train carriage. Mona Chalabi, Guardian. Sep. 17, 2018.

Some species are so close to extinction, that every remaining member can fit on a New York subway carriage (if they squeeze). 

All estimates come from the IUCN Red List, 2018.

Melting Arctic Permafrost Releases Acid that Dissolves Rocks. Mindy Weisberger, LiveScience. Sep. 18 2018.

'Dumbest Policy in the World': Report Details How Canada's Massive Fossil Fuel Subsidies Undermine Climate Action. Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams. Sep 17, 2018.

Working to curb emissions while using public funds to subsidize oil and gas industry "is like trying to bail water out of a leaky boat"

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Growth Rate. Carl Edward Rasmussen. Sep. 14, 2018.

Release of green house gases, such as carbon dioxide, or CO2, into the atmosphere is causing global warming. The underlying physical mechanism has been well understood at least since the 1970s. More recently, attempts have been made to limit the release of green house gases both nationally and globally, most prominently the Kyoto Protocol in force from 2005 and the Paris Agreement in force from 2016. In this note I assess the progress made so far in limiting atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.

So, what does the data tell us? It shows that all is not well in the state of the atmosphere! In order to prevent further warming, the carbon dioxide levels must not grow any further. On the growth curve, this corresponds the curve having to settle down to 0 ppm/y. There is absolutely no hint in the data that this is happening. On the contrary, the rate of growth is itself growing, having now reached about 2.3 ppm/y the highest growth rate ever seen in modern times. This is not just a "business as usual" scenario, it is worse than that, we're actually moving backward, becoming more and more unsustainable with every year. This shows unequivocally that the efforts undertaken so-far to limit green house gases such as carbon dioxide are woefully inadequate.

Why Growth Can't Be Green. Jason Hickel, Foreign Policy. Sep. 12, 2018.

New data proves you can support capitalism or the environment -- but it's hard to do both.

Warnings about ecological breakdown have become ubiquitous. Over the past few years, major newspapers, including the Guardian and the New York Times, have carried alarming stories on soil depletion, deforestation, and the collapse of fish stocks and insect populations. These crises are being driven by global economic growth, and its accompanying consumption, which is destroying the Earth’s biosphere and blowing past key planetary boundaries that scientists say must be respected to avoid triggering collapse. 

Many policymakers have responded by pushing for what has come to be called “green growth.” All we need to do, they argue, is invest in more efficient technology and introduce the right incentives, and we’ll be able to keep growing while simultaneously reducing our impact on the natural world, which is already at an unsustainable level. In technical terms, the goal is to achieve “absolute decoupling” of GDP from the total use of natural resources, according to the U.N. definition. 

It sounds like an elegant solution to an otherwise catastrophic problem. There’s just one hitch: New evidence suggests that green growth isn’t the panacea everyone has been hoping for. In fact, it isn’t even possible.

Green growth first became a buzz phrase in 2012 at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro. In the run-up to the conference, the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the U.N. Environment Program all produced reports promoting green growth. Today, it is a core plank of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. 

But the promise of green growth turns out to have been based more on wishful thinking than on evidence. In the years since the Rio conference, three major empirical studies have arrived at the same rather troubling conclusion: Even under the best conditions, absolute decoupling of GDP from resource use is not possible on a global scale.

This is how UN scientists are preparing for the end of capitalism. Nafeez Ahmed, The Independent. Sep 12, 2018.

As the era of cheap energy comes to an end, capitalist thinking is struggling to solve the huge problems facing humanity. So how do we respond?

Capitalism as we know it is over. So suggests a new report commissioned by a group of scientists appointed by the UN secretary general. The main reason? We’re transitioning rapidly to a radically different global economy, due to our increasingly unsustainable exploitation of the planet’s environmental resources and the shift to less efficient energy sources. 

Climate change and species extinctions are accelerating even as societies are experiencing rising inequality, unemployment, slow economic growth, rising debt levels, and impotent governments. Contrary to the way policymakers usually think about these problems these are not really separate crises at all.

These crises are part of the same fundamental transition. The new era is characterised by inefficient fossil fuel production and escalating costs of climate change. Conventional capitalist economic thinking can no longer explain, predict or solve the workings of the global economy in this new age.

Could we save the world if we all went vegan? Chloe Cornish, FT. Sep. 21, 2018.

According to scientist Joseph Poore of Oxford University, worldwide conversion to veganism would shrink the amount of farmland needed by 3.1 billion hectares, the size of the African continent. That land could store carbon instead, in trees for example. Poore estimates worldwide veganism could also help cut greenhouse gas emissions by a quarter.

In 2014, a UK study published in the journal Climatic Change found that eating a diet high in meat came with a cost of 7.2kg of carbon dioxide emissions per day, compared with 3.8kg for vegetarians and just 2.9kg for vegans. About a quarter of greenhouse gases attributable to human activity come from intensive farming, which is roughly the same as electricity and heat production, and slightly more than industry, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. Agriculture also pulverises ecosystems with deforestation and chemical change caused by fertilisers and pesticides. 

And it’s only going to get worse, because demand for meat and milk is rising

Nearly third of Earth’s surface must be protected to prevent mass extinction, warn leading scientists. Josh Gabbatiss, The Independent. Sep. 13, 2018.

Two leading scientists have issued a call for massive swathes of the planet’s land and sea to be protected from human interference in order to avert mass extinction. 

Current levels of protection “do not even come close to required levels”, they said, urging world leaders to come to a new arrangement by which at least 30 per cent of the planet’s surface is formally protected by 2030. 

Chief scientist of the National Geographic Society Jonathan Baillie and Chinese Academy of Sciences biologist Ya-Ping Zhang made their views clear in an editorial published in the journal Science.

Was Near-Term Extinction Unavoidable? Guy McPherson, Weekly Hubris. Sep. 1, 2018.

“The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, ‘Western civilisation’ or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.”—John Gray, from The Human: Disseminated Primatemaia


It is not at all clear that humanity can be saved (or, for that matter, is worth saving). Evolution drives us to breed, drives to procreate, and drives us to accumulate material possessions. Evolution always pushes us towards the brink, and culture piles on, hurling us into the abyss. Nietzsche was correct about our virtual lack of free will; and, as British philosopher John Gray points out in Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, free will is an illusion. It’s not merely the foam on the beer: it’s the last bubble of foam, the one that just popped. It’s no surprise, then, that we are sleep-walking into the future, or that the future is a lethal cliff. 

Collectively, several authors from the Enlightenment illustrate the capacity for, and importance of, Reason. Reason is the basis for understanding the material world. As such, it serves as the foundation upon which conservation biology can be understood and practiced. We can willingly conserve Nature and its parts only through description and understanding rooted in reality. Mysticism has proven an insufficient foundation for conserving nature. Ultimately, it has proven inadequate for saving humanity as well. Reason has similarly failed us, thus leaving us with no time and no other options. In this essay, I demonstrate links between Reason and conservation biology to illustrate the process by which our demise as a species was ensured long ago. In short, we were doomed by our narrowly clinical application of Reason. ...

War and Empire Links: September 2018

Another Coalition Strike On Yemen Civilian Bus Occurs The Same Day US Affirms It Stands By Saudis. zerohedge. Sep. 13, 2018.

America's Death Trail in Yemen, and the Importance of Showing Graphic Images of War. Walker Bragman, Paste Magazine. Aug. 24, 2018.

When We Commemorate The Tragedy of 9/11, Why Do We Ignore The Tragedy Of The Iraqi Women And Children We Killed Because Of It? Evert Cilliers, 3QD. Sep. 17, 2018.

When it comes to evil, nobody beats Hitler. He committed the biggest mass murder of innocent humans in all of history. 

Six million Jews, and that’s not even mentioning all the people who died because Hitler started the Second World War. 

But Hitler is not the only mass murderer in human history: there’s Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. 

And then there’s us. The people of America. 

Often given to calling America the greatest country on earth, we’ve had a very recent example in which we ourselves committed mass murder. President George W. Bush and his neo-conservative cabinet of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice and others, persuaded our noble American nation to go to war against Iraq and mass-murder a million and a half innocent Iraqi women and children.

oh, yeah, and it was NOT, as Cilliers says

"our hysterical reaction to the terrorists killing over three-thousand of us on 9/11, a tragedy which we commemorated this past week."

No, it was, as per below, the plan all along, for which 9/11 was required as a pretext.

"A million and a half innocents. We bombed and shot them to smithereens."

A Diabolic False Flag Empire. A Review of David Ray Griffin's The American Trajectory: Divine or Demonic? Edward Curtin, Behind the Curtain. Sep. 4, 2018.

We have, as Harold Pinter said in his Nobel address, been feeding on “a vast tapestry of lies” that surrounds us, lies uttered by nihilistic leaders and their media mouthpieces for a very long time. We have, or should have, bad consciences for not acknowledging being active or silent accomplices in the suppression of truth and the vicious murdering of millions at home and abroad. 

But, as Pinter said,

“I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.” 

No one is more emblematic of this noble effort than David Ray Griffin, who, in book after book since the attacks of 11 September 2001, has meticulously exposed the underside of the American empire and its evil masters. His persistence in trying to reach people and to warn them of the horrors that have resulted is extraordinary. Excluding his philosophical and theological works, this is his fifteenth book since 2004 on these grave issues of life and death and the future of the world. 

In this masterful book, he provides a powerful historical argument that right from the start with the arrival of the first European settlers, this country, despite all the rhetoric about it having been divinely founded and guided, has been “more malign that benign, more demonic than divine.” He chronologically presents this history, supported by meticulous documentation, to prove his thesis. In his previous book, Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World, Griffin cataloged the evil actions that flowed from the inside job/false flag attacks of September 11th, while in this one – a prequel – he offers a lesson in American history going back centuries, and he shows that one would be correct in calling the United States a “false flag empire.” 

The attacks of 11 September 2001 are the false flag fulcrum upon which his two books pivot. Their importance cannot be overestimated, not just for their inherent cruelty that resulted in thousands of innocent American deaths, but since they became the justification for the United States’ ongoing murderous campaigns termed “the war on terror” that have brought death to millions of people around the world. An international array of expendable people.

...

And again, how many Americans are aware of this depraved proposal that is documented and easily available? How many even want to contemplate it? For the need to remain in denial of the facts of history and believe in the essential goodness of America’s rulers is a very hard nut to crack. Griffin has written a dozen books about 11 September 2001, trying to do exactly that. 

If one is willing to embrace historical facts, however, then this outstanding book will open one’s eyes to the long-standing demonic nature of the actions of America’s rulers. A reader cannot come away from its lucidly presented history unaffected, unless one lives in a self-imposed fantasy world. The record is clear, and Griffin lays it out in all its graphic horror.

Dupe Throat: Bob Woodward's Self-Parody. Patrick Blanchfield, n+1. Sep. 12, 2018.

It is a bleak fact of American life that a brilliant woman can publicly speak the devastating truth about a prominent man for decades without his success being affected much at all. Joan Didion had Bob Woodward’s number back in 1996. Writing in the New York Review of Books, she skewered the famous journalist and his “disinclination . . . to exert cognitive energy on what he is told.” Selling a sexily packaged “insider’s inside story,” Woodward, per Didion, did more than just spin a “crudely personalized,” Great Man narrative history of recent events: he offered his powerful subjects near limitless opportunities for comprehensive image rehabilitation. For all his self-proclaimed rigor and attention to detail, Woodward’s work was at core defined by its “deferential spirit”—a basic, transactional pact in which he would be allowed access as long as he maintained his unquestioning credulity.

In the twenty-two years since Didion’s diagnosis, Bob Woodward has gone on to write eleven further books, seven of them about contemporaneous presidencies. America’s turn to global war has been particularly good for Woodward, not least because the inside story of leaders in wartime makes for especially sexy copy—and since the reversals and tragedies of war itself mean politicians have added need for P.R. triage of the sort Woodward happily provides.

But if his four books on George W. Bush and two on Barack Obama were case studies in proving Didion’s point, Woodward’s latest, Fear: Inside the Trump White House, drives it home with almost excruciating feats of self-parody. It’s not just that Woodward’s self-consciously Serious approach to Serious People sputters and short-circuits when confronted with the ludicrously Unserious figure of Donald Trump himself (who, unlike previous Presidents, did not make himself available for Woodward to interview.) Rather, Fear showcases Woodward in his most abject and pathetic role as what Christopher Hitchens, who also saw him for what he was, called a “stenographer to power.” For page after dumbfounding page, Fear reproduces, with gobsmacking credulity, the self-aggrandizing narratives of factitious scoundrels. Didion was absolutely right to class Woodward’s work as fundamentally a kind of “political pornography.” But Fear is to Woodward’s previous oeuvre of political pornography what Fifty Shades of Grey is to Twilight: vampiric fan-fiction repackaged as middlebrow smut.

17 Years Ago Today

9/11: The Evidence.

On April 10, 2018 the Lawyers Committee for 9/11 Inquiry submitted a legal petition to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York for a Grand Jury to examine the evidence for the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings on 9/11.

The 52-page petition, accompanied by 57 exhibits of evidence, states “The Lawyers’ Committee has reviewed the relevant available evidence . . . and has reached a consensus that there is not just substantial or persuasive evidence of yet-to-be-prosecuted crimes related to the use of pre-planted explosives and/or incendiaries to destroy WTC1, WTC2 and WTC7 in New York City on 9/11, but there is actually conclusive evidence that such federal crimes were committed… The Lawyers’ Committee states unequivocally that the evidence permits no other conclusion – as a matter of science, as a matter of logic, and as a matter of law.”

American Pravda: 9/11 Conspiracy Theories. Ron Unz. Sep. 10, 2018.

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Over the years, all these discordant claims had gradually raised my suspicions about the official 9/11 story to extremely strong levels, but it was only very recently that I finally found the time to begin to seriously investigate the subject and read eight or ten of the main 9/11 Truther books, mostly those by Prof. David Ray Griffin, the widely acknowledged leader in that field. And his books, together with the writings of his numerous colleagues and allies, revealed all sorts of very telling details, most of which had previously remained unknown to me. I was also greatly impressed by the sheer number of seemingly reputable individuals of no apparent ideological bent who had become adherents of the 9/11 Truth movement over the years.

I certainly attempted to locate contrary books supporting the official 9/11 story, but the only one widely discussed was a rather short volume published by Popular Mechanics magazine, whose lead researcher turned out to be the cousin of Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff. None of the writers appeared to have any serious academic credentials, and they seemed to generally ignore or deflect some of the strongest pieces of evidence provided by the numerous scholars and experts involved in the 9/11 Truth movement. Therefore I hardly found their rebuttal persuasive, and I half-wondered whether Homeland Security had quietly arranged the publication, which might help explain the extremely odd nepotistic coincidence. Popular magazines simply do not carry the scientific weight of research professors at major universities. Perhaps the holes in the official 9/11 narrative were so numerous and large that no serious scholar could be enlisted to defend it.

When utterly astonishing claims of an extremely controversial nature are made over a period of many years by numerous seemingly reputable academics and other experts, and they are entirely ignored or suppressed but never effectively refuted, reasonable conclusions seem to point in an obvious direction. Based on my very recent readings in this topic, the total number of huge flaws in the official 9/11 story has now grown enormously long, probably numbering in the many dozens. Most of these individual items seem reasonably likely and if we decide that even just two or three of them are correct, we must totally reject the narrative that so many of us have believed for so long.

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With so many gaping holes in the official story of the events seventeen years ago, each of us is free to choose to focus on those we personally consider most persuasive, and I have several of my own. Danish Chemistry professor Niels Harrit was one of the scientists who analyzed the debris of the destroyed buildings and detected the residual presence of nano-thermite, a military-grade explosive compound, and I found him quite credible during his hour-long interview on Red Ice Radio. The notion that an undamaged hijacker passport was found in an NYC street after the massive, fiery destruction of the skyscrapers is totally absurd, as was the claim that the top hijacker conveniently lost his luggage at one of the airports and it was found to contain a large mass of incriminating information. The testimonies of the dozens of firefighters who heard explosions just before the collapse of the buildings seems totally inexplicable under the official story. The sudden total collapse of Building Seven, never hit by any jetliners is also extremely implausible.

Let us now suppose that the overwhelming weight of evidence is correct, and concur with high-ranking former CIA intelligence analysts, distinguished academics, and experienced professionals that the 9/11 attacks were not what they appeared to be. We recognize the extreme implausibility that three huge skyscrapers in New York City suddenly collapsed at free-fall velocity into their own footprints after just two of them were hit by airplanes, and also that a large civilian jetliner probably did not strike the Pentagon leaving absolutely no wreckage and only a small hole. 

What actually did happen, and more importantly, who was behind it?

my 2017 post

The Fakest Fake News: The U.S. Government’s 9/11 Conspiracy Theory – A Review of 9/11Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation by David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth. Edward Curtin. Sep. 10, 2018.

If you want to fathom today’s world, absolutely nothing is more important than to understand the truth about the attacks of September 11, 2001. This is the definitive book on the subject.

For seventeen years we have been subjected to an onslaught of U.S. government and corporate media propaganda about 9/11 that has been used to support the “war on terror” that has resulted in millions of deaths around the world. It has been used as a pretext to attack nations throughout the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. It has led to a great increase in Islamophobia since Muslims were accused of being responsible for the attacks. It has led to a crackdown on civil liberties in the United States, the exponential growth of a vast and costly national security apparatus, the spreading of fear and anxiety on a great scale, and a state of permanent war that is pushing the world toward a nuclear confrontation. And much, much more.

The authors of this essential book, David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth, and all their colleagues who have contributed to this volume, have long been at the front lines trying to wake people up to the real news about 9/11. They have battled against three U.S. presidents, a vast propaganda machine “strangely” allied with well-known leftists, and a corporate mass media intent on serving deep-state interests, all of whom have used illogic, lies, and pseudo-science to conceal the terrible truth. Yet despite the establishment’s disinformation and deceptions, very many people have come to suspect that the official story of the September 11, 2001 attacks is not true.

With the publication of 9/11Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation, they now have a brilliant source book to use to turn their suspicions into certitudes. And for those who have never doubted the official account (or accounts would be more accurate), reading this book should shock them into reality, because it is not based on speculation, but on carefully documented and corroborated facts, exacting logic, and the scientific method.

The book is based on the establishment in 2011 of a scientific review project comprising 23 experts with a broad spectrum of expertise, including people from the fields of chemistry, structural engineering, physics, aeronautical engineering, airline crash investigation, piloting, etc. Their job was to apply systematic and disciplined analyses to the verifiable evidence about the 9/11 attacks. They used a model called the Delphi Method as a way to achieve best-evidence consensus. This best-evidence consensus model is used in science and medicine, and the 9/11 Consensus Panel used it to examine the key claims of the official account(s). Each “Official Account” was reviewed and compared to “The Best Evidence” to reach conclusions. The authors explain it thus:

The examination of each claim received three rounds of review and feedback. According to the panel’s investigative model, members submitted their votes to the two of us moderators while remaining blind to one another. Proposed points had to receive a vote of at least 85 percent to be accepted…This model carries so much authority in medicine that medical consensus statements derived from it are often reported in the news. They represent the highest standard of medical research and practice and may result in malpractice lawsuits if not followed.

This research process went on for many years, with the findings reported in this book. The Consensus 9/11 Panel provides evidence against the official claims in nine categories:

1. The Destruction of the Twin Towers
2. The Destruction of WTC 7
3. The Attack on the Pentagon
4. The 9/11 Flights
5. US Military Exercises on and before 9/11
6. Claims about Military and Political Leaders
7. Osama bin Laden and the Hijackers
8. Phone Calls from the 9/11 Flights
9. Insider Trading

Each category is introduced and then broken down into sub-sections called points, which are examined in turn. For example, the destruction of the Twin Towers has points that include, “The Claim That No One Reported Explosions in the Twin Towers,” “The Claim That the Twin Towers Were Destroyed by Airplane Impacts, Jet Fuel, and Fire,” “The Claim That There Were Widespread Infernos in the South Tower,” etc. Each point is introduced with background, the official account is presented, then the best evidence, followed by a conclusion. Within the nine categories there are 51 points examined, each meticulously documented through quotations, references, etc., all connected to 875 endnotes that the reader can follow. It is scrupulously laid out and logical, and the reader can follow it sequentially or pick out an aspect that particularly interests them.

The 9/11 Consensus Panel members describe their goal and purpose as follows:

The purpose of the 9/11 Consensus Panel is to provide the world with a clear statement, based on expert independent opinion, of some of the best evidence opposing the official narrative about 9/11. 

The goal of the Consensus Panel is to provide a ready source of evidence-based research to any investigation that may be undertaken by the public, the media, academia, or any other investigative body or institution.

As a sociologist who teaches research methods and does much research, I find the Consensus Panel’s method exemplary and their findings accurate. They have unmasked a monstrous lie. It is so ironic that such serious scholars, who question and research 9/11, have been portrayed as irrational and ignorant “conspiracy theorists” by people whose thinking is magical, illogical, and pseudo-scientific in the extreme.

A review is no place to go into all the details of this book, but I will give a few examples of the acumen of the Panel’s findings.

As a grandson of a Deputy Chief of the New York Fire Department (343 firefighters died on 9/11), I find it particularly despicable that the government agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), that was charged with investigating the collapse of the Towers and Building 7, would claim that no one gave evidence of explosions in the Twin Towers, when it is documented by the fastidious researcher Graeme MacQueen, a member of The 9/11 Consensus Panel, that over 100 firefighters who were at the scene reported hearing explosions in the towers. One may follow end-note 22 to MacQueen’s research and his sources that are indisputable. There are recordings.

On a connected note, the official account claims that there were widespread infernos in the South Tower that prevented firefighters from ascending to the 78th floor. Such a claim would support the notion that the building could have collapsed as a result of fires caused by the plane crashing into the building. But as 9/11 Unmasked makes clear, radio tapes of firefighters ascending to the 78th floor and saying this was not so, prove that “there is incontrovertible evidence that the firefighter teams were communicating clearly with one another as they ascended WTC” and that there were no infernos to stop them, as they are recorded saying. They professionally went about their jobs trying to save people.

Then the South Tower collapsed and so many died. But it couldn’t have collapsed from “infernos” that didn’t exist. Only explosives could have brought it down.

A reader can thus pick up this book, check out that section, and use common sense and elementary logic to reach the same conclusion. And by reaching that conclusion and going no further in the book, the entire official story of 9/11 falls apart.

Or one can delve further, let’s say by dipping into the official claim that a domestic airline attack on the Pentagon was not expected. Opening to page 78, the reader can learn that “NBC’s Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski was warned of the Pentagon attack by an intelligence officer,” who specified the illogical spot where the attack would happen shortly before it did. In Miklaszewski’s words, “And then he got very close to me, and, almost silent for a few seconds, he leaned in and said, ‘This attack was so well coordinated that if I were you, I would stay off the E Ring – where our NBC office was – the outer ring of the Pentagon for the rest of the day, because we’re next.’” The authors say correctly, “The intelligence officer’s apparent foreknowledge was unaccountably specific.” For if a terrorist were going to fly a plane into Pentagon, the most likely spot would be to dive into the roof where many people might be killed, including top brass and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. To make an impossibly acrobatic maneuver to fly low into an outside wall would make no sense. And for the government to claim that this impossible maneuver was executed by the alleged hijacker Hani Hanjour, a man who according to documentation couldn’t even pilot a small plane, is absurd. But the intelligence officer knew what would happen, and the reader can learn this, and marvel.

Or the reader can start from the beginning and read straight through the book. They will learn in detail that the official version of the attacks of 9/11 is fake news at its worst. It is a story told for dunces.

Griffin and Woodworth and their colleagues simply and clearly in the most logical manner show that the emperor has no clothes, not even a mask.

Feature Reference Article #14

We Cannot Fight Climate Change With Capitalism, Says Report. Laura Paddison, Huff Po. Aug. 31, 2018.

The world's economies are totally unprepared for rapid climate change, rising social inequality and the end of cheap energy.

As access to cheap, plentiful energy dries up and the effects of climate change take hold, we are entering a new era of profound challenge ― and free market capitalism cannot dig us out. This is the conclusion of a report produced for the United Nations by Bios, an independent research institute based in Finland.

Signs of a world in turmoil are not hard to find. People are increasingly feeling the effects of rapid climate change. Cities boil in more than 120-degree heat, California burns and the Arctic thaws. Meanwhile, biodiversity loss is reaching terrifying levels, with animals going extinct at about 1,000 times the natural rate. In addition, as societies, we’re facing increased inequality, unemployment and soaring personal debt levels.

Faced with these interconnected crises, says the report, our economies are woefully underprepared: “It can be safely said that no widely applicable economic models have been developed specifically for the upcoming era.”

The paper, commissioned by the U.N. to feed into its 2019 Global Sustainable Development Report, looks specifically at the next 20 to 30 years as a key transition period during which the world must radically cut emissions and consumption to have a hope of stopping climate change.

Traditional ways of economic thinking have been based on the assumption we will continue to have access to cheap and plentiful sources of energy and materials, says the report, but the “era of cheap energy is coming to an end.”

The thrust of the authors’ argument is that, for the first time, economies are moving to sources of energy that are much less efficient ― meaning more and more effort is needed to get smaller amounts of energy. There are plenty of fossil fuels that can still be pulled from the ground but doing so would shoot through climate commitments and accelerate global warming. In addition, we have used up the planet’s capacity to handle the waste generated through all our material and energy use.

In other words, we are at an ecological crunch point and we don’t have the economic tools to deal with it.

“Trusting that the free market capitalist dynamics will get us there, that of course is not going to happen,” report co-author Paavo Järvensivu, an academic who specializes in economics and culture at Bios, says in a phone call with HuffPost. Economies that rely on the power of markets, notes the report, don’t even recognize the problem as they’re too focused on short-term profits to take account of longer-term issues like climate change and environmental destruction.

But Järvensivu is also keen not to fuel an argument about whether capitalism is dead.

“I think it’s harmful to think of capitalism as this one big lump, or capitalism as this kind of ‘either, or’ question: that we either have capitalism or something totally different,” Järvensivu says.

“The social and material need for this transformation [away from cheap energy and mass consumption] is so acute and societies have to go through a very dramatic shift over 20 to 30 years to get their emissions dramatically lower,” he adds, “so we are past this discussion of should we have capitalism or should we have something else.”

Instead, he says, we need to find new ways of thinking about the economy to meet these challenges. It’s asking the question, he says, “Do we aim for more consumption or do we aim for liveable environments in the future?”

Around 80 percent of global energy comes from fossil fuels ― oil, coal and gas, which powered industrialization but have a heavy toll through their climate change impact. While we need to wean ourselves off these, renewables are not efficient enough yet compared to conventional energy and the infrastructure is not in place for it, the report says. “Meeting current or growing levels of energy need in the next few decades with low-carbon solutions will be extremely difficult, if not impossible,” it notes.

What’s needed, says the report, is to combine developing clean energy sources with lowering energy use. And it has some suggestions about how to achieve this without compromising people’s opportunity for a decent life.

The report calls for an overhaul of transportation away from a focus on car ownership. In cities, this would mean changes in city planning to focus on biking and walking, combined with an electric public transit system. This “could be beneficial for people in a larger sense,” says Järvensivu, as it “means less transport, less owning private cars, but not necessarily a less good quality life.”

International freight transportation and aviation would need to be slashed, says the report, as they “cannot continue to grow at current rates” because of the need to cut emissions as well as the lack of low carbon alternatives.

Food systems also need to be rethought. Both rich and poor countries should focus on self-sufficiency, advises the report, to produce a diverse selection of food for their own populations. As for diets, it advocates that dairy and meat, which have a big climate impact, be replaced by largely plant-based diets.

Housing is the third area slated for transformation. Construction using steel and concrete is hugely carbon intensive. The report authors suggest moving to wooden structures, which could provide carbon storage.

All these changes require concerted political action. “There must be a comprehensive vision and closely coordinated plans. Otherwise a rapid system level transformation towards global sustainability goals is inconceivable,” says the report.

Which is all well and good, but doesn’t exactly jibe with what’s been happening on the political scene. President Donald Trump is hellbent on cutting environmental regulation and has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement. Even the countries that remain in the agreement are failing on their commitments to curb climate change.

There has been interest in introducing a carbon price, which means charging polluters for the carbon they emit ― a key pledge Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made in his campaign. But the report argues this measure is nowhere near good enough: “As a policy tool, carbon pricing lacks the crucial element of coordinating a diverse set of economic actors toward a common goal.”

Järvensivu believes the push for action will come from the fact that people are starting to genuinely worry about their future security and looking for collective action. “These kind of things might actually start to matter quite a bit more than caring about a new iPhone or a yearly trip to Thailand,” he says. “We are actually looking for a sense of security and not in a way that we would just aim for more consuming power in terms of money and so on.”

He cites Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) as an example of someone seeking transformational economic change, along with professor Stephanie Kelton, whose work argues sovereign governments cannot run out of money, thus debunking the argument that economies cannot afford to make the transformations needed to address climate change.

Järvensivu insists the report isn’t advocating for an economy that would be unrecognizable from what we have now, at least not in the short term. Rather, he says, it seeks to identify the material and energy crises approaching us and the kinds of economic tools and policies we need to meet them.

“After 20 to 30 years, we don’t know what this [economy] would look like, if we actually managed to achieve radically lower emissions and still secure possibilities for a good life ... are we then even concerned whether this was capitalism or not, or are we looking for other things,” he says. “Probably we are.”

Global Sustainable Development Report 2019 drafted by the Group of independent scientists. Paavo Järvensivu (1*,2*), Tero Toivanen (1,3*), Tere Vadén (1), Ville Lähde (1), Antti Majava (1), Jussi T. Eronen (1,4*). Aug. 14, 2018.

*1 BIOS Research Unit, Helsinki, Finland
*2 Aalto University, Sustainability in Business Research, Helsinki, Finland
*3 Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland
*4 Ecosystems and Environment Research Programme & Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science (HELSUS), Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland

Governance of Economic Transition

We live in an era of turmoil and profound change in the energetic and material underpinnings of economies. The era of cheap energy is coming to an end (Murphy 2014, Lambert et al. 2014, Hall et al. 2014, Hall et al. 2009, Hirsch et al. 2005). Because economies are for the first time in human history shifting to energy sources that are less energy efficient, production of usable energy (exergy) will require more, not less, effort on the part of societies to power both basic and non-basic human activities. Sink costs are also rising; economies have used up the capacity of planetary ecosystems to handle the waste generated by energy and material use. Climate change is the most pronounced sink cost.

What will happen during the oncoming years and decades when we enter the era of energy transition, combined with emission cuts, and start to witness more severe effects of climate change? That is the big question. What kind of economic understanding and governance models do we need, now that economies are undergoing dramatic rather than incremental change? While economists typically emphasize carbon pricing as a policy tool for tackling climate change, natural scientists and multidisciplinary environmental research groups argue for more profound political engagement and proactive governance of economic transition (Chapin et al. 2011, Steffen et al. 2018) – something akin to a global Marshall Plan (Aronoff 2017, Gore 1992). This difference in perspective is in part due to relatively recent advancements in environmental research, which have revealed a faster-than-expected decline in natural ecosystems and take into account the whole range of human-induced pressures, and not merely climate emissions (Barnosky et al. 2014).

New economic thinking for the turbulent years ahead

Decades of academic work in ecological economics have gone into integrating energetic and material stocks, flows, and boundaries into economic thinking (van den Bergh 2001, Røpke 2005). Although some progress can be seen on the economic-theoretical level, the economic models which inform political decision-making in rich countries almost completely disregard the energetic and material dimensions of the economy (Hall and Klitgaard 2011).

As Hall and Klitgaard (2011) have shown, today’s dominant economic theories, approaches, and models were developed during the era of energetic and material abundance. These theories were challenged only temporarily by the oil crises of the 1970s and the 1990s; no significant theoretical or political changes were made. Thus, dominant economic theories as well as policy-related economic modeling rely on the presupposition of continued energetic and material growth. The theories and models anticipate only incremental changes in the existing economic order. Hence, they are inadequate for explaining the current turmoil.

In addition to rapid climate change, biodiversity loss, and other environmental hazards, societies are witnessing rising inequality, rising unemployment, slow economic growth, rising debt levels, and governments without workable tools for managing their economies. Central banks in the US and the Eurozone have resorted to unconventional measures such as negative interest rates and buying up significant amounts of public debt. This has relieved some economic pressure, but many commentators are worried about what can be done after these extraordinary measures are exhausted and the next economic crisis hits (Stein 2018).

It can be safely said that no widely applicable economic models have been developed specifically for the upcoming era. Here we highlight under-utilized tenets of existing economic-theoretical thinking that can assist governments in channeling economies toward activity that causes a radically lighter burden on natural ecosystems and simultaneously ensures more equal opportunities for good human life. Our focus is on the transition period, the next few decades.

What needs to be done – in social and material terms?

Let us first take a glance at what economies need to accomplish, in concrete terms. They need to transform the ways in which energy, transport, food, and housing are produced and consumed (O’Neill et al. 2018). The result should be production and consumption that provides decent opportunities for a good life while dramatically reducing the burden on natural ecosystems. In terms of greenhouse gases, global net emissions should be zero around 2050 – in Europe and the US by around 2040. (Rockström et al. 2017)

• Energy. Currently, approximately 80% of the global net primary energy supply comes from fossil fuels – oil, natural gas, and coal (IEA 2017). Good quality, easily available fossil fuels have powered the industrialization of nations world-wide. Now, the entire energy infrastructure needs to be transformed. The energy return on investment (EROI) decreases across the spectrum – unconventional oils, nuclear and renewables return less energy in generation than conventional oils, whose production has peaked – and societies need to abandon fossil fuels because of their impact on the climate. Because renewables have a lower EROI and different technical requirements, such as the need to build energy storage facilities, meeting current or growing levels of energy need in the next few decades with low-carbon solutions will be extremely difficult, if not impossible. Thus, there is considerable pressure to lower total energy use. The development of energy production will also need to be closely linked with the development of the systems and practices of energy consumption, for example, the electrification and sharing of transport vehicles. (Murphy 2014, Lambert et al. 2014, Hall et al. 2014, Hall et al. 2009)
• Transport. In cities, walking and biking should be emphasized and the remaining public or semi-public transport in and between cities should be largely electrified. This will require changes in city planning (for example, how homes and workplaces are connected to each other and how convenient biking is), in vehicle production, in transport infrastructure such as railways, roads and charging stations, and in energy production and storage. Due to the decreased need and capacity for rapid transit, the overall result will most likely be less transport rather than more. (Banister 2011, Geels 2012) In addition, international freight transport and aviation cannot continue to grow at current rates, because of the need to cut emissions and the lack of low-carbon alternatives to current technologies.
• Food. In developing countries, the regime of exporting a narrow selection of commodities and raw materials and importing cheap basic food items has not worked for local communities. A wide array of research shows that developing countries ought to focus on providing diverse nutrition for their own people and thereby increase local livelihood opportunities and improve socio-material conditions in general. Simultaneously, most countries, affluent and developing alike, face great environmental challenges in food production. It will be too risky to rely on the functioning of only a few main food production areas in the future. (FAO et al. 2015, FAO et al. 2017) This will have repercussions for international food trade, also in Europe and the US. Countries currently relying on significant amounts of food imports will have to attain a high degree of food self-sufficiency, with international food trade regaining its position as a crucial component of food security rather than serving as a commodity market. With regard to both production and consumption practices, dairy and meat should make way for largely plant-based diets (Poore & Nemecek 2018).
• Housing. The construction industry is currently dominated by concrete and steel, whose manufacturing and other life-cycle processes are very energy-intensive and cause significant climate emissions and other types of waste (ECORYS 2014). Long-lasting wood buildings, on the contrary, can provide carbon storage (Pingoud et al. 2003, Soimakallio et al. 2016, Gustavsson et al. 2017). A significant shift toward using wood in construction would require changes in the entire production network, starting from forestry, in which construction uses compete for example with paper and energy uses. In addition to manufacturing, cooling and heating are the most significant drivers of lifetime emissions from housing. As for transport and food, the level of emissions caused by cooling and heating is closely tied with the mode of energy production on the one hand and with housing practices – e.g., the level and means of convenience – on the other hand (Shove 2003).

Rapid economic transition requires proactive governance – markets cannot accomplish the task

It is clear from these examples that strong political governance is required to accomplish the key transitions. Market-based action will not suffice – even with a high carbon price. There must be a comprehensive vision and closely coordinated plans. Otherwise, a rapid system-level transformation toward global sustainability goals is inconceivable. Mazzucato (2013, 2018) has examined this topic from the perspective of innovation policy and argues that historically, major system-level innovations such as the US Apollo program have required the state to set the mission and coordinate and finance much of the related research and development. According to her research, achieving system-level transition has required and will require proactive mission-oriented innovation – it will not be enough for the state to fix “market failures” reactively. Of course, innovation alone is not enough, and we will return to the question of limiting resource use and organizing jobs below.

The typical opposition to the need for rapid coordinated transition in most Western countries begins with the influential idea that only under a regime of limited government “intervention” can the market sustain its efficiency. Thus, if the state prioritizes one technology over the other, it will most likely prioritize the wrong one. If the state employs people to build new infrastructure, it will crowd out private enterprise. From this standpoint, many economists have settled for carbon pricing as the least interventionist, economically most efficient “first-best” policy for cutting greenhouse gas emissions (Jenkins 2014). Carbon pricing can be accomplished via carbon taxes or emissions caps and permit trading (“cap-and-trade”). A carbon price is a “Pigouvian fee” (Pigou 2017 [1932]) designed to correct undesired, unpriced market externalities.

A key problem with carbon pricing has been that states, federations, or unions have not implemented it on a sufficiently high level, fearing industrial leakage to less environmentally-regulated countries. For this reason, many economists and politicians hope for global carbon pricing. But if we return to the four examples above, energy, transport, food, and housing, we can see that it would be highly unlikely that even global carbon pricing would guide economic activity in the right direction – at least with sufficient speed and breadth. As a policy tool, carbon pricing lacks the crucial element of coordinating a diverse set of economic actors toward a common goal. Individual actors would have an incentive to decrease carbon emissions, but they would still compete through their own business logics; there would be nothing to ensure that any one business logic would support the transition to sustainability on a systemic level. Moreover, it has been extremely difficult in recent years to settle almost anything with such a wide impact on an international level.

Another influential idea opposing state-guided transition to sustainability is the goal of a balanced state budget, which is considered essential even in the relatively short run. This means, on the one hand, that states should avoid spending to avoid running budget deficits, and on the other hand, that they should avoid regulation that negatively affects existing private enterprise and consequently tax revenues. Thus, states have not been keen to invest in sustainability transformation or limit resource-intensive economic activity.

Both a priori arguments against strong state governance presented above depend on a particular kind of economic theory, namely the neoclassical school. If we switch to another theoretical lens, looking at the economy from another perspective, these arguments lose their effect. The theoretical move is analogous to a shift from a focus on individual cognition to social or structural dimensions of human behavior, where we begin to see that individual wants, for example, are not merely individual but are produced or conditioned by a set of extra-individual dimensions. This kind of theoretical shift is a normal procedure for any student of the social or human sciences.

Economic theory to support transition governance

Whereas the neoclassical school of economic theory starts from a set of theoretical axioms depicting reality in terms of simplified mathematical functions leading to equilibrium and presupposed to hold in any historical situation, the Post-Keynesian school (Hein and Stockhammer 2011, Lavoie 2009) builds its theories on existing economic institutions. Post-Keynesian analysis is historical in nature; markets would not and do not exist without political regulation. Consequently, the Post-Keynesian approach is not a priori wary of the state’s role in the market. It does not assume that markets always seek equilibrium, but maintains instead that capitalist economies tend to generate market bubbles and other crises. Markets do not lead to socially and ecologically desirable outcomes on their own, but require active political guidance.

Many Post-Keynesians, working through the framework of modern monetary theory, emphasize the economic role of states or unions of states with their own currencies and central banks (Wray 2015, Mitchell 2015, Lavoie 2013). A central claim of these scholars is that states can never run out of their own currency. Unlike natural, social, and technological resources, sovereign currencies are not a limiting factor in collective action such as the transition to sustainability. This has been the case since the gold standard was abandoned and fiat money adopted in the 1970s. The state can always spend and invest in its own currency. Moreover, it does not have to hold on to particular jobs or industries for the sake of tax revenues. In other words, from this perspective, collective action, organized at least partly through the state, should be guided not by the need to secure public funds, but on the basis of social goals and material boundary conditions.

As a practical policy tool, Post-Keynesians have suggested a so-called job guarantee (Cook et al. 2008, Murray and Forstater 2017, Tcherneva 2018), which would ensure that all people capable and willing to work would be able to get a permanent, state-funded, and locally administered job. The most suitable jobs for the program would be those that almost anyone can do with limited training. The jobs could be modeled to serve the transition to sustainability and to build capacities to adapt to climate change: for example, installing decentralized energy solutions and preparing for floods. In addition to triggering the transition, the job guarantee would ensure full employment. It would lessen insecurity and the need to compete for environmentally destructive jobs on the individual and the collective level.

The Post-Keynesian approach challenges economic orthodoxy and supports sustainability transitions in the current economic and political context of Western and other similarly ordered countries. Developments in China serve as a reminder that economic theories other than neoclassical ones are already effective in the world. In China, economic transitions have not been held back by the ideas of minimum state intervention or a balanced budget. Past transitions have, however, been ecologically unsustainable in many ways. Beyond Post-Keynesian theory, there can be a variety of economic theories that support rapid materially and ecologically beneficial transitions. The key theoretical requirement is that they must enable politics to acknowledge transformational social goals and the material boundaries of economic activity.

The new geopolitical order during and after transition governance

Taken together, what would these policy measures mean for the world economy and geopolitics? Of course, as is always the case in large-scale societal transformations, it is difficult to predict the overall outcome when there are multiple variables, but generally the direction would be toward “a Keynesian world with planetary boundaries”: unique, autonomous economies and societies engaging in regulated international trade for specific reasons, such as food security, rather than for the sake of free trade as a principle. Individuals, organizations, and nations would approach the economy as a tool to enable a good life rather than as an end in itself. Economic activity will gain meaning not by achieving economic growth but by rebuilding infrastructure and practices toward a post-fossil fuel world with a radically smaller burden on natural ecosystems. In rich countries, citizens would have less purchasing power than now, but it would be distributed more equally. Citizens in all countries would have access to meaningful jobs and they could trust that a desirable future is being constructed on the collective level.

The focus on life-improving and emissions-reducing goals rather than abstract economic goals would also characterize the relations between developing and developed countries; economic activity between them would consist of bi-directional learning in order to build new, locally suitable infrastructure and practices at both ends. This kind of proactive state-led economic governance oriented toward self-sustained, low-emission production and consumption runs contrary to the currently dominant world political order, which has been organized around international free trade. Key international institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund, which has been known for its policies of privatization and export-led industrialization, will need to be reconfigured accordingly.

Climate change and other environmental changes threaten livelihoods across the planet and thus give cause for mass migration. It is in the interest of all countries to maintain local opportunities for a good life. Because different countries and areas have different path-dependencies and goals, there is no socio-technical solution that fits all. One especially important constraint for rich countries is that dramatic reductions in emissions at current high levels of consumption are very challenging, if not impossible. Some developing countries, in contrast, can make significant improvements in their people’s wellbeing with new investments in low-carbon solutions. These developing countries do not need to begin by dismantling the fossil-fuelled infrastructure that has provided a range of low-cost production and consumption opportunities in rich countries for decades. Shifting climate zones towards the Earth’s North and South Poles ads another imperative for learning: for example, food producers in northern Europe have a lot to learn from their southern colleagues.

In view of the challenges encountered today in implementing meaningful international agreements, the most likely option for initiating transitions to sustainability would be for a group of progressive states to take the lead. 

This would require economic thinking that enables large public investment programs on the one hand and strong regulation and environmental caps on the other. In the modern global economy, states are the only actors that have the legitimacy and capacity to fund and organize large-scale transitions.