Canada's changing climate presentation

So so so many questions:


What is your view of scientific reticence? Do you communicate your expectations and concerns any differently in private than in public?


Given political considerations (I.e. policy prescriptions must be consistent with continued economic growth) as well as optimism bias and other behavioural psych factors that we all tend to suffer from to some degree, are we still, even now as govts are declaring climate "emergency"s, potentially downplaying the risks?


Is your report Independent or based on IPCC? (Science made in Canada? Or predicated on global scientific consensus)


If at 415ppm now and 500ish on CO2e basis... even without any further emissions.. when was planet last there.. and what was sea level and temp then?


What impacts are we seeing now that are already worse than scientific consensus had assumed we would yet be experiencing? E.g. arctic temps? Antarctic ice sheet destabilization?


Do ranges of RCPs totally encapsulate all possible scenarios? If worst case RCP 8.5 is actually BAU, do we really think it cant be worse than that?


Ecs?
Assumptions
E.g.  is Ecs static or dynamic
Changes over time as other factors change... e.g. deforestation and ocean heating and acidification changing ability of carbon sinks to keep operating... also albedo etc from sea ice loss... and increasing release of methane not just from industrial sources like fracking but also permafrost and seafloor release


What will make temp stabilize at current levels give climate system inertia and lagged effects of past emissions?


If we are on track for 3+C..and 6 in Canada and 10 in the arctic...  how do we stop there?


Tipping points and feedback loops

New wave of Climate models?

Isnt ECS being increased in new gen models?

Carbon budget based on 50% chance of staying under temp target

Precautionary principle re probabilities

But range of climate outcomes isnt normal curve...what about fat tail risks... should govts be basing their policy decisions on 50% chance of failure particularly when those probabilities based on models that dont yet capture all poorly understood climate phenomena meaning models potentially understating prospective temp changes?


Does conservatism in cli sci  communication provide a false sense of precision?

The end of super-giants

The end of super-giants; and what if means. Dr. Louis Arnoux. View Damn the Matrix. May 16, 2019.

The meaning of this news snippet takes a bit of explaining.  What the specialised media did not emphasise is what follows:

When giant oil fields go into decline, they usually decline abruptly. Ghawar’s decline is ominous. It was discovered in 1948 and until recently represented about 50% of the oil crude production of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Ghawar is representative of some 100 to 200 giant oil fields. Most of them are old.  The most recently discovered giants are of a diminutive size compared with those old giants.[2]

Giants represent about 1% of the total number of oil fields and yet produce over 60% of conventional oil crude.[3] Very few real giants have been discovered in recent years. The geology of the planet is now known well enough and prospects for new significant giant oil discoveries are known to be low.  In recent decades, discoveries of smaller oil fields have not been able to compensate for the eventual loss of the giants. Figure 1 illustrates the matter. It shows the net flux of addition to reserves per year (additional volumes less volumes used). Since 2010 the steep declining trend has worsened. The level of new discoveries per year is now only about 5% of yearly reserves depletion. That is, since the late 1970s the oil industry has been steadily depleting its stock-in-trade at a rather fast rate.

The fact that Ghawar is in terminal decline means that we must consider that most of the old giants are in a similar situation.  Some were already known to be in a terminal status, e.g. Cantarell in Mexico or the main North Sea fields.[4]  However, there is a paucity of recent public data on giants.  The matter of their depletion status is commercially sensitive.  Still, a number of public databases and studies from about 10 years ago provide a robust backdrop to the Ghawar news.[5]  This needs to be unpacked a bit more.  Older giants have been developed more slowly and as a result, tend to have lower depletion rates once they pass their peak of production.  More recent ones have been developed more aggressively with more recent technology and as a result, tend to have a much steeper depletion rate once past their production peak.  In short, we now must expect a “bunching”of abrupt declines of oil giants, old and more recent, between now and about 2030.

So, in fact, this little snippet of news about Ghawar tells us a lot.  It corroborates the assessment developed since 2010 with a number of colleagues, based on a thermodynamics analysis of the PPS and summarised in Figure 2.  In short, our world runs on net energy from oil.  Due to resource depletion, it takes more and more net energy from oil to get more oil. We estimate that in consequence, since the early 1980s, the absolute amount of net energy delivered by the oil industry to the non-oil part of the industrial world has been in steep decline.  The data summarised in Figure 3 corroborates Figure 2.

Almost no one noticed how dire the situation has become because most analysts reason in terms of barrels of crude or in financial terms. GDP growth data aggregates the growth of the oil industry world (oil industry plus everything and everyone that are necessary for the oil industry to operate) with that of the non-oil world.  This aggregation masks what is actually taking place. To keep operating the oil world progressively starves the non-oil world of the net energy that is vital for its continued existence.

It is in our view significant that it is precisely in the early 1980s that total global debt took off to high heaven (source Bank of America Meryl Lynch). This steep debt growth, evaluated in fiat currencies, masks the decline in net energy from oil; net energy that is at the source of all, actual tangible, real economic growth. Due to this decline, it is most unlikely that this global debt will ever be repaid.

The terminal decline of Ghawar also corroborates the more indirect analyses of the PPS summarised in Figure 3.  This means that the part-floating of Aramco that KSA wants to achieve in the near future is most likely so as to pre-empt having to go into a “fire sale” at a later stage when the decline of Ghawar and of the other Saudi large fields become rather obvious to even the most ignorant traders.

More importantly, the corroboration of our earlier analyses by the Ghawar news and the data summarised in Figure 3 tell us that we must expect abrupt turmoil from 2020 onwards not only re oil, but also concerning all other forms of energy supply, as well as socially and financially (consider the tail end of the orange curve on Figure 2). The present turmoil in Venezuela will probably appear as a forerunner of a nasty situation becoming global.

To emerge, develop and flourish, every civilisation requires a self-powered energy supply chain – i.e. it takes energy to get energy, so any civilisation lives on the energy surplus delivered to it by its self-powered energy supply chain(s). In the globalised industrial world’s case and until recently this was the oil industry (including the whole of the support systems required for the oil industry to operate).  Since oil overtook coal and biomass during the earlier part of the 20^th century, the oil industry has been the sole self-powered supply chain of the industrial world. All other forms of energy depend on it, coal, natural gas, nuclear, all so-called “renewables”, and all the way to feed and food production. In our estimates, the oil industry entered terminal decline about 7 years ago and this decline will be over by about 2030 or before.  In our view, the decline of Ghawar corroborates that this end is most likely than not going to be abrupt.

The big problem is that presently we do not have a substitute energy supply chain that could be deployed in time. As summarised in Figure 4, what one calls “renewables” is not quite so and by a wide margin. Not only current “renewable” equipment requires net energy from oil for its manufacture, transport, maintenance, and eventual decommissioning but also its production results in substantial greenhouse gases emissions (GHGs).  Even more importantly, the current “renewable” technology mix cannot form the basis for a new, sustainable, self-powered energy supply chain able to substitute for the oil-based one within the time frame defined by the decline of net energy from oil and the imperatives to combat catastrophic global warming (at least 45% greenhouse gases emissions reduction by 2030).

We call the present situation the Energy Seneca (after the Roman philosopher who first identified patterns of progressive growth followed with a peak and then abrupt decline). Figure 5 explains why the industrial world is now in a very tight spot, just after it has passed through the Energy Seneca apex.  On the one hand, the oil industry world is trapped in the famous Red Queen effect (RQ).  It has to keep pumping at an ever-faster rate to keep delivering net energy while, per barrel extracted, this net energy is in steep decline.  Soon it will run out of breath…  On the other hand, alternatives face what I call the Inverse Red Queen effect (1/RQ).  If the alternatives grow too fast, their manufacture and deployment drain energy from the industrial world just when it desperately needs more. And if those alternatives do not grow fast enough, then the industrial world is bound to abruptly decline or even collapse.

The harsh reality that few have identified is that presently none of the solutions touted by “green” business interests, governmental bodies, and NGOs alike can extricate us in time from the combination of RQ and 1/RQ effects. Not only this combination precludes building a new self-powered energy supply chain in time but also it precludes augmenting the present oil industry with non-oil energy sources to extend its terminal operations.  In short, unbeknown to most, our world is in the process of losing access to all the energy forms it depends on.  This thermodynamic conundrum compounds global warming and all other ecological, social and financial global issues to form a lethal avalanche that has been in train since about 2008.  There is global cognitive failure on the part of world elites to recognise this situation and address it.

As shown in Figure 6, the abrupt end of the Oil Age converges with the surge in protests that have taken place in recent years and that keeps gathering momentum. While most do not understand the intricacies summarised here, thousands of scientists and millions of people now do realise that they no longer have a future.  There is a “demand-for-something-else” than what they presently have.  This now strident demand is for a way forward that breaks through prevailing cognitive failure and re-opens a future for the younger ones.

To conclude, in our view Ghawar’s decline heralds the abrupt end of the Oil Age, as we have known it so far, over the next ten years.  It does not mean that we are “running out of oil”; there is plenty left but most of it will stay underground.  If a resource cannot be used to generate economic activity it loses all value and ceases to be a resource.  Like it or not, we now have to face the harsh emerging reality on the downside of the Energy Seneca.

Ian Welsh says "Good luck."

Why The Consensus Environmental Predictions Are Wrong. Ian Welsh. Jun. 15, 2019.

So, a little bit ago I noted that with temperatures of 70 degrees in the arctic, we could expect permafrost to melt, and that would release methane. Methane is a lot stronger greenhouse gas than carbon, in the short run, and there is a lot held in arctic permafrost.

It was suggested that this was “alarmism” and the temperatures would [not] penetrate enough for the permafrost to really melt.

Yeah, about that…

Researchers also recorded thawing at depths not expected until air temperatures rose to levels that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted it would reach in 2090.
So…70 years early. Swell. 

https://t.co/9sMxdOqHRn
— Lori Freshwater(@loufreshwater) June 15, 2019

One point I have made consistently now for many years is that virtually everything will happen faster than the consensus estimates. That point has been, well, consistently true.

The estimates made by organizations like the UN are always way too optimistic. Always. They are always wrong.

This is partially because they are playing politics: they’re trying to tell decision makers what they are willing to hear. It is partially because decision makers trim their estimates; and it is partially because most people, even most scientists, are shitty system thinkers.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

The concept of break points and exponential growth don’t really penetrate into most people’s thinking.

The way the world works for long periods is that it’s mostly the same, and there are trends, and the trends are mostly linear. Assume the world [will] be about how it was yesterday, add or subtract the trends, and you’re done.

But when the world actually changes it changes fast. Those linear trends (which often aren’t linear, they just look like it) hit break points, and they go exponential or geometric or they just change their linearity dramatically (from a 1% change to a 3% change a year, say.)

And everything then changes, big time.

This is true for human affairs and for non-human systems (though the two are largely the same now that humanity is the elephant in the ecosystem tea shop.) So everything changes after the Great Depression and after the War. Everything changes because of the oil shocks leading to stagflation leading to Reagan/Thatcher.

There’s a status quo, with slow change, then something breaks the status quo, and BOOM.

This is how climate change is working and will work. Slow change, then a threshold is crossed and BOOM. Weeks of tornadoes. Category 6 hurricanes (5 was supposed to be the top.)

Or permafrost melts.

And the permafrost melt is happening 70 years before expected by the consensus estimate.

People suck at systems thinking, even most scientists.

The world is changing. We have the foreshocks now of changes which in a decade or two, will lead to a VERY different world. Ecologically, and socially.

This can no longer be stopped. It will not happen. (Maybe we can, once we take it seriously, make it better with geo-engineering, but that will not stop it from first happening.)

So, again, we are now in “something bad is going to happen, what are you going to do?” stage. Organizing to stop it failed. It failed. It failed. It is done. You can organize to mitigate and prepare, and you can prepare yourself.

Good luck.

Funnies for the Depressed Collapsitarian

Weekend Funnies for the Depressed Collapsitarian #11. Collapse of Industrial Civilization. Jun 15, 2019.


It’s been a while since I’ve published one of these dark humor posts, but I think that as the catastrophic flooding, heat waves, and other extreme weather events continue to multiply and intensify and as more and more people start losing their minds, all we can do is laugh at the absurdity of our self-inflicted predicament. As has been said many times before, the Anthropocene carbon spike is just one of many symptoms from an overpopulated technocapitalist-driven world chasing too few resources, whether it be wild fish, potable water, rare earth minerals, or arable land. No one is putting the breaks on this race towards the abyss because no one is truly in charge, except for the cold and amoral calculator of corporate profits and stock market returns. 

In an age of “worse than expected” and “faster than anticipated”, the true cost of environmental collapse cannot be fully appreciated because humans have never existed in a world that is 500ppm CO2e and accelerating. One thing is certain —most of Earth’s mass extinctions were caused by a disruption in the carbon cycle which happened slowly over a much longer time span compared to today and without all the other human-forced pressures on the planet. All the technological advances and creature comforts we value today came at a rising environmental cost which is now impossible to repay since we have essentially ‘sold the farm’ in terms of the stability of the Holocene and the biochemistry of the planet.

There’s no techno-fixing our way out of this mess. We didn’t build a durable civilization; we built a superficial and fleeting one blinded by delusions of technological grandeur and human superiority.

So as we all slowly arrive at the fifth stage of grief, here’s a toast to humans before the party ends…

And this cartoon is becoming more accurate as time passes and oil executives mourn for the loss of future profits…

Earth will be fine. Humans?…not so much

No need to plan for retirement, the beach will come to you…

I’m sure Greta Thunberg would have something to say…

And lastly…
A Final Warning to Planet Earth

15,364 scientists from 184 countries issue a ‘warning to humanity’ and present a radical agenda to protect planet Earth. We, the billions of people believing in human exceptionalism, categorically reject this agenda and issue in return a stark warning to planet Earth…We officially summon planet Earth to abandon its intransigent attitude and accept the inevitable: an extension of its biological and physical limits. Should planet Earth stick with its hardline ideological stance, it needs to be aware that mankind will never compromise and that we will seek a second planet. The universe is like our ambition: limitless…

Is humanity dying?

Is humanity dying? Christian Mihatsch, Climate reporter, June 9, 2019.

The climate crisis is becoming increasingly apocalyptic. It is unlikely that our civilization will end soon — but possible. And this possibility is still receiving too little attention.

The perception of the climate problem is currently changing rapidly. The term "climate change" is increasingly being replaced by "climate crisis", and instead of "warming", what will probably prevail is "climate overheating" or a similar term. But is it appropriate to speak of the end of our civilization or even the extinction of humanity?

Some of the most important climate movements are doing just that. Extinction Rebellion is already carrying extinction in its name and the movement's first call is: Tell the truth and explain the state of emergency.

Fridays for Future's Greta Thunberg also clearly states what options humanity has: "Either we choose to preserve our civilization or we do not." And addressing world leaders, Thunberg says: "I want you to panic."

But is there really a reason to panic? The IPCC says that overheating can theoretically be stopped at 1.5 degrees. The IPCC reports are considered the "gold standard" of climate science because they summarize the findings of thousands of studies.

But the reports are also criticized, for example, because of their language. Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, ex-head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and an IPCC author, says that among IPCC authors a trend has developed "to err on the side of least drama". So you may present a better situation than exists in order not to sound alarmist.

The “probability obsession" of the IPCC

In addition, the IPCC assumes that warming will continue in a linear fashion. However, many climate models show that warming is accelerating. The difference: Instead of 2040, the 1.5-degree threshold will be reached in 2030 (see diagram).

In addition, the IPCC does not take into account feedback processes such as permafrost thawing, which may [will] cause climate overheating to increase.

According to Schellnhuber, however, the biggest drawback is the IPCC's "probability obsession" because it means not enough attention is paid to the most dangerous developments: "Calculating probabilities has little meaning in the most critical areas, such as the thawing of permafrost or the possible collapse of entire states."

In addition, the damage of, for example, the collapse of our civilization cannot be quantified. A recent study by the Australian think tank Breakthrough states: "A risk is usually calculated by multiplying the probability of an event by the expected damage, but if the damage can no longer be quantified, this method breaks down."

But even in the quantifiable realm, one underestimates the risk by focusing on relatively probable warming and masking worst-case scenarios. For these damages increase exponentially (see chart below).

Unlikely, but catastrophic

Schellnhuber calls for less attention be paid to "probabilities" and more to "possibilities". "This corresponds to the scenario planning in the economy, where the consequences of possible developments are examined, which seem unlikely, but have far-reaching consequences."

That's exactly what the authors of the Breakthrough study, David Spratt and Ian Dunlop, have done, developing a scenario that will raise the climate by three degrees by 2050. That's not extreme. For the 30 years to the middle of the century, there is a five percent chance that the climate will warm up by 3.5 to 4 degrees.

How sensitive is the climate to the warming of the atmosphere
(climate sensitivity) and what are the consequences?
The probability (likelihood) multiplied by the damage (impact)
gives the risk (risk). The light blue bar shows that very
unlikely developments are the biggest risk.
(Graphic from the study).

To show how this can happen, Spratt and Dunlop tell a "story": In the coming decade, the climate crisis is still receiving too little attention, and emissions will continue to rise until 2030, only to decline thereafter. Then it is already too late and the climate warms by 2050 by three degrees.

In retrospect, scientists then find that several tipping points have been reached, such as the thawing of permafrost and droughts in the Amazon rainforest. One-third of the earth is now too hot for at least 20 days a year to allow people to survive outdoors. Food production is no longer enough to feed all people, and there are more than a billion climate refugees.

As I said: The probability of this development is around five percent. 

[MW: nope: its higher... this estimate of probability is based on the IPCC stuff, which, as mentioned above, is plagued by "conservatism" and "scientific reticence"... how can you properly calculate the probabilities if you ignore the positive feedback effects that you can't include in your models because you don't understand them well enough yet?! next gen climate models are increasingly showing that ECS, or earth climate sensitivity, is higher than previously assumed. see the Ian Welsh article posted June 16 about everything happening faster, in a bad way, than scientific consensus said it would. UN is always too optimistic (in the same way the consensus of economists always is)]

Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg invoke such scenarios with their apocalyptic language. Still, it is more likely that our civilization will not end and humanity will not die out. 

[says you, and your optimism bias, i.e. wishful thinking not based on facts... but under business as usual, we are f'd; and even if we transform everything NOW (As Naomi Klein says, This Changes Everything), it may still be too late due to tipping points, in particular methane release from permafrost and seafloor] 

Nevertheless, it is possible if our protection from climate change continues to be only half-hearted.

These "possibilities" must be given more attention, says Schellnhuber: "This is especially true when it comes to the survival of our civilization."

Existential climate-related security risk. David Spratt and Ian Dunlop, Breakthrough Institute. 

A scenario approach

Understanding climate-driven security risks relies on climate impact projections, but much knowledge produced for policymakers is too conservative. Because the risks are now existential, a new approach to climate and security risk assessment is required using scenario analysis.

Roy Scranton: No Happy Ending

No Happy Ending: On Bill McKibben’s “Falter” and David Wallace-Wells’s “The Uninhabitable Earth”. Roy Scranton, LA Review of Books. June 3, 2019.

MANY YEARS AGO, when I was a college dropout with bad credit, having defaulted on my student loans, I worked briefly as a phone psychic. There was some training involved: how to use the system that routed callers to your home phone, for instance, but also how to keep callers on the line and, even more important, keep them coming back. On some level, of course, one’s success as a psychic depended on one’s supernatural abilities: either you have the gift or you don’t. The business side, however, depended a lot more on telling the right story. Asking open-ended questions and having a sympathetic ear helped, but the key was in reading the tarot spread in such a way that you crafted a compelling narrative of struggle and overcoming. “Basically, you tell them things will be hard,” my trainer instructed me, “then you tell them things will get better.”

I wasn’t a phone psychic long. The people who called had real problems — cancer, family members in prison, abusive relationships, drugs and alcohol — and my simple story of struggle and overcoming seemed not only inadequate but unethical, a comforting sop to make the unbearable bearable, especially given that my goal was to get them hooked on paying several dollars a minute to hear me interpret the relationship between the seven of wands and the Wheel of Fortune. The stories these people were living didn’t match the story I was being paid to tell them, and deceiving them with happy-ending fables seemed wrong. But the narrative insight my psychic trainer offered was important, and came in use a few years later, when I worked as a door-to-door grassroots canvasser for the largest progressive nonprofit fundraising organization in the United States.

The basic tool of the door-to-door canvasser is “the rap.” It’s a concise, punchy narrative that always follows the same five-part formula: introduce yourself, describe the problem, describe the solution, identify the opposition, and solicit engagement. It’s a subtle variation on the narrative my psychic trainer taught me, in that it adds a villain and ends with an appeal to action. I would learn later that it closely resembles classic Ciceronian structure. Best of all, it worked. Not every door, not every time, but reliably over the long haul. If you knocked on 75 doors and talked to 40 people, which was an average night, you could usually get four or five people to contribute, which was enough to make quota.

I turned out to be pretty good at canvassing, regularly beating quota by significant margins, which was a shock to me, since I’d never really thought of myself as a “people person.” I was quickly promoted to field manager, then assistant campaign director, and soon found myself training canvassers, writing raps for new campaigns, and troubleshooting problems in the field. Any time a canvasser seemed to be flailing, the first and best advice was to have them focus on the rap. It was a sturdy and dependable tool, an effective rhetorical framework for presenting any problem as solvable and for convincing people to write checks and sign petitions — not someday, but right now: “We need your help tonight.”

The last campaign I worked on was a WashPIRG summer campaign to stop the Olympic Pipeline Company from building a petroleum pipeline across the Cascade mountains. It was a noble fight against a dastardly villain, and I brought all my working-class rage to bear on the struggle. Who makes a better enemy than oil executives? What starker conflict could there be than the one between rapacious greedheads and sacred wilderness? By June, the campaign was going great: our canvas was expanding, our canvassers were building powerful esprit de corps, and donations were rolling in. Then something terrible happened.

We won.

Or rather, an underground gas pipeline exploded in Bellingham, Washington, and killed three people, two of them 10-year-old boys. That pipeline was owned by the Olympic Pipeline Company, which prudently withdrew the cross-Cascades proposal we’d been fighting. It was something of a crisis, since we weren’t even halfway through the summer campaign: we still had thousands of postcards, flyers, posters, and factsheets, all urging Washingtonians to “Stop the Pipeline.” The decision WashPIRG leadership made was to count this as a victory and go on the offensive. Our campaign shifted from “Stop the Pipeline” to “No New Pipelines.” The trouble came when we designed the new rap, which didn’t talk about the dead boys at all and gave WashPIRG credit for stopping the pipeline.

There can be no doubt that the pressure WashPIRG put on the Olympic Pipeline Company contributed to that company’s sense that it couldn’t go forward in the wake of the explosion. Yet to claim that WashPIRG was primarily responsible dishonored the memory of those dead boys and deceived the people we were asking to support us. What had happened wasn’t a victory, but a tragedy. The problem was, there’s no room in the rap for tragedy. It’s not that kind of story.

There are few periods in my life as dispiriting as were the last weeks of that campaign, when I went out every night and lied in the service of a good cause. I trained canvassers to dissemble and evade, to downplay tragedy in favor of a story with a happy ending, and to unscrupulously prey on the good faith of well-meaning people because we believed that what we were doing was right. My numbers slipped, and my passion evaporated. I couldn’t even depend on the rap.

The slippage turned into a full-blown ethical crisis, which opened my eyes to the power of institutional inertia and to the dangers of finding yourself trapped in the wrong story. It made me question whether any real social change was possible within the constraints of the system we lived in. If the only stories we could tell had to have happy endings, what else were we lying about? And if our fight was based on lies, what the hell were we fighting for?

I left the Fund and spent some time in Mexico, then came back to Washington for the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. Participating in that protest, an experience at once chastening and sublime, crippled what faith I had left in protest-based social movements. The WTO protestors were adaptable, passionate, and cunning, but divided, incoherent, and critically weakened by a lack of discipline. The Seattle police and the National Guard were slow and reactive, but they also had all the resources, including time. All they had to do to win was to keep us from winning, which turned out to be relatively easy. The next two years I remember as a complicated search for a way forward. In the spring of 2002, I enlisted in the US Army, in large part for the GI Bill and Army College Fund, but also to understand how the world had changed after 9/11, and soon found myself in a new narrative: protecting America from WMDs by bringing democracy to the people of Iraq in what would be, we were promised, a short and easy war.

¤

The stories we tell ourselves matter. As beings whose social existence is structured by symbolic reasoning, we comprehend our lives through collectively-agreed-upon narratives about what is important, what to attend to, what reality itself is and means. These narratives undergird our politics, inform our notions of identity, and give shape to our desires. They tell us what is possible and what is not, what is known and what is inconceivable, what must be true and what cannot be. It is therefore essential that we always keep testing our narratives against reality, and always be willing to edit, revise, or even wholly rewrite them in light of new information.

Indeed, there are moments when changing the stories we live within is the only way to keep going. Today, facing worldwide ecological collapse, we find ourselves in such a moment. Two new books illustrate and embody this challenge: Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben and The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warmingby David Wallace-Wells.

The first, Falter, is journalist-turned-activist Bill McKibben’s 15th book. In it, he presents climate change, economic inequality, artificial intelligence, automation, and genetic engineering as threats to human existence and human identity. McKibben sees the “human game” as risking “playing itself out” primarily because of what he calls “leverage,” by which he means the scale of changes humans are causing. For McKibben, the “human game” is “the entirety of our ceaseless activity,” a game which “has no rules and no end,” but goes “well when it creates more dignity for its players, and badly when that dignity diminishes.”

The threats McKibben discusses are real enough, though his discussion of them tends toward shallow recapitulations of trendy think pieces and internet journalism. The bigger problem is that McKibben never bothers to clarify why it makes sense to think of the sum total of human existence on the planet Earth as a “game,” especially one that has no rules and doesn’t end, since the very definition of game is that it is a structured form of play. The idea of a game with neither rules nor boundaries makes no sense. And while thinkers such as John von Neumann, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roger Caillois, and Johan Huizinga have all used the idea of games to explore what it means to be human, McKibben doesn’t seem to care much about how games actually work. Rather, he seems to want to use the idea of the “human game” as a secular framework for conceptualizing human values.

McKibben has always been a particularly American kind of public intellectual, in the tradition of Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Indeed, the historian Richard White once described Bill McKibben’s style as a combination of Emerson and Walt Disney, a comparison White made not “glibly or mockingly,” but rather because of Disney’s “great influence on how Americans […] think about nature.” According to White,

McKibben can so readily bring to mind both Emerson and Disney because a common Protestant sensibility unites all of them. For each, a common religiosity pervades the natural world. Humans learn […] that there is a power that made all of them and is greater than all of them. It must be acknowledged and obeyed.

Thus, McKibben’s notion of the “human game” begins to come into focus, as does the problem it means to solve. Climate change poses such profound challenges to the ways that we conceive of human existence that we are compelled to rethink what that existence means. In some sense, this was apparent from McKibben’s first book, The End of Nature, published in 1989. Since then, he has been a leading voice in framing the problems climate change poses, yet his solutions lean always toward the homiletic. The story McKibben knows best is one in which our mission in the wilderness has foundered but can be saved by spiritual renewal. When he turns to face the future, he does so dressed in a faded patchwork of Protestant confessionalism, Disneyfied Romanticism, and faith in human redemption.

Bill McKibben’s worldview is steeped in the spiritual dregs of ’60s hippie optimism. David Wallace-Wells is of another generation; he was seven when Bill McKibben pronounced the “end of nature,” and belongs to one of the first cohorts that grew up knowing it lived in a world transformed by global warming. “I am not an environmentalist,” he writes, “and [I] don’t even think of myself as a nature person.” Indeed, Wallace-Wells asserts that he wouldn’t mind losing “much of what we think of as ‘nature’ […] so long as we could go on living as we have in the world left behind.” The reason this self-described gadget-loving, beef-eating, bitcoin-buying human chauvinist has written a book about climate change is that we can’t.

The Uninhabitable Earth expands on Wallace-Wells’s alarming and controversial 2017 New York magazine article of the same name and takes a close look at the likely effects of climate change over the next several decades. Wallace-Wells begins with an introductory overview that seeks to dismantle what he calls the “comforting delusions” of climate-change complacency: that it is happening slowly, that it is happening far away, that it is primarily about sea level rise, that wealth can defend against it, that we can expect an easy technological fix, or “that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down.” He then spends the next hundred pages or so taking each consequence of global warming in turn, from “Heat Death” to “Dying Oceans” to “Economic Collapse.” These first two sections of the book are the strongest: while occasionally repetitive, sometimes overwritten, and often mind-numbingly abstract (what, for instance, would it mean that 3.7 degrees of warming could cost the world $551 trillion?), Wallace-Wells paints a compelling, comprehensive, solidly researched, and genuinely terrifying picture of our future.

Wallace-Wells also does justice to the limits and obstacles we face in addressing the problem, which he explores in the book’s last third, building a thorough and convincing argument that we moderns, especially and specifically 21st-century Americans, are prodigiously ill-equipped for coping with or even really understanding the global cataclysm we’ve unleashed. As the reader closes in on the final 30 pages, a dizzying narrative suspense takes hold: the problem Wallace-Wells presents is so overwhelming, so comprehensive, so frightening, and so far beyond the grasp of current political institutions that you wonder how the author will confront the abyss toward which the story seems headed. Disappointingly, Wallace-Wells flinches.

The book’s last two chapters are the least persuasive. In the penultimate chapter, “Ethics at the End of the World,” Wallace-Wells engages in a weak argument with several writers he misleadingly lumps together under the pejorative “ecological nihilism.” While the chapter’s title suggests some discussion of the problem of ethics in a world shaped by climate change, perhaps with reference to the work of thinkers such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Stephen Gardiner, Donna Haraway, Dale Jamieson, Bruno Latour, Samuel Scheffler, Eugene Thacker, or Anna Tsing, Wallace-Wells instead beats up on a straw man. He starts with the fringe scientist Guy McPherson, who makes an easy target: McPherson’s paranoid style, his outrageous confidence in his predictions (such as that climate change will cause human extinction by 2030), his polyamorous homestead, and his goofy mustache all scream “crank.” And yet as Wallace-Wells himself points out, many of McPherson’s fears are legitimate. Even among McPherson’s mistakes, Wallace-Wells writes, “there is enough real science to give rise to real alarm: a good summary of the albedo effect, a convenient assemblage of rigorous readings of the Arctic ice sheets.” McPherson’s biggest bugbear, Arctic methane emissions, remains poorly understood and controversial, but a recent study shows a surge in atmospheric methane strong enough to negate even the most rigorous plans for CO2 reduction outlined in the Paris Agreement, were they to be enacted. More to the point, McPherson’s ethical quietism is a legitimate philosophical position, not one that can be waved away with a sneer, as Wallace-Wells attempts. It’s easy to dismiss McPherson, less so Epictetus, the Buddha, St. Benedict, and Voltaire.

Wallace-Wells seems to have decided that anyone who takes seriously the possibility that climate change has slipped out of our control isn’t worth seriously considering. It’s not a great loss with McPherson, but it is disappointing to see Wallace-Wells treat Paul Kingsnorth, a provocative and original writer, with condescension and misunderstanding. While McPherson believes he can tell the future, Kingsnorth’s pessimism is grounded in the past, founded on “a simple fact which any historian could confirm: human civilisation is an intensely fragile construction […] built on little more than belief,” as he writes in Uncivilization: The Dark Mountain Manifesto. Such a skeptical, historically informed pessimism has substantial force, and deep literary and philosophical roots. It can be argued against, as can McPherson’s quietism, but not the way Wallace-Wells does here, by implying it’s merely a kind of moral cowardice, then dishonestly mislabeling it “ecological nihilism.” Believing that humans are fallible and that the universe has meaning above and beyond human existence is not nihilism; it is rather the opposite.

In his conclusion, Wallace-Wells writes:

The emergent portrait of suffering is, I hope, horrifying. It is also, entirely, elective. If we allow global warming to proceed, and to punish us with all the ferocity we have fed it, it will be because we have chosen that punishment — collectively walking down a path of suicide. If we avert it, it will be because we have chosen to walk a different path, and endure.

Here’s the crux: climate change is our choice, for we have all the tools we need to stop it. The solutions Wallace-Wells offers are familiar ones (carbon tax, investment in green energy and carbon capture, changing the ways we produce and eat food), but he doesn’t spend much time thinking about the practical steps such policies would require. He doesn’t think much about how politics and governance work. He doesn’t look at history to see how humans in crisis have handled such challenges before. He doesn’t even follow through the implications of everything he’s written in the rest of his book. In spite of his own evidence, Wallace-Wells ends on a note of hope, choosing to see climate change as an “invigorating picture” that “flatters our sense of power, and in so doing calls the world […] to action.”

Whereas McKibben’s book is breezy and rambling, Wallace-Wells’s is more tightly constructed, more focused, and relies more substantially on primary scientific research, but ultimately both adhere to the same basic narrative: things are bad, but they can get better if we’re good. Both books convey alarming visions of the near human future, as temperatures and seas rise, crops fail, diseases spread, refugees suffer, fires burn, conflicts erupt, and the oceans die; yet both books emphasize the power of human agency in deciding our collective future, insisting that in spite of such dire prognostications, we have the capacity to avert the worst and bend the course of human history back from the abyss.

In this way, both authors adhere neatly to the genre of the monitory ecological sermon, which found archetypal form in Theodor Geisel’s 1971 story The Lorax: industrial capitalism has wrought total ecological devastation upon the Earth, denuding it of Truffula Trees, brown Bar-ba-loots, Humming Fish, and Swomee Swans, which devastated world is fated to be our grim gray home forever … unless. Unless, that is, we heed the Lorax who speaks for the trees. The future depends upon cultivating the right feelings: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” Which implies that if you do care, things will get better — a kind of magical thinking to which Americans seem especially susceptible.

Both The Uninhabitable Earth and Falter swerve in their final pages into this “unless,” in equally desperate and unconvincing ways. Wallace-Wells insists that “[i]f humans are responsible for the problem, they must be capable of undoing it,” which assertion is false in two ways. First, I may be responsible for knocking a glass of wine onto the floor, but I cannot simply undo the shattering. George W. Bush was responsible for the American invasion of Iraq, but no executive order could unbomb Baghdad and resurrect all the children he killed. Both ecological thinking and human history teach the same lesson: actions have complex, unforeseeable, and often irrevocable consequences.

Second, Wallace-Wells’s assertion attributes conscious deliberation to an abstract entity — “humanity” — which has shown no evidence of having any such quality. At the global scale, we act not as rational agents making individual decisions, but as a concatenation of competing actors. Even at the level of the individual, we often face limitations when it comes to doing what we think we ought. Simply because someone is responsible for drinking too much, losing their temper, or making a fool of themselves does not mean that they are necessarily capable of doing otherwise, much less of undoing the consequences of their actions.

While Wallace-Wells subscribes to the standard checklist of proposals to fight climate change, he neglects to present a convincing case for how policies such as the Green New Deal, a carbon tax, or massive global investment in direct air capture technology might be enacted and put into practice. Any environmental studies undergrad can tell you what we need to do; the problem is doing it. Wallace-Wells’s personal exhortations that we “choose to feel empowered” and “take responsibility” for climate change ring as hollow as the self-help slogans they so resemble.

McKibben’s “unless” relies less on contemporary language of empowerment than on a mashup of 1960s social activism and 1970s techno-utopianism. He argues that “two new technologies” offer us the chance to save the Bar-ba-loots: “One is the solar panel, and the other is the nonviolent movement.” To support this claim, McKibben first turns to Thomas Friedman–style anecdotes about poor families in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and rural Vermont relying on solar panels for home power generation, then descends into a stupefying mix of cheerleading, moral hectoring, and small-is-beautiful nostalgia.

Solar panels, on their own, cannot meet global energy needs, and will not solve the problems caused by CO2 currently in the atmosphere and oceans, the catastrophic collapse of the biosphere, imminent crises in industrial agriculture, and accelerating climate feedbacks. And at this point — after the 2003 protests against the Iraq War, the “largest anti-war rally in history,” which saw millions of people in hundreds of cities across the world protesting the American invasion of Iraq and which utterly failed to stop the war — after the “People’s Climate March” in 2014, the “largest climate change march in history,” which utterly failed to have any noticeable effect on global climate policy — after decades of failed protests against institutional racism, gun violence, sexism, nuclear weapons, abortion, war, environmental degradation, and a raft of other issues — only the deluded and naïve could maintain that nonviolent protest politics is much more than ritualized wishful thinking. In the end, McKibben’s argument falls into the same vague preaching as does Wallace-Wells’s. Human beings are special, McKibben insists, because we have free will: “We’re the only creature who can decide not to do something we’re capable of doing.” Asking hard questions about who that “we” is, how “we” make decisions, how power works, and the limits of human freedom are beyond the reach of both writers, because such questions lie outside the narrative they’re both trapped in.

Unluckily for us, climate change is not a moral fable, a point Wallace-Wells makes but then seems to forget. “There is nothing to learn from global warming,” he writes early on, “because we do not have the time, or the distance, to contemplate its lessons; we are after all not merely telling the story but living it.” And therein lies the problem with both books. The story we’re living is one of failure, catastrophe, suffering, and tragedy: an out-of-control car careening off a dark road. The story Wallace-Wells and McKibben wind up telling, however, is that we’re in control and the skid is manageable, if only we choose to take the wheel. It’s a story I’ve heard before:

Things are hard but they’re gonna get better … Our enemies are strong but we can defeat them … The odds are long but we can do it … The problem is solvable if we have the political will … We will pass through this time of peril and carry on the work of peace … We’ve reached a turning point … The movement is growing … We need your help tonight …

The lag time between carbon emissions and consequent warming means that even if humans stopped emitting CO2 worldwide today, we would still face levels of warming over the next several decades that will not only put colossal political and economic stress on poor and wealthy nations alike, but also have a good chance of initiating runaway climate change, presuming such a tipping point hasn’t already been passed. Climate feedbacks such as permafrost melt, ice collapse, and wildfires are accelerating. The oceans are both dying and rising, like some Lovecraftian sea monster. Absent a Herculean effort devoting trillions of dollars to building direct-air-capture carbon scrubbers, none of this can be changed.

Despite the unconvincing cheer for human empowerment with which he ends his book, however, David Wallace-Wells understands the seriousness of our predicament. And despite his atavistic Protestant optimism, even Bill McKibben can see that the odds are not in our favor. The challenge these two capable, intelligent writers struggle with so powerfully, and which they so disappointingly fail to meet, is a challenge that anyone who thinks seriously about climate change confronts: the danger we face is utterly unlike anything humanity has ever faced before. Their moral fables don’t really fit our situation, but neither does the traditional narrative of apocalypse, nor the story of wartime mobilization, nor the story of innovation and progress, nor narratives of heroic overcoming.

Climate change is bigger than any individual moral choice. It’s bigger than the New Deal, bigger than the Marshall Plan, bigger than World War II, bigger than racism, sexism, inequality, slavery, the Holocaust, the end of nature, the Sixth Extinction, famine, war, and plague all put together, because the chaos it’s bringing is going to supercharge every other problem. Successfully meeting this crisis would require an abrupt, traumatic revolution in global human society; failing to meet it will be even worse. This is the truth we struggle to comprehend in narrative, the reality our stories must make sense of. The all-too-real possibility we must confront — and which David Wallace-Wells and Bill McKibben notably refuse — is that the story we’re living is a tragedy that ends in disaster, no matter what.

War and Empire links June 2019

Donald Trump Is The Most Honest US President Of All Time. Caitlin Johnstone. Jun. 5, 2019.

I happened upon some pictures from Trump’s UK visit with Queen Elizabeth yesterday, which isn’t something I’d normally care about. The British royals are basically just oligarchs who rub your face in it, and the fluffy media publicity around a monarch of one murderous kleptocratic  imperialist regime meeting the leader of another murderous kleptocratic imperialist regime is something I’d usually try to avoid looking at or commenting on.

I’ve paid exactly zero attention to the stories about the visit itself, so if you want to know what kind of tea they drank or how Trump got along with Lord Hothalbotham and the Duchess of Yorksquire or whatever you’ve come to the wrong place. But I saw one photo from the visit that made me stop and realize something that is definitely worth noting: Donald Trump is the most honest US president of all time.

To be clear, I am not saying that Trump actually tells the truth with his words; he obviously does not. Trump is so comfortable with lying that he once tweeted the claim that he’d never urged House Republicans to vote for a particular immigration bill, three days after posting a tweet explicitly urging House Republicans to vote for that bill. He left both tweets up. I mean, that’s like one click away from literally looking someone in the eye while urinating on their leg and telling them it must be the rain.

No, when I say that Trump is the most honest US president of all time, what I mean is that he has a unique gift for exposing the face of the empire for exactly what it is, in all its depravity, all its deceitfulness, all its corruption, and in this case, all its jaw-dropping ridiculousness. I mean, look at this photo:

Really look at it. Have you ever seen anything so ridiculous? Who the fuck dressed him? And what’s going on with that freak in the red dress? And why are these rich assholes all walking in formation? Is it some kind of weird parade for people who’ve never bought their own groceries?

Obama could have made this look normal. Bush would have looked a little bit goofy, but nothing that would make you spit your coffee on your screen. Hell, Bill Clinton would have looked downright at home, like he was born in Buckingham Palace and spent his whole life sipping champagne and groping the maids while he waited for this photo to be taken. It took the badly-dressed awkward posture and golf bod of a reality TV star who became president via 4chan prank to expose that whole absurd royalty display for the risible self-parody that it deserves to be seen as.

Trump’s entire presidency has been like this. Blatant, tactless, and completely unmasked.

Journalist gets literally butchered in an embassy by the Saudi government? Yeah well we don’t want to do anything about that because they’ve got an arms deal with us worth billions of dollars. He just comes right out and says it. When they want to stage a coup in Venezuela, they don’t limit it to CIA covert ops and behind-the-scenes manipulations; the whole administration is on Twitter saying they’re going to keep starving everyone with sanctions until the nation’s president is replaced with the guy they prefer. It’s all right there, right in your face, as closeted and secret Flavor Flav’s fondness for clocks.

His whole cabinet is basically human versions of the departments they represent. His Secretary Treasurer was a Goldman Sachs executive. His CIA Director literally tortured people. His National Security Advisor is an Iraq-raping Bush-era neocon. His Secretary of Commerce is a former Rothschild executive. His EPA Administrator is a former coal lobbyist. His Secretary of State came straight out of the CIA. It’s like he designed a convenient labeling system for everyone who’s unsure of what it is that each department in the executive branch of the US government actually does.

Trump has been continuing and expanding all of the depravities of his predecessors, but he’s been doing so openly, making it look exactly as ugly and disgusting as it is. His supporters try to justify this by claiming he’s making brilliant 4-D chess maneuvers against the Deep State, but Trump isn’t playing chess. He isn’t even playing checkers. He’s playing Uno, and he’s playing it with his hand fully exposed on the table, with his only defense being to point at a red card and say “This one’s green” and point at an eight and say “That’s a two. It’s the best two, absolutely terrific two.”

Even his dishonesty is honesty, in a way. He lies constantly, brazenly and unapologetically, while his predecessors have lied sneakily, subtly and usually only by distortions, omissions and half-truths. Trump is a walking public service announcement that US presidents are liars. Which is the truth.

And I for one think that’s great. It’s entirely possible that Trump will be ousted in 2020 by Joe Biden or by one of Joe Biden’s 397 ideological clones who are also in the race, and that will make a lot of people very happy. It will make them happy because they won’t have to look at the ugly face of Orwellian dystopia anymore, because an infinitely smoother and more charismatic leader will go back to hiding it for them. And then things will at long last go back to normal, the way they always were: no partisan divisiveness, no corrupt politicians, no racism in America, and brunch all day, every day.

The most aggressive anti-Trumpists have no interest in real change, they just want things to go back to the way they were before Trump, which is actually just wanting to go back to the conditions which gave rise to Trump. They’re not interested in waking up, they’re interested in smoothing an uncomfortable wrinkle in their bedsheets so that they can go back to sleep.

And if that happens, fine, whatever; it’s not like they were taking any meaningful action against the ugly face of empire anyway. But at least things got shaken up with a little honesty for a while. A little corrupt, blood-spattered, button-popping honesty.

Thirty-Two Tips For Navigating A Society That Is Full Of Propaganda And Manipulation. Caitlin Johnstone. Jun 3, 2019.

For as long as there has been human language, humans have been using it to manipulate one another. The fact that it is possible to skillfully weave a collection of symbolic mouth noises together in such a way as to extract favors, concessions, votes and consent from other humans has made manipulation so common that it now pervades our society from top to bottom, from personal relationships between two people to international relationships between government agencies and the public.

This has made it very difficult to figure out what’s going on, both in our lives and in the world. Here are thirty-two suggestions for navigating this complex manipulation-laden landscape, whether it be for navigating the manipulations you may encounter in your small-scale personal interactions, or the large-scale manipulations which impact the entire world:

1 – Understand the fact that humans are storytelling animals, and that whoever controls the stories controls the humans. Mental narrative dominates human consciousness; thought is essentially one continuous, churning monologue about the self and what it reckons is going on in its world, and that monologue is composed entirely of mental stories. These stories can and will be manipulated, on an individual scale by people we encounter and on a mass scale by skillful propagandists. We base our actions on our mental assessments of what’s going on in the world, and those mental assessments can be manipulated by narrative control.

Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.
This is the clearest I've been able to sum it all up so far. https://t.co/JqbZMKn7ov
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) August 22, 2018

2 – Be humble and open enough to know that you can be fooled. Your cognitive wiring is susceptible to the same hacks as everyone else, and manipulators of all sorts are always looking to exploit those vulnerabilities. It’s not shameful to be deceived, it’s shameful to deceive people. Don’t let shame and cognitive dissonance keep you compartmentalized away from considering the possibility that you’ve been duped in some way.

3 – Watch people’s behavior and ignore the stories they tell about their behavior. This applies to people in your life, to politicians, and to governments. Narratives can be easily manipulated and distorted in many different ways, while behavior itself, when examined with as much objectivity as possible, cannot be. Pay attention to behavior in this way and eventually you’ll start noticing a large gap between what some people’s actions say and what their words say. Those people are the manipulators. Distrust them.

4 – Be suspicious of people who keep telling you what they are and how they are, because they’re trying to manipulate your narrative about them. Be doubly suspicious of people who keep telling you what you are and how you are, because they’re trying to manipulate your narrative about you.

5 – Learn to see how trust and sympathy are used by manipulators to trick people into subscribing to their narratives about what’s going on. Every manipulator uses trust and/or sympathy as a primer for their manipulations, because if you don’t have trust or sympathy for them, you’re not going to mentally subscribe to their stories. This is true of mass media outlets, it’s true of State Department press releases which implore you to have sympathy for the people of Nation X, and it’s true of family members and coworkers. Once you’ve spotted a manipulator, your task is to kill off all of your sympathy for them and your trust in them, no matter how hard they start playing the victim to suck you back in.

6 – Be suspicious of anyone who refuses to articulate themselves clearly. Word salading is a tactic notoriously used by abusive narcissists, because it keeps the victim confused and unable to figure out what’s going on. If they can’t get a clear handle on what the manipulative abuser is saying, they can’t form their own solid position in relation to it, and the abuser knows this. Insist on lucid communication, and if it’s refused to you, remove trust and sympathy. Apply this to people in your life, to government officials, and to 8chan propaganda constructs.

7 – Familiarize yourself with cognitive biases, the glitches in human cognition which cause us to perceive things in a way that is not rational. Pay special attention to confirmation bias, the backfire effect, and the illusory truth effect. Humans have an annoying tendency to seek out cognitive ease in their information-gathering and avoid cognitive dissonance, rather than seeking out what’s true regardless of whether it brings us cognitive ease or dissonance. This means we tend to choose what we believe based on whether believing it is psychologically comfortable, rather than whether it’s solidly backed by facts and evidence. This is a weakness in our cognitive wiring, and manipulators can and do exploit it constantly. And, again, be humble enough to know that this means you.

8 – Trust your own understanding above anyone else’s. It might not be perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than letting your understanding be controlled by narrative managers and dopey partisan groupthink, or by literally anyone else in a narrative landscape that is saturated with propaganda and manipulation. You won’t get everything right, but betting on your own understanding is the very safest bet on the table. It can be intimidating to stand alone and sort out the true from the false by yourself on an instance-by-instance basis, but the alternative is giving someone else authority over your understanding of the world. Abdicating your responsibility to come to a clear understanding of what’s going on in your world is a shameful, cowardly thing to do. Be brave enough to insist that you are right until such time as you yourself come to your own understanding that you were wrong.

9 – Understand that propaganda is the single most overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of our society. Everyone’s constantly talking about what’s wrong with the world, but hardly any of those discussions are centered around the fact that the public been manipulated into supporting the creation and continuation of those problems by mass media propaganda. The fact that powerful people are constantly manipulating the way we think, act and vote should be at the forefront of everyone’s awareness, not relegated to occasional discussions in fringe circles.

10 – Respect the fact that the science of modern propaganda has been in research and development for over a century. Think of all the military advancements that have been made in the last century to get an idea of how sophisticated this science must now be. They are far, far ahead of us in terms of research and understanding of the methods of manipulating the human psyche toward ends which benefit the powerful. If you ever doubt that the narrative managers could be advanced and cunning enough to pull off a given manipulation, you can lay that particular doubt to rest. Don’t underestimate them.

11 – Understand that western mass media propaganda rarely consists of full, outright lies. At most, such outlets will credulously publish the things that are told to them by government agencies which lie all the time. More often, the deception comes in the form of distortions, half-truths, and omissions. Pay more attention to discrepancies in things that are covered versus things that aren’t, and to what they’re not saying.

12 – Put effort into developing a good news-sense, a sense for what’s newsworthy and what’s not. This takes time and practice, but it lets you see which newsworthy stories are going unreported by the mass media and which non-stories are being overblown to shape an establishment-friendly narrative. When you’ve got that nailed down, you’ll notice “Why are they acting like this is a news story?” and “Why is nobody reporting this??” stories all the time.

13 – Be patient and compassionate with yourself when it comes to developing your narrative navigating skills. Like literally any skill set, you’ll suck at it for a while. If you learn you’ve been wrong about something, just take in the new information, adjust appropriately, and keep plugging away. Don’t expect to have mastered this thing before you’ve had time to master it. Like anything else, if you put in the hours you’ll get good at it.

14 – Find reliable news reporters who have a good sense for navigating the narrative matrix, and keep track of them to orient yourself and stay on top of what’s going on. Use individual reporters, not outlets; no outlet is 100 percent solid, but some reporters are pretty close on some specific subjects. Click this hyperlink for a list of all my favorite news reporters on Twitter right now.

How To Make A Solid, Customized News Stream That Isn’t Manipulated By Silicon Valley
"It can be hard to find a supply of information about what’s going on in the world that isn’t being manipulated by power." #MediaLiteracy#revolution#propagandahttps://t.co/xRyBtDJx2Y
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) October 4, 2018

15 – Don’t let paranoia be your primary or only tool for navigating the narrative matrix. Some people’s only means of understanding the world is to become intensely suspicious of everything and everyone, which is about as useful as a compass which tells you that every direction is north. Spend time in conspiracy and media criticism circles and you’ll run into many such people. Rejecting everything as false leaves you with nothing as true. Find positive tools for learning what’s true.

16 – Hold your worldview loosely enough that you can change it at any time in the light of new information, but not so loosely that it can be slapped out of your head by someone telling you what to think in a confident, authoritative tone. As Carl Sagan once said, “It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.”

17 – Speaking of confident, authoritative tones, be suspicious of confident, authoritative tones. It’s amazing how much traction people can get with a narrative just by posturing as though they know that what they’re saying is true, whether they’re an MSNBC pundit or a popular conspiracy Youtuber. So many people are just plain faking it, because it works. You run into this all the time in debates on online political forums; people come at you with a supremely confident posture, but if you push them to present their knowledge on the subject and the strength of their arguments, there’s not actually anything there. They’re just accustomed to people assuming they know what they’re talking about and leaving their claims unchallenged, and it completely throws them off when someone doesn’t buy their feigned confidence schtick.

18 – Be aware that sociopaths exist. There are people who, to varying degrees, do not care what happens to others, and these are the types of people who will use manipulation to get their way whenever it serves them. If you don’t care about truth or other people beyond the extent to which you can use them, then there’s no disincentive to manipulating.

19 – Be aware of projection, and be aware of the fact that it cuts both ways: unhealthy people tend to project their wickedness onto others, while healthy people tend to project their goodness. Don’t let your goodness trick you into thinking there aren’t monsters who will deceive and manipulate you, and don’t let sociopaths project their own sinister motives onto you by telling you how rotten you are. This mixes a lot of good people up, especially in their personal lives. Not everyone is good, and not everyone is truthful. See this clearly.

20 – Be suspicious of those who excessively advocate civility, rules and politeness. Manipulators thrive on rules and civility, because they know how to manipulate them. Someone who’s willing to color outside the lines and get angry at someone noxious even when they’re acting within the rules makes a manipulator very uncomfortable. Often times those telling you to calm down and behave yourself when you are rightfully upset are manipulators who have a vested interest in getting you to adhere to the rules set they’ve learned to operate within.

How To Wake Up
"I’ve been putting off writing this article all year, but readers keep asking for it, and since I’ve been writing about mass enlightenment a lot lately I figure I might as well slip it in now." #enlightenment#spiritualityhttps://t.co/gmxHh267LX
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) September 1, 2018

21 – Meditation, mindfulness, self-inquiry and other practices are powerful tools which can help you understand your own inner processes, which in turn helps you understand how manipulators can manipulate you, and how they manipulate others. Just be sure that you are using them for this purpose, not for escapism as most “spiritual” types do. You’re trying to become fully aware of what makes you tick mentally, emotionally and energetically; you’re not trying to become some vapid spiritual bliss bunny. The goal isn’t to feel better, the goal is to get better at feeling. Better at consciously experiencing your own inner world.

22 – Be relentlessly honest with yourself about your own inner narratives and the various ways you engage in manipulation. You can’t navigate your way through the narrative control matrix if you aren’t clear on your own role in it. Look inside and consciously take an inventory.

23 – Understand that truth doesn’t generally move in a way that is pleasing to the ego, i.e. in a way Hollywood scripts are written to appeal to. Any narrative that points to a Hollywood ending where the bad guy gets karate kicked into lava and the hero gets the girl is manufactured. Russiagate and QAnon are both perfect examples of an egoically pleasing narrative with the promise of a Hollywood ending, either by Trump and his cohorts being dragged off in chains or by the “white hats” overcoming the Deep State and throwing all the Democrats and Never-Trumpers in prison for pedophilia. Ain’t gonna happen, folks.

24 – Try to view the world with fresh eyes rather than with your tired old grown-up eyes which have taught you to see all this as normal. Hold an image in your mind of what a perfectly healthy and harmonious world would look like; the sharp contrast between this image and the world we have now allows you see through the campaign of the propagandists to normalize things like war, poverty, ecocide, and impotent electoral systems which keep seeing the same government behavior regardless of who people vote for. None of this is normal.

25 – Know that the truth has no political party, and neither do the social engineers. All political parties are used to manipulate the masses in various ways, and nuggets of truth can and do emerge from any of them. Thinking along partisan lines is guaranteed to give you a distorted view. Ignore the imaginary lines between the parties. You may be certain that your rulers do.

26 – Remain always aware of this simple dynamic: the people who become billionaires are generally the ones who are sociopathic enough to do whatever it takes to get ahead. This class has been able to buy up near-total narrative control via media ownership/influence, corporate lobbying, think tank funding, and campaign finance, and are thus able to manipulate the public into consenting to agendas which benefit nobody but plutocrats and their lackeys. This explains pretty much every major problem that we are facing right now.

The Legal Narrative Funnel That’s Being Used To Extradite Assange
How warped interpretations of technicalities in Ecuadorian, British and American law allow for a journalist to be imprisoned for telling the truth while keeping the illusion of democracy. https://t.co/OaBVDeuyax
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) April 13, 2019

27 – Understand that nations are pure narrative constructs; they only exist to the extent that people agree to pretend that they do. The narrative managers know this, and they exploit the fact that most of us don’t. Take Julian Assange, perfect example: he was pried out of the embassy and imprisoned by an extremely obvious collaboration between the US, UK, Sweden, Ecuador, and Australia, yet they each pretended that they were acting as separate, sovereign nations completely independently of one another. Sweden pretended it was deeply concerned about rape allegations, the UK pretended it was deeply concerned about a bail violation, Ecuador pretended it was deeply concerned about skateboarding and embassy cat hygiene, the US pretended it was deeply concerned about the particulars of the way Assange helped Chelsea Manning cover her tracks, Australia pretended it was too deeply concerned about honoring the sovereign affairs of these other countries to intervene on behalf of its citizen, and it all converged in a way that just so happened to look exactly the same as imprisoning a journalist for publishing facts. You see this same dynamic constantly, whether it’s with military interventions, trade deals, or narrative-shaping campaigns against non-aligned governments.

28 – Understand that war is the glue which holds the US-centralized empire together. Without the carrot of military/economic alliance and the stick of military/economic violence, the US-centralized empire would cease to exist. This is why war propaganda is constant and sometimes so forced that glaring plot holes become exposed; it’s so important that they need to force it through, even if they can’t get the narrative matrix around it constructed just right. If they ceased manufacturing consent for the empire’s relentless warmongering, people would lose all trust in government and media institutions, and those institutions would lose the ability to propagandize the public effectively. Without the ability to propagandize the public effectively, our rulers cannot rule.

29 – Remember that when it comes to foreign policy, the neocons are always wrong. They’ve been so remarkably consistent in this for so long that whenever there’s a question about any narrative involving hostilities between the US-centralized power alliance and any other nation, you can just look at what Bill Kristol, Max Boot and John Bolton are saying about it and believe the exact opposite. They’re actually a very helpful navigation tool in this way.

30 – Notice how the manipulators like to split the population in two and then get them arguing over how they should serve the establishment. Arguing over whether it’s better to vote Democrat or Republican, arguing over whether it’s better to increase hostilities with Iran and Venezuela or with Syria and Russia, over whether you should support the US president or the FBI, arguing over how internet censorship should happen and whom should be censored rather than if censorship should happen in the first place. The longer they can keep us arguing over the best way to lick the imperial boot, the longer they keep us from talking about whether we want to lick it at all.

31 – Watch out for appeals to emotion. It’s much easier to manipulate someone by appealing to their feely bits rather than their capacity for rational analysis, which is why any time they want to manufacture support for military interventionism you see pictures of dead children on news screens everywhere rather than a logical argument for the advantages of using military violence based on a thorough presentation of facts and evidence. You see the same strategy used in the guilt trips they lay on third-party voters; it’s all emotional hyperbole that crumbles under any fact-based analysis, but they use it because it works. They go after your heart strings to circumvent your head.

32 – Pay attention to how much propaganda goes into maintaining the propaganda machine itself. This is done this because propaganda is just that central to the maintenance of dominant power structures. Much effort is spent building trust in establishment narrative management outlets while sowing distrust in sources of dissent. You’ll see entire propaganda campaigns built around accomplishing solely this.

New ‘Call Of Duty’ Encourages Support For The White Helmets. CJ. June 6, 2019.

The White Helmets are what legendary journalist John Pilger describes as “a complete propaganda construct“, an operation designed by former British army officer and private military contractor James Le Mesurier to manipulate the narrative about what’s going on in Syria. This excellent half-hour mini-documentary by James Corbett clearly outlines the way the operation is used to create footage implicating the Assad government in the slaughter of civilians via chemical weapons attacks and other camera-friendly war crimes, the mountain of evidence of their ties to literal terrorist organizations in Syria, and the western funding and media manipulations that have been pouring into elevating the outfit.

It’s a brilliant invention, really. Have a purportedly neutral group filming on the ground in “rebel”-held areas (where the White Helmets exclusively operate), and you can ensure an endless supply of footage which can be used to paint a longtime western target for regime change as a barbarian who needs to be ousted. And indeed, the extremist jihadist factions which overran Syria with the backingof the US and its allies nearly succeeded in toppling Assad prior to Russia’s intervention, and we may be certain that the agenda to control who rules over the geostrategically crucial region remains as intact as ever.

The pro-White Helmets propaganda is not Call of Duty‘s first foray into US military narrative management. As noted by journalist Max Blumenthal in April, an earlier CoD game depicted the assassination of the leader of Venezuela and, bizarrely, attacking Venezuela’s hydroelectric dam and energy grid with the goal of causing power outages like the ones the nation has been struggling with. Citing public information, Blumenthal documents how such games have been “developed with substantial input from America’s military intelligence apparatus”, as well as the CoD designer’s involvement with the Pentagon and the NATO narrative management firm the Atlantic Council.