Marxism and Collapse: Climate catastrophe, Collapse, Democracy and Socialism

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Climate catastrophe, Collapse, Democracy and Socialism | Noam Chomsky, Miguel Fuentes, Guy McPherson

MARXISM AND COLLAPSE: The following is the first part of the interview-debate “Climate Catastrophe, Collapse, Democracy and Socialism” between the linguist and social scientist Noam Chomsky, one of the most important intellectuals of the last century, the Chilean social researcher and referent of the Marxist-Collapsist theoretical current Miguel Fuentes, and the American scientist Guy McPherson, a specialist in the topics of the ecological crisis and climate change. One of the most remarkable elements of this debate is the presentation of three perspectives which, although complementary in many respects, offer three different theoretical and political-programmatic approaches to the same problem: the imminence of a super-catastrophic climate change horizon and the possibility of a near civilisational collapse. Another noteworthy element of this debate is the series of interpretative challenges to which Chomsky’s positions are exposed and that give this discussion the character of a true “ideological contest” between certain worldviews which, although as said before common in many respects, are presented as ultimately opposed to each other. In a certain sense, this debate takes us back, from the field of reflection on the ecological catastrophe, to the old debates of the 20th century around the dilemma between “reform or revolution”, something that is undoubtedly necessary in the sphere of contemporary discussions of political ecology.

Noam Chomsky

American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. He adheres to the ideas of libertarian socialism and anarcho-syndicalism. He advocates a New Green Deal policy as one of the ways of dealing with the ecological crisis.

Miguel Fuentes

Chilean social researcher in the fields of history, archaeology, and social sciences. International coordinator of the platform Marxism and Collapse and exponent of the new Marxist-Collapsist ideology. He proposes the need for a strategic-programmatic updating of revolutionary Marxism in the face of the new challenges of the Anthropocene and the VI mass extinction.

Guy McPherson

American scientist, professor emeritus of natural resources, ecology, and evolutionary biology. He adheres to anarchism and argues the inevitability of human extinction and the need to address it from a perspective that emphasises acceptance, the pursuit of love and the value of excellence.

1. In a recent discussion between ecosocialist stances and collapsist approaches represented by Michael Lowy (France), Miguel Fuentes (Chile) and Antonio Turiel (Spain), Lowy constantly denied the possibility of a self-induced capitalist collapse and criticized the idea of the impossibility of stopping climate change before it reaches the catastrophic level of 1.5 centigrade degrees of global warming. Do you think that the current historical course is heading to a social global downfall comparable, for example, to previous processes of civilization collapse or maybe to something even worse than those seen in ancient Rome or other ancient civilizations? Is a catastrophic climate change nowadays unavoidable? Is a near process of human extinction as a result of the overlapping of the current climate, energetic, economic, social and political crisis and the suicidal path of capitalist destruction, conceivable? [1] (Marxism and Collapse)

Noam Chomsky:

The situation is ominous, but I think Michael Lowy is correct. There are feasible means to reach the IPPC goals and avert catastrophe, and also moving on to a better world. There are careful studies showing persuasively that these goals can be attained at a cost of 2-3% of global GDP, a substantial sum but well within reach – a tiny fraction of what was spent during World War II, and serious as the stakes were in that global struggle, what we face today is more significant by orders of magnitude. At stake is the question whether the human experiment will survive in any recognizable form.

The most extensive and detailed work I know on how to reach these goals is by economist Robert Pollin. He presents a general review in our joint book Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal. His ideas are currently being implemented in a number of places, including some of the most difficult ones, where economies are still reliant on coal. Other eco-economists, using somewhat different models, have reached similar conclusions. Just recently IRENA, —the International Renewable Energy Agency, part of the UN– came out with the same estimate of clean energy investments to reach the IPCC goals.

There is not much time to implement these proposals. The real question is not so much feasibility as will. There is little doubt that it will be a major struggle. Powerful entrenched interests will work relentlessly to preserve short-term profit at the cost of incalculable disaster.  Current scientific work conjectures that failure to reach the goal of net zero Carbon emissions by 2050 will set irreversible processes in motion that are likely to lead to a “hothouse earth,” reaching unthinkable temperatures 4-5º Celsius above pre-industrial levels, likely to result in an end to any form of organized human society.

Miguel Fuentes:

Noam Chomsky highlights the possibility of a global warming that exceeds 4-5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels within this century in his previous response, which according to him could mean, literally, the end of all forms of organised human society. Chomsky endorses what many other researchers and scientists around the world are saying. A recent report by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, for example, points to 2050 as the most likely date for the onset of widespread civilisational collapse. The central idea would be that, due to a sharp worsening of the current climate situation, and the possible transformation by the middle of this century of a large part of our planet into uninhabitable, a point of no return would then be reached in which the fracture and collapse of nation states and the world order would be inevitable [3]. At the same time, he states that the needed goals to avert this catastrophe which will lay the foundations for a transition to “clean energy”, and a more just society, would still be perfectly achievable. Specifically, Chomsky says that this would only require an investment of around 2-3% of world GDP, the latter within the framework of a plan of “environmental reforms” described in the so-called “Green New Deal” of which he is one of its main advocates.

Let’s reflect for a moment on the above. On the one hand, Chomsky accepts the possibility of a planetary civilisational collapse in the course of this century. On the other hand, he reduces the solution to this threat to nothing more than the application of a “green tax”. Literally the greatest historical, economic, social, cultural and even geological challenge that the human species and civilisation has faced since its origins reduced, roughly speaking, to a problem of “international financial fundraising” consisting of allocating approximately 3% of world GDP to the promotion of “clean energies”. Let’s think about this again. A danger that, as Chomsky puts it, would be even greater than the Second World War and could turn the Earth into a kind of uninhabitable rock, should be solved either by “international tax collection” or by a plan of limited “eco-reforms” of the capitalist economic model (known as the “Green New Deal”).

But how is it possible that Chomsky, one of the leading intellectuals of the 20th century, is able to make this “interpretive leap” between accepting the possibility of the “end of all organised human society” within this century and reducing the solution to that threat to what would appear to be no more than a (rather timid) cosmetic restructuring of international capitalist finance? Who knows! What is certain, however, is that Chomsky’s response to the climate threat lags far behind not only those advocated by the ecosocialist camp and even traditional Marxism to deal with the latter, based on posing the link between the problem of the root causes of the ecological crisis and the need for a politics that defends the abolition of private ownership of the means of production as a necessary step in confronting it. Moreover, Chomsky’s treatment of the ecological crisis seems to be inferior to that which characterises all those theoretical tendencies which, such as the theory of degrowth or a series of collapsist currents, advocate the imposition of drastic plans of economic degrowth and a substantial decrease in industrial activity and global consumption levels. The latter by promoting a process of “eco-social transition” which would not be reduced to a mere change in the energy matrix and the promotion of renewable energies, but would imply, on the contrary, the transition from one type of civilisation (modern and industrial) to another, better able to adapt to the new planetary scenarios that the ecological crisis, energy decline and global resource scarcity will bring with them.

But reducing the solution of the climate catastrophe to the need for a “green tax” on the capitalist market economy is not the only error in Chomsky’s response. In my view, the main problem of the arguments he uses to defend the possibility of a successful “energy transition” from fossil fuels to so-called “clean energy” would be that they are built on mud. First, because it is false to say that so-called “clean energies” are indeed “clean” if we consider the kind of resources and technological efforts required in the implementation of the energy systems based on them. Solar or wind energy, for example, depend not only on huge amounts of raw materials associated for their construction with high polluting extractive processes (e.g., the large quantities of steel required for the construction of wind turbines is just one illustration of this), but also on the use of extensive volumes of coal, natural gas or even oil. The construction of a single solar panel requires, for instance, enormous quantities of coal. Another striking example can be seen in the dependence of hydrogen plants (specially the “grey” or “blue” types) on vast quantities of natural gas for their operations. All this without it ever being clear that the reduction in the use of fossil fuels that should result from the implementation of these “clean” technologies will be capable of effectively offsetting a possible exponential increase in its “ecological footprint” in the context of a supposedly successful energy transition [4].

Secondly, it is false to assume that an energy matrix based on renewable energies could satisfy the energy contribution of fossil fuels to the world economy in the short or medium term, at least, if a replication of current (ecologically unviable) patterns of economic growth is sought. Examples of this include the virtual inability of so-called “green hydrogen” power plants to become profitable systems in the long term, as well as the enormous challenges that some power sources such as solar or wind energy (highly unstable) would face in meeting sustained levels of energy demand over time. All this without even considering the significant maintenance costs of renewable energy systems, which are also associated (as said) with the use of highly polluting raw materials and a series of supplies whose manufacture also depend on the use of fossil fuels [5].

But the argumentative problems in Chomsky’s response are not limited to the above. More importantly is that the danger of the climate crisis and the possibility of a planetary collapse can no longer be confined to a purely financial issue (solvable by a hypothetical allocation of 3% of world GDP) or a strictly technical-engineering challenge (solvable by the advancement of a successful energy transition). This is because the magnitude of this problem has gone beyond the area of competence of economic and technological systems, and has moved to the sphere of the geological and biophysical relations of the planet itself, calling the very techno-scientific (and economic-financial) capacities of contemporary civilisation into question. In other words, the problem represented by the current levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or those related to the unprecedented advances in marine acidification, Arctic melting, or permafrost decomposition rates, would today constitute challenges whose solution would be largely beyond any of our scientific developments and technological capabilities. Let’s just say that current atmospheric carbon dioxide levels (already close to 420 ppm) have not been seen for millions of years on Earth. On other occasions I have defined this situation as the development of a growing “terminal technological insufficiency” of our civilisation to face the challenges of the present planetary crisis [6].

In the case of current atmospheric CO2 concentrations, for example, there are not and will not be for a long time (possibly many decades or centuries), any kind of technology capable of achieving a substantial decrease of those concentrations. This at least not before such concentrations continue to skyrocket to levels that could soon guarantee that a large part of our planet will become completely uninhabitable in the short to medium term. In the case of CO2 capture facilities, for instance, they have not yet been able to remove even a small (insignificant) fraction of the more than 40 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted each year by industrial society [7]. Something similar would be the situation of other ecological problems such as the aforementioned increase in marine acidification levels, the rise in ocean levels or even the increasingly unmanageable proliferation of space debris and the consequent danger it represents for the (immediate) maintenance of contemporary telecommunication systems. In other words, again, increasing threatening problems for which humanity has no effective technologies to cope, at least not over the few remaining decades before these problems reach proportions that will soon call into question our very survival as a species.

Unsolvable problems, as unsolvable as those that would confront anyone seeking to “restore” a clay pot or a glass bottle to its original state after it has been shattered into a thousand fragments by smashing it against a concrete wall! To restore a glass of the finest crystal after it has been smashed to pieces? Not even with the investment of ten, a hundred world GDPs would it be possible! This is what we have done with the world, the most beautiful of the planetary crystals of our solar system, blown into a thousand pieces by ecocidal industrialism! To restore? To resolve? Bollocks! We have already destroyed it all! We have already finished it all! And no “financial investment” or “technological solution” can prevent what is coming: death! To die then! To die… and to fight to preserve what can be preserved! To die and to hope for the worst, to conquer socialism however we can, on whatever planet we have, and to take the future out of the hands of the devil himself if necessary! That is the task of socialist revolution in the 21st century! That is the duty of Marxist revolutionaries in the new epoch of darkness that is rising before us! That is the mission of Marxism-Collapsist!

Guy McPherson:

There is no escape from the mass extinction event underway. Only human arrogance could suggest otherwise. Our situation is definitely terminal. I cannot imagine that there will be a habitat for Homo sapiens beyond a few years in the future. Soon after we lose our habitat, all individuals of our species will die out. Global warming has already passed two degrees Celsius above the 1750 baseline, as noted by the renowned Professor Andrew Glikson in his October 2020 book “The Event Horizon”. He wrote on page 31 of that book: “During the Anthropocene, greenhouse gas forcing increased by more than 2.0 W/m2, equivalent to more than > 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures, which is an abrupt (climate change) event taking place over a period not much longer than a generation”.

So yes. We have definitely passed the point of no return in the climate crisis. Even the incredibly conservative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has already admitted the irreversibility of climate change in its 24 September 2019 “Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate”. A quick look around the globe will also reveal unprecedented events such as forest fires, floods and mega-droughts. The ongoing pandemic is just one of many events that are beginning to overwhelm human systems and our ability to respond positively.

All species are going extinct, including more than half a dozen species of the genus Homo that have already disappeared. According to the scientific paper by Quintero and Wiens published in Ecology Letters on 26 June 2013, the projected rate of environmental change is 10.000 times faster than vertebrates can adapt to. Mammals also cannot keep up with these levels of change, as Davis and colleagues’ paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 30 October 2018 points out. The fact that our species is a vertebrate mammal suggests that we will join more than 99% of the species that have existed on Earth that have already gone extinct. The only question in doubt is when. In fact, human extinction could have been triggered several years ago when the Earth’s average global temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above the 1750 baseline. According to a comprehensive overview of this situation published by the European Strategy and Policy Analysis System in April 2019, a “1.5 degree increase is the maximum the planet can tolerate; (…) in a worst-case scenario, [such a temperature increase above the 1750 baseline will result in] the extinction of humanity altogether”.

All species need habitat to survive. As Hall and colleagues reported in the Spring 1997 issue of the Wildlife Society Bulletin: “We therefore define habitat ‘as the resources and conditions present in an area that produce occupancy, including survival and reproduction, of a given organism. Habitat is organism-specific; it relates the presence of a species, population or individual (…) to the physical and biological characteristics of an area. Habitat implies more than vegetation or the structure of that vegetation; it is the sum of the specific resources needed by organisms. Whenever an organism is provided with resources that allow it to survive, that is its habitat’”. Even tardigrades are not immune to extinction. Rather, they are sensitive to high temperatures, as reported in the 9 January 2020 issue of Scientific Reports. Ricardo Cardoso Neves and collaborators point out there that all life on Earth is threatened with extinction with an increase of 5-6 degrees Celsius in the global average temperature. As Strona and Corey state in another article in Scientific Reports (November 13, 2018) raising the issue of co-extinctions as a determinant of the loss of all life on Earth: “In a simplified view, the idea of co-extinction boils down to the obvious conclusion that a consumer cannot survive without its resources”.

From the incredibly conservative Wikipedia entry entitled “Climate change” comes this supporting information: “Climate change includes both human-induced global warming and its large-scale impacts on weather patterns. There have been previous periods of climate change, but the current changes are more rapid than any known event in Earth’s history.” The Wikipedia entry further cites the 8 August 2019 report “Climate Change and Soils”, published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is among the most conservative scientific bodies in history. Yet it concluded in 2019 that the Earth is in the midst of the most rapid environmental change seen in planetary history, citing scientific literature that concludes: “These rates of human-driven global change far exceed the rates of change driven by geophysical or biospheric forces that have altered the trajectory of the Earth System in the past (Summerhayes 2015; Foster et al. 2017); nor do even abrupt geophysical events approach current rates of human-driven change”.

The Wikipedia entry also points out the consequences of the kind of abrupt climate change currently underway, including desert expansion, heat waves and wildfires becoming increasingly common, melting permafrost, glacier retreat, loss of sea ice, increased intensity of storms and other extreme environmental events, along with widespread species extinctions. Another relevant issue is the fact that the World Health Organisation has already defined climate change as the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century. The Wikipedia entry continues: “Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations collectively agreed to keep warming ‘well below 2.0 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) through mitigation efforts’”. But Professor Andrew Glikson already pointed out as we said in his aforementioned book The Event Horizon that the 2 degrees C mark is already behind us. Furthermore, as we already indicated, the IPCC also admitted the irreversibility of climate change in its “Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate”. Therefore, 2019 was an exceptional year for the IPCC, as it concluded that climate change is abrupt and irreversible.

How conservative is the IPCC? Even the conservative and renowned journal BioScience includes an article in its March 2019 issue entitled “Statistical language supports conservatism in climate change assessments”. The paper by Herrando-Perez and colleagues includes this information: “We find that the tone of the IPCC’s probabilistic language is remarkably conservative (…) emanating from the IPCC’s own recommendations, the complexity of climate research and exposure to politically motivated debates. Harnessing the communication of uncertainty with an overwhelming scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change should be one element of a broader reform, whereby the creation of an IPCC outreach working group could improve the transmission of climate science to the panel’s audiences”. Contrary to the conclusion of Herrando-Perez and colleagues, I cannot imagine that the IPCC is really interested in conveying accurate climate science to its audiences. After all, as Professor Michael Oppenheimer noted in 2007, the US government during the Reagan administration “saw the creation of the IPCC as a way to prevent the activism stimulated by my colleagues and me from controlling the political agenda”.

2. Have the human species become a plague for the planet? If so, how can we still conciliate the survival of life on Earth with the promotion of traditional modern values associated with the defence of human and social rights (which require the use of vast amounts of planetary resources) in a context of a potential increase of world’s population that could reach over twelve billion people this century? The latter in a context in which (according to several studies) the maximum number of humans that Earth could have sustained without a catastrophic alteration of ecosystems should have never exceeded the billion. Can the modern concept of liberal (or even socialist) democracy and its supposedly related principles of individual, identity, gender, or cultural freedom survive our apparent terminal geological situation, or it will be necessary to find new models of social organization, for example, in those present in several indigenous or native societies? Can the rights of survival of living species on Earth, human rights, and the concept of modern individual freedom be harmoniously conciliated in the context of an impending global ecosocial disaster? (Marxism and Collapse)

Noam Chomsky:

Let’s begin with population growth. There is a humane and feasible method to constrain that: education of women. That has a major effect on fertility in both rich regions and poor, and should be expedited anyway. The effects are quite substantial leading to sharp population decline by now in parts of the developed world. The point generalizes. Measures to fend off “global ecosocial disaster” can and should proceed in parallel with social and institutional change to promote values of justice, freedom, mutual aid, collective responsibility, democratic control of institutions, concern for other species, harmony with nature –values that are commonly upheld by indigenous societies and that have deep roots in popular struggles in what are called the “developed societies” –where, unfortunately, material and moral development are all too often uncorrelated.

Miguel Fuentes:

Chomsky’s allusions to the promotion of women’s education and the social values of justice, freedom, mutual aid, and harmony with nature, as “moral values” disconnected from a broader critique of the industrial system, capitalism, and the class society within which threats such as global warming have been generated and aggravated, become mere phrases of good intentions. On the contrary, the realization of these principles must be thought within a context of a large-scale world social transformation. The latter if those principles are to be effective in combatting the challenges facing humanity today and the kind of civilisational crisis that is beginning to unfold as a product of the multiple eco-social (ecological, energy and resource) crises that are advancing globally. In other words, a process of historical transformation that can envisage the abolition of the current ecocidal industrial economic system, and its replacement by one in which production, exchange and distribution can be planned in accordance with social needs.

But even a traditional socialist approach to these problems, such as the one above, also falls short of accounting for the kind of planetary threats we face. Let’s put it this way, the discussion around the ecological crisis and the rest of the existential dangers hanging over the fate of our civilisation today really only begins, not ends, by giving it a proper Marxist contextualisation. One of the underlying reasons for this is that the traditional socialist project itself, in all its variants (including its more recent ecosocialist versions), would also already be completely insufficient to respond to the dangers we are facing as a species. That is, the kind of dangers and interpretative problems that none of the Marxists theoreticians of social revolution over the last centuries had ever imagined possible, from Marx and Engels to some of the present-day exponents of ecosocialism such as John Bellamy Foster or Michael Lowy [8].

One of these new types of problems that revolutionary theories are facing today is that of the current uncontrolled demographic growth rates of humanity. A problem that would already confer on us, amongst other things, the condition of one of the worst biological (or, in our case, “biosocial”) plagues existing to this day. This if we consider the absolutely devastating role that our species has been exerting on the biosphere in the last centuries. A plague that would be even comparable in its destructive power to that represented by the cyanobacteria that triggered the first mass extinction event on Earth some 2.4 billion years ago, although in our case at an even more accelerated and “efficient” pace than the latter. Is this statement too brutal? Maybe, from a purely humanist point of view, alien to the kind of problems we face today, but not from an eminently scientific perspective. Or can there be any doubt about our condition as a “planetary plague” for any ecologist studying the current patterns of behaviour, resource consumption and habitat destruction associated with our species? Too brutal a statement? Tell it to the more than 10.000 natural species that become extinct every year as a result of the role of a single species on the planet: ours! Tell it to the billions of animals killed in the great fires of Australia or the Amazon a few years ago! Tell it to the polar bears, koalas, pikas, tigers, lions, elephants, who succumb every year as a product of what we have done to the Earth! Very well, we are then a “plague”, although this term would only serve to classify us as a “biological species”, being therefore too “limited” a definition and lacking any social and historical perspective. Right? [9]

Not really. The fact that we possess social and cultural systems that differentiate us from other complex mammals does not mean that our current status as a “plague of the world” should be confined to the biological realm alone. On the contrary, this just means that this status could also have a certain correlation in the social and cultural dimension; that is, in the sphere of the social and cultural systems particular to modern society. To put it in another way, even though our current condition of “plague of the world” has been acquired by our species within the framework of a specific type of society, mode of production and framework of particular historical relations, characteristic of industrial modernity, this does not mean that this condition should be understood as a merely historical product. That is, excluding its biological and ecological dimension. In fact, beyond the differentiated position and role of the various social sectors that make up the productive structure and the socio-economic systems of the industrial society (for example, the exploiting and exploited social classes), it is indeed humanity as a whole: rich and poor, entrepreneurs and workers, men and women, who share (all of us) the same responsibility as a species (although admittedly in a differentiated way) for the current planetary disaster. An example of the above. Mostly everything produced today by the big multinationals, down to the last grain of rice or the last piece of plastic, is consumed by someone, whether in Paris, London, Chisinau or La Paz. And we should also remember that even biological plagues (such as locusts) may have different consumption patterns at the level of their populations, with certain sectors being able to consume more and others consuming less. However, just because one sector of a given biological plague consumes less (or even much less), this sector should not necessarily be considered as not belonging to that plague in question.

Another similar example: it is often claimed in Marxist circles (sometimes the numbers vary according to each study) that 20% of humanity consumes 80% of the planetary resources. This means that approximately 1.600.000.000.000 people (assuming a total population of 8 billion) would be the consumers of that 80% of planetary resources; that is, a number roughly equivalent to three times the current European population. In other words, what this sentence really tells us is that a much larger segment of the world’s population than the capitalist elites (or their political servants) would also bear a direct, even grotesque, responsibility for the unsustainable consumption patterns that have been aggravating the current planetary crisis. Or, to put it in more “Marxist” terms, that a large percentage (or even the totality) of the working classes and popular sectors in Europe, the United States, and a significant part of those in Latin America and other regions of the so-called “developing countries”, would also be “directly complicit”, at least in regards of the reproduction of the current ecocidal modern urban lifestyle, in the destruction of our planet.

But let us extend the discussion to the remaining 80% of humanity; that is, to the approximately 6.400.000.000.000 people who consume 20% of the planetary resources used in a year. To begin with, let us say that 20% of global resources is not a negligible percentage, representing in fact a fifth of them and whose production would be associated with substantial and sustained levels of environmental destruction. The latter in the context of an ever-growing world population that possibly should never have exceeded one billion inhabitants, so that we would have been in a position today to stop or slow down the disastrous impact we are having on ecosystems. Let us not forget that the number of people included in this 80% of the world’s population is more than four times higher than the entire human population at the beginning of the 20th century, which means that the number of basic resources necessary for the survival of this sector is an inevitable pressure on the earth’s natural systems, even if consumption levels are kept to a minimum.

In short, there is therefore no doubt that humanity has indeed become one of the worst planetary plagues in the history of terrestrial life, constituting this a (fundamental) problem in itself for contemporary revolutionary thought and, more generally, for the human and social sciences as a whole. In other words, a problem that today would not be solved by a mere change in the mode of production, the class structure, or the socio-political system, but would be associated with the very “genetics” of the development of industrial society. That is to say, a society based on a particularly destructive (voracious) form of human-nature relationships, which would be at the same time the “structural basis” of all possible and conceivable models of it (capitalists, socialists or any other type). Whether in the framework of a neo-liberal market economy or a socialist and/or collectivist planned economy, it is the industrial system and modern mass society in all its variants, whether capitalist or socialist, its mega-cities, its productive levels, its consumption patterns and lifestyles, its “anthropocentric spirit”, structurally associated with certain demographic patterns in which the Earth is conceived as a mere space for human consumption and reproduction… that is the main problem.

Is it possible to reconcile current levels of overpopulation with the survival requirements of our species? No. We have become a planetary plague and will remain a planetary plague until such time as, by hook or by crook (almost certainly by crook) our numbers are substantially reduced and remain at the minimum possible levels, for at least a few centuries or millennia. Is it possible to solve the problem of overpopulation and at the same time defend the legitimacy of traditional modern values associated with the promotion of human and social rights, at least as these values have been understood in recent centuries? No. Modernity has failed. Modernity is dead. We are going to have to rethink every single one of our values, including the most basic ones, all of them. We are going to have to rethink who we are, where we are going and where we come from. The existence of almost 8 billion people on our planet today, and moreover the likely increase of this number to one that reaches 10 or even 12 billion is not only incompatible with the realisation of the very ideals and values of modern democracy in all its variants (capitalists or socialists), but also with the very survival of our species as a whole and, possibly, of all complex life on Earth. This simply because there will be nowhere near enough resources to ensure the realization of these values (or even our own subsistence) in such a demographic context (there simply won’t be enough food and water). Our situation is terminal. Modernity is dead. Democracy is dead. Socialism is dead. And if we want these concepts -democracy or socialism- to really have any value in the face of the approaching catastrophe, then we will have to rethink them a little more humbly than we have done so far.

Modern civilisation has borne some of the best fruits of humanity’s social development, but also some of the worst. We are in some ways like the younger brother of a large family whose early successes made him conceited, stupid and who, thinking of himself as “master of the world”, began to lose everything. We are that young man. We should therefore shut up, put our ideologies (capitalists and socialists) in our pockets, and start learning a little more from our more modest, slower and more balanced “big brothers”; for example, each of the traditional or indigenous societies which have been able to ensure their subsistence for centuries and in some cases even millennia. The latter while industrial society would not even have completed three centuries before endangering its own existence and that of all other cultures on the planet. In a few words, start learning from all those traditional societies that have subsisted in the context of the development of social systems that are often much more respectful of ecological and ecosystemic balances. Those “ecosocial balances” which are, in the end, in the long view of the evolution of species, the real basis for the development of any society… because without species (be they animal or plant), any human culture is impossible. Scientific and technological progress? Excellent idea! But perhaps we could take the long route, think things through a bit more, and achieve the same as we have achieved today in two centuries, but perhaps taking a bit longer, say ten, twenty or even a hundred centuries? Who’s in a hurry? Let us learn from the tortoise which, perhaps because it is slow, has survived on Earth for more than 220 million years, until we (who as Homo sapiens are no more than 250.000 years old) came along and endangered it.

Guy McPherson:

As ecologists have been pointing out for decades, environmental impacts are the result of human population size and human consumption levels. The Earth can support many more hunter-gatherers than capitalists seeking more material possessions. Unfortunately, we are stuck with the latter rather than the former. Ecologists and environmentalists have been proposing changes in human behaviour since at least the early 20th century. These recommendations have fallen on deaf ears. However, even if it is possible to achieve substantial changes in human behaviour, and if they result in an effective slowing down or stopping of industrial activity, it is questionable whether this is a useful means of ensuring our continued survival. One reason for this lies in the knowledge of what the effect of “aerosol masking” could mean for the climate crisis.

The “climate masking” effect of aerosols has been discussed in the scientific literature since at least 1929, and consists of the following: at the same time as industrial activity produces greenhouse gases that trap part of the heat resulting from sunlight reaching the Earth, it also produces small particles that prevent this sunlight from even touching the surface of the planet. These particles, called “aerosols”, thus act as a kind of umbrella that prevents some of the sunlight from reaching the earth’s surface (hence this phenomenon has also been referred to as “global dimming”) [11]. In other words, these particles (aerosols) prevent part of the sun’s rays from penetrating the atmosphere and thus inhibit further global warming. This means, then, that the current levels of global warming would in fact be much lower than those that should be associated with the volumes of greenhouse gases present in the atmosphere today (hence the designation of this phenomenon as “climate masking”). To put it in a simpler way, the global warming situation today would actually be far more serious than is indicated not only by the very high current global temperatures, but also by the (already catastrophic) projections of rising global temperatures over the coming decades. This is especially important if we consider the (overly optimistic) possibility of a future reduction in the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere as a result of a potential decrease in greenhouse gas emissions over the next few years, which should paradoxically lead, therefore, to a dramatic increase in global temperatures.

Global temperatures should then not only be much higher than they are today, but the expected rise in global temperatures will necessarily be more intense than most climate models suggest. According to the father of climate science, James Hansen, it takes about five days for aerosols to fall from the atmosphere to the surface. More than two dozen peer-reviewed papers have been published on this subject and the latest of these indicates that the Earth would warm by an additional 55% if the “masking” effect of aerosols were lost, which should happen, as we said, as a result of a marked decrease or modification of industrial activity leading to a considerable reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. This study suggests that this could potentially lead to an additional (sudden) increase in the earth’s surface temperature by about 133% at the continental level. This article was published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications on 15 June 2021. In conclusion, the loss or substantial decrease of aerosols in the atmosphere could therefore lead to a potential increase of more than 3 degrees Celsius of global warming above the 1750 baseline very quickly. I find it very difficult to imagine many natural species (including our own) being able to withstand this rapid pace of environmental change.

In reality, a mass extinction event has been underway since at least 1992. This was reported by Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson, the so-called “father of biodiversity”, in his 1992 and 2002 books The Diversity of Life and The Future of Life, respectively. The United Nations Environment Programme also reported in August 2010 that every day we are leading to the extinction of 150 to 200 species. This would thus be at least the eighth mass extinction event on Earth. The scientific literature finally acknowledged the ongoing mass extinction event on 2 March 2011 in Nature. Further research along these lines was published on 19 June 2015 in Science Advances by conservation biologist Gerardo Ceballos and colleagues entitled “Accelerated human-induced losses of modern species: entering the sixth mass extinction”. Coinciding with the publication of this article, lead author Ceballos stated that “life would take many millions of years to recover and that our species would probably soon disappear”. This conclusion is supported by subsequent work indicating that terrestrial life did not recover from previous mass extinction events for millions of years. It is true, however, that indigenous perspectives can help us understand ongoing events. However, I am convinced that rationalism is key to a positive response to these events.

Collapsosaurus Rex: Collapse 101

Collapse 101, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Kali Yuga

by Collapsosaurus Rex

Editor’s note: I started this site with the intent of hosting others’ writings, as well as my own, on the topic of how to live with the awareness of impending civilizational collapse brought on by climate change and global capitalism. When I have reposted others’ writing here without permission, I have tried to remain within the bounds of fair use by limiting my reposting to excerpts and linking to the original. However, on one prior occasion, I posted essays which were not elsewhere available. This is another such instance. The three essays which follow were written under the pseudonym “Collapsosaurus Rex” in 2018. They are now only available in archived format and therefore cannot be found through regular internet searches. I am reposting them here so that they might be more widely appreciated. I recommend reading the three articles together. Michael Dowd’s audio recording of his reading of the entire series here.


Dear Friends and Neighbors,

I’m sorry to say that I have some bad news for you: Civilization is collapsing. If you hadn’t realized that already, I imagine that reading this summary will come as something of a shock. If you’ve already started putting together the pieces for yourself, then this might cover some familiar territory. In any case, the purpose of this overview is to describe in simple and straightforward terms why so many reputable people have become convinced that civilization is heading for a disaster of epic proportions.

But What About Rocket Jesus?

On the surface, the idea that industrial civilization is collapsing might seem utterly ridiculous to people raised on the techno-utopian vision of shows and movies like Star Trek, Star Wars and all the endless imitators who imagined that humanity would travel to the stars and explore the universe. Indeed, for most of my life I was one of the people who believed exactly that. I thought that humanity, despite our flaws, would mature along with our technology and eventually leave our home planet for sexy sci-fi adventures among the stars.

Looking back, that seems pretty ridiculous now, but you’d be amazed by how many otherwise intelligent and rational people still seem to believe something along those lines.

Hell, celebrity billionaire Elon Musk (henceforth referred to by his charming internet nickname Rocket Jesus) famously spent a metric fuckton of money launching a goddamn sports car into orbit in order to keep dreams of space exploration alive. The problem is, of course, that if we can’t manage to build a sustainable civilization on Earth with an abundance of resources, how the hell are we supposed to make it work on Mars?

The main point I’m trying to make here is that settling other planets or living on spaceships is no solution for the problems that have gotten us into this mess. We have built an entire civilization on the foundations of overconsumption, inequality, greed and hubris. Taking those things into space will kill us even faster than they are killing us here on Earth.

On to the Main Event

So what do I mean when I say that civilization is collapsing? Well, as it turns out, this whole shitshow of a culture is based on exploiting resources as quickly as possible and turning them into constant growth. Ever since our ancestors developed totalitarian agriculture (by which I mean the system that dominates ecosystems as opposed to coexisting with them) we have been heading down a dead-end road that ends with a very steep cliff.

Think of it like this: When yeast cells are added to a sugar solution to make alcohol, they begin by doubling their numbers over and over again until they have completely saturated the solution. Then, they metabolize the sugar for energy and excrete CO2 and alcohol. After a few days almost all the sugar is gone, and the yeast begin to die off as their food supply runs out and their waste products build up until they can no longer survive.

Humans are carrying out the same process right now on a planetary scale, but almost everyone is in denial of this fact because they can’t quite believe that our leaders and decision-makers could be so damn stupid. “But wait,” I hear some of you thinking, “humans are so much smarter than yeast! We’re individuals who make choices and create amazing technology. Surely someone will invent something that can save us!”

It’s true that as individuals we’re (marginally) smarter than yeast, but as a whole our population dynamics follow the same physical laws and respond to the same pressures and incentives as other species. When resources are abundant, our population grows until it reaches the physical limits of the environment. Once all the resources have been consumed, our population will inevitably decline, no matter how smart some individuals may be.

Unfortunately, we’ve been born into the generations living right before the peak of civilization, and we are currently witnessing the last of the easily-accessible resources being consumed. It’s somewhat like riding up the steep initial incline of a roller coaster: on the way up it can seem as though we are climbing an endless hill of progress, but as soon as we tip over the peak there will be a rapid and dramatic fall.

Oil, Energy and EROEI

The main driver of collapse is our addiction to fossil fuel energy sources. As I write this in early 2018, more than 85 percent of the world’s energy is derived by burning oil, coal, natural gas and other fossil fuels. Our civilization is completely dependent on these fuels for electricity, transportation, manufacturing and pretty much every other aspect of industrial society. There are several major problems with this situation, some of which we will have to deal with very soon (within 5 to 10 years) and others that we will be dealing with until our species goes extinct (much sooner than you probably imagine).

In the short term, the most pressing problem is that we have burned through most of the easily-accessible oil in the planetary equivalent of a wild weekend bender. Oil is basically stored solar energy that has been accumulating for millions of years, and when we first began burning through this treasure trove in the early 20th century, each barrel provided up to 40 times as much energy as was required to extract it (some estimates say as high as 100-to-1). This energy surplus allowed our population to explode and provided the fuel for massive economic growth and unprecedented prosperity for the wealthy nations of the world.

Unfortunately, just like a raging alcoholic who drinks up all their money in one weekend instead of saving anything for the future, we’ve now burned through our reserves and we’re desperately fracking everything in sight to squeeze out a few more drops of the good stuff. Making matters worse is the fact that fracking and using other technological fixes to extract shale oil is highly energy-intensive. That means that where once we were getting an Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) of greater than 40 to 1, now we’re down below 20 to 1 and falling fast.

This is reflected economically by the anemic growth and near-zero interest rates that have characterized the post-2008 economic “recovery.” I put recovery in quotes there because it is quite clear that conditions for 99% of humanity have not recovered and never will. Instead, we will see a continual decline in quality of life and available resources until the system reaches a breaking point. Some analysts suggest that EROEI below 10-to-1 will make it impossible to sustain our manufacturing and distribution networks, effectively leading to collapse well before the planet actually runs out of oil. Based on current consumption and discovery rates, this could happen as soon as the early 2020s.

CO2, Climate Change and Collapse

Unfortunately, even if the entire world population became enlightened overnight and gave up fossil fuels today, went 100 percent vegan and lived out the rest of their lives as hermetic eco-saints, there is already so much carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution in the atmosphere that collapse is “baked into the cake.” Because of its chemical makeup, CO2 takes a few decades from when it is initially released until it is fully active as a heat-trapping agent in the atmosphere. This means that the wild climatic swings, monstrous storms and record-breaking heat waves we’re already witnessing are being amplified by CO2 emissions from the 1980s and 90s, and will continue to intensify as all the CO2 we’ve released since then stacks on top.

Basically, we would have had to dramatically downsize the global economy decades ago and actively worked to prevent the last 40 years of population growth in order to have a chance to avoid catastrophic climate change and eventual extinction. But, since our political leaders and corporate overlords have the common sense, empathy and foresight of meth-addicted hyenas, we’re now in what I like to think of as “the darkest timeline” in which our species is effectively going to go extinct by the end of this century. I say “effectively” because even if the children of a few billionaire survivors eke out a living for a while longer in underground bunkers, there will be no triumphant return to the surface for them or their descendants. Those bunkers will eventually become tombs, as elaborate and ultimately pointless as the pyramids of Giza.

I say all this with considerable confidence because we have already altered the climate of our planet so much that eventually the atmosphere will become unbreathable. To make a long story short, phytoplankton in the oceans make more than 50 percent of our oxygen, and we are killing them off by heating up the water and causing it to become more acidic as it absorbs CO2. Once the oceans pass a certain threshold, dangerous bacteria take over and produce a toxic gas called hydrogen sulfide. Here’s a link to a full explanation if you want to read more about this process. (Fair warning: It’s depressing as hell and there’s nothing you can do about it anyway, but that sure didn’t stop me from ruining my own life by learning about it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

Well before the oxygen runs out, though, we will reach global average temperatures that make it difficult (if not impossible) to grow the staple crops that billions depend on for sustenance, including rice, wheat and corn. Droughts are already impacting millions of people all over the world, and they are projected to increase dramatically in many areas, turning whole swathes of productive countryside into deserts. Other areas will receive massive increases in rainfall, leading to unprecedented flooding and the loss of cropland due to pollution and erosion. The combined effects of food shortages, famines, droughts, floods, fires, hurricanes and all the other disasters brought about by climate change will rapidly destabilize most countries and lead to mass migrations on a scale never before seen. Inevitably, this will cause political and military conflicts as wealthier nation-states attempt to secure their borders and hoard the few remaining resources for the elites.

Economically, these factors will lead to death-by-a-thousand-cuts as multi-billion-dollar disasters occur over and over again until insurance companies are bankrupted and the global economy lies in smoking ruins, just like our storm-shattered cities.

(Note that I haven’t even bothered to talk about the wholesale destruction of ecosystems and biodiversity, proliferation of toxic chemicals and plastic pollution in every water source, or any of the accelerating feedback loops that are complicating all of these problems. Frankly, there’s no point. It only takes one extinction-level event to end a species, and we’ve set ourselves up for at least a dozen of them and counting. Reading the news these days feels like watching a special-needs soccer team racking up own-goals and celebrating that the score is getting so high.)

Jumping to Conclusions

At this point in the article, it’s customary to drag out the ol’ garden hose and blow a bunch of smoke and sunshine up your ass about how humanity can solve its problems with advanced technology, greater political engagement and positive thinking about chakra crystals or something.

Fortunately, I don’t care enough about what you think or do to bother lying to you. So, I am free to summarize the situation succinctly and honestly in layman’s terms: We fucked up big time and there’s absolutely nothing we can do to fix it. In upcoming articles I will dig more deeply into the techno-fantasies of carbon capture and storage, space-based reflectors and other geo-engineering pipedreams, but for now suffice it to say that you’d better enjoy your remaining time and money while you can, because the future is looking grim and retirement is a fantasy for all but the wealthiest people alive right now.

Whew! I need a drink, and I imagine you might as well. There’s plenty more we could cover, but this is just Collapse 101, so let’s save some despairoin for another day. If you’re wondering what comes next, check out our piece on What YOU Can Do to stop collapse, or get a head start on navigating the Stages of Grief.

If this is all a bit much for you, why not take a break from the hardcore doom with our suggestions for Coping Mechanisms, or consider getting offline entirely and go for a walk in the park while you can still breathe the air and see some actual plants and animals before they’re gone for good.

No matter what else you take away from this article, I hope you’ll remember to appreciate what you’ve got while you’ve got it. Becoming aware of collapse can be a terrible burden, but it can also be a great gift when it becomes a reminder to treasure each day as if it could be your last, and to live life to the fullest while you can. Our children and grandchildren will look back on these years as a time of unbelievable luxury, comfort and convenience, so try not to take anything for granted, and do your best to be grateful for the time you have left.

Monica Lee's Realism is a breath of fresh air

Monica Lee: Climate Crisis and Bullshit Optimism. May 21, 2022.

I’m so amazed by anyone who is optimistic with regard to our current climate crisis.

I suspect that this optimism prevails maybe because almost every mainstream article or discussion on the topic by a scientist ends with a message of hope that we can turn things around in time if we just work together and cooperate to cut our emissions.

They keep telling us that all the shit hits the fan by 2050 or 2100, so we assume that we have some time before we really need to buckle down and make some sacrifices.

I also suspect that no scientist really believes this and it’s really insulting to those of us who see through the bullshit message. Even if they know that there’s realistically nothing we can do at this point to stop and reverse the warming, it’s bad PR to not at least appear hopeful. Great, the ship’s going down and why not whore yourselves out to corporate media with your bullshit message of hope instead of telling the truth?

Surely, you’ve notice what’s happening around you. You don’t need someone else to tell you that things are headed off a cliff, or are you that frog in the boiling pot?

Excess carbon dioxide heating up the atmosphere? That’s okay, we’ll develop carbon sequestration technology that will remove the excess carbon and store it underground indefinitely and not worry about the environmental degradation that accompanies this technology and the fact that we’re already several decades too late for it to be a current viable solution.

Currently, the biggest carbon sequestration plant in the world may​ negate an equivalent of three seconds’ worth of emissions per year. There aren’t enough of these extremely costly plants in existence to even make a dent in offsetting the emissions.

Let’s plant more trees! Sure, we’ll just ignore the fact that there’s not enough available land due to its appropriation for agricultural usage and that there’s not enough time to plant the amount of trees needed to grow to their full potential to sequester enough carbon to slow down the warming caused by the increasing rate of carbon dioxide and methane and warming that’s already baked in the atmosphere.

And guess what? All of these increasing wildfires release even more of that sequestered carbon creating an endless feedback loop of increasing temperatures which leads to more wildfires, etc., because trees can’t adapt fast enough to the increasing temperatures.

In the past two years alone, twenty percent of the giant sequoias were wiped out of existence due to wildfires. Twenty percent of some of the oldest living organisms on the planet that were once considered fireproof are wiped out forever. Don’t count on restoring them anytime soon. It takes hundreds of years for them to reach their full height if they are allowed to grow in a temperate climate which no longer describes California.

In fact, every year, wildfires are getting worse, and at the time of this writing, the wildfire season started four months earlier than usual in the Southwestern United States where it’s also experiencing extreme drought. The water level of Lake Mead is so low that they’re discovering more remains of discarded dead bodies from the 70s or 80s.

In California, Gavin Newsom asked residents to conserve their water usage by about 15%, but instead, usage is up dramatically. If people living in California can’t be convinced to conserve water during an unprecedented drought and in fact do the opposite, what hope is there for other regions of the world?

How about we focus on the lack of insects? We’re losing more than 70% of our insects including bees. No problem, we can hand pollinate the fruit and vegetables and mimic what the bees and insects do to ensure our food supply. We don’t need the bees if there are enough of us willing to do their work for free. If bees are disappearing from our region, we’ll just steal them from somewhere else because that’s the trend these days in the world of beekeeping.

.....

Forget about sociopathic power-hungry leaders, the average person doesn’t care either. Just try to bring up the topic with friends or family, you will either get an angry reaction, outright dismissal, or pleas to seek treatment for mental health because they think you’re insane to feel anxiety over such a trivial matter.

..

We should have been protesting the shit out of our crisis many decades ago and worked furiously to come up with solutions to slow and reverse the damage that we’re seeing now. We should have looked beyond the profit motive as a solution to all of our problems.

It’s pathetic and sad that the climate crisis spokesperson who berates world leaders for not making this issue the number one priority is a teenage girl who knows that we didn’t care enough to leave a sustainable planet for her and future generations.

Unfortunately, we have proved to be incapable of divorcing ourselves from this profit-driven system to come up with any meaningful solutions to save our asses and secure the viability of future generations.

Human reactions to this crisis tell me that there is no hope. I already knew this years ago, but I thought that at the very least a lot more people with all of the glaring evidence of the current environmental collapse would “look up”.

Monica Lee: The Best Kept Secret in Climate Science. July 10, 2022.

Disclaimer: Please stop reading if you are “doomed out” and would rather read solution-oriented articles sprinkled with sugar-coated positivity. I understand your need to avoid our harsh reality in order to cope with daily life, but some of us realists are unable to build up a wall of protective denial around us and pretend that everything will be okay.

We’ve disrupted the Earth’s climate systems to the extent that ironically, the only thing that’s kind of saving our asses right now and keeping us from experiencing a summer hotter than Hades is also what’s killing about four to seven million of us every year — industrial aerosols, or pollution.

We don’t truly understand the climate crisis and just how fucked we are unless we understand the concept of global dimming, or the Aerosol Masking Effect (AME).

...

The general idea of AME is that some of the pollution we’re emitting in the form of sulphur dioxide is actually keeping us cooler. Tiny water particles bind more readily to SO2 particles, reflect sunlight, and prevent further global warming.

If you live in one of the areas inflicted by never-ending heatwaves right now, you don’t want to know how hot it would get without the cooling effect of aerosols, but scientists estimate that aerosols offset the effects of global warming, depending on the source, anywhere from a whopping 40 to 55%.

Therefore, the potential risks of reducing our emissions quickly and abruptly at this late stage after our long history of poisoning the planet are akin to an alcoholic abruptly quitting alcohol — dangerous and life-threatening.

So why is the most important news that affects all living organisms on the planet being kept secret?

Scientists have attempted to warn the public for decades that we need to cut our emissions. While it’s true that we can’t continue to poison the planet at this rate because it’s killing anywhere from about four to seven million people every year, the loss of cooling aerosols and the AME would kill us faster, thus creating a sort of Sophie’s Choice-type paradox.

Say what?

...

Perhaps the AME is deliberately left out of mainstream discussion because it complicates the general message that we need to cut our emissions, and populations don’t seem to respond to simple messages too well, let alone complicated ones.

It’s as if our leaders and scientists collectively decided to not further confuse and frighten the already confused and frightened public.

...

Wet-bulb temperatures, with previous maximum temperatures of human survivability at 35°C (95°F) with 100% humidity, have been lowered in a recent study to 31°C (87°F) with 100% humidity even for young, healthy subjects. For older subjects, the temperature is likely lower.

I don’t need to be told what this spells out for all of us.

Dr. Michael Mann, scientist and corporate whore who praised Joe Biden for his “climate plan” after his election, blatantly lies in this interview posted here on Medium:

“There’s no science that supports the idea that we are committed to some sort of runaway warming. The science pretty clearly now indicates that how much warming we get is a function of how much carbon we burn. And the flip side of that is if we bring our carbon emissions to zero, the warming, at least of the surface of our planet, stabilizes very quickly. We basically stop the warming of the planet if we stop polluting the atmosphere with carbon.”

I don’t know how these kinds of comments go unchallenged.

[they do, but by too few, and on Twitter, Mann blocks anyone who tries to debate the point with him] 

And Joe Biden never had a plan. In case you were optimistic that we were going to get our shit together in the United States as the world’s biggest carbon emitter historically— and currently the world’s second biggest emitter — and take the first steps to reverse course and serve as an example to other nations, the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling just dealt a crushing blow to the EPA’s power to regulate emissions.

Most of us haven’t even noticed that we’ve run out of time to “really do something”, and the only choices we currently have are to continue with business as usual like we’ve been doing and watch mass die-offs in horror, or attempt to geoengineer ourselves out of this mess and hope against all odds that luck is on our side.

Do you ever wonder why geoengineering solutions to save the planet have even been considered in the first place?

More scientists are now admitting that if we don’t consider them, we are positively screwed. Even if we were able to curb our emissions to net zero right now, the rate of warming would continue to increase due to the built-in warming from CO2 emitted about a decade ago and the tendency for CO2 to linger in the atmosphere from hundreds to a thousand years.

If we attempt geoengineering solutions, the best-case scenarios of implementing these Hail Mary attempts could theoretically buy us some time, but more likely, we’ll cause more harm to the planet in the process and cause ourselves to become extinct faster.

Those are our choices?

Yes, apparently.

What former NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen has referred to as the “Faustian bargain”, the devil has come to collect. The stakes are much higher today than they were decades ago.

We’ve waited way too long, and instead of curbing our emissions when it really mattered, we’ve doubled down driving exponential growth of human population and expansion, global carbon emissions, and resource depletion thanks to capitalism.

Dr. Hansen noticing an unusually hot July in 2021, considering that it should have been relatively cooler in a fairly strong La Niña phase but was later confirmed to be the hottest month ever recorded, admitted in a study published in August 2021 that scientists are underestimating and ignoring the climate impact of the AME.

He recently stated that reducing aerosol pollution could double the rate of global warming over the next 25 years. That’s not good news considering that the amount of heat that the Earth traps has doubled since 2005 and is warming “faster than expected.”

The AME is the biggest wild card in climate change, perhaps the least understood climate forcing impacting global warming, and it complicates any geoengineering solution that exists today.

The most recent and well-known examples of real-world immediate impacts of the AME on global warming were the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, the temporary grounding of all airline flights after 9–11, and the temporary halting of production and manufacturing during the lockdown in China in 2020.

How did each scenario affect global temperatures?

The eruption of Mount Pinatubo caused a reduction in global temperature by about 0.6°C (1.1°F) for about two years. The vast amounts of aerosols injected high into the stratosphere created a cooling affect.

The period of September 11–14 when all flights were temporarily grounded had the biggest diurnal temperature range of about about 1.1°C (2°F) of any three-day period within the previous 30 years due to clear skies and lack of contrails that normally reflect solar radiation during the day and trap heat during the night.

...

Despite the large drop in CO2 emissions of 5.4% in 2020, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere continued to grow at about the same rate compared to previous years, and methane grew by 0.3%, at a faster rate than any other year within the decade due to the reduction of nitrogen oxides (NOx).

This is quite disconcerting considering that scientists are finally beginning to admit that we need to also focus on rising methane emissions.

...

Most people don’t even know that our climate crisis is heading toward not just a crisis, but a total annihilation in the very near term.

It’s not just a mass annihilation of all humanity.

It’s a mass annihilation of all living organisms on our planet, and it’s happening now, not in the distant future.

Jessica Wildfire: We Should Be Building Homes to Survive The Climate Apocalypse

They’d be cheaper, too.

...................

We’re going to live harder lives than our parents.

We’re going to have to get scrappier.

A lot of knowledge hasn’t been passed down from prior generations, so we’re going to have to get it from places like books. Some good ones include David Pogue’s How to Prepare for Climate Change, and Carleen Madigan’s The Backyard Homestead.

Hey, I know.

We were preparing for a different future, one stripped of upward mobility and easy retirement like we were promised. We’re looking at a future where it’s smart to know how to build an outhouse.

The future of our old dreams is gone.

It’s not going to happen.

Adopt a new mindset.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, just a starting point.

It’s a different way of thinking.

It’s a way of investing that most Americans don’t think about, because they’re too busy worrying about stocks and crypto. It’s about redesigning a future where we actually feel some hope.

I don’t know about you, but just knowing that I could pull water out of the air if I needed makes me sleep a little better.

You could even just dig a hole.

There’s options.

There’s no point in working all the time and dreaming of the things that we’ll never afford, especially when those things were creating enormous inequality and destroying the planet. There’s also no point in curling up into a ball and crying yourself to sleep every night.

Imagine if millions of us adopted this new mindset. Imagine if we gave up our dreams of making millions and owning big homes, and instead we started thinking about how to live better with less. We could live happier and more in tune with our environment.

We could be more equal.

Instead of wasting our last resources on mansions in the desert, we could be building smaller, cheaper homes that use less energy. We could be housing more people with less. We could be designing and building homes for a better future for everyone, not just the super rich.

It’s what we always talk about anyway, right? Let’s apply this trendy minimalism in ways that actually matter.

Endless growth was killing us.

This way is better.

Ishi Nobu: Self-Extinction

The Litany of Self-Extinction. Ishi Nobu. April 16, 2022.


Though the cause of human self-extinction may be singularly attributed to unsustainable lifestyles, it involves so much more than just “climate change.”

An unbroken continuity to human existence has been to employ technology to make men money by making living more comfortable for the masses. Ecological abuse from technology has been the modus operandi to self-destruction.

The hominid diaspora ended up with this apex predator on most every dot of land on Earth where survival could be eked out: if not from the earth itself, by trading with others.

Everywhere they have lived, people tried to make their claimed patch of land a Nature-exclusion zone. Homes and farmlands were cleared of “weeds” and “pests” using biocides. Heading into hothouse, cities have become heat islands precisely because vegetation has been replaced by asphalt and concrete.

The relentless taking of land, including the extensive network of roads – ribbons of death – has been a factor in the mass extinction event underway. Chopping habitats into fragments has been a death sentence to billions of other mammals.

Real-estate retrenchment, by restoring bits of land back to Nature, would be wholly inadequate to reverse what has already been done. Planting trees may make people feel good about Nature, but it has no significance.

Material extraction to support the industrial lifestyle is an odious extension of land use. It exacerbates taking from Nature by profuse pollution. Mining and drilling invariably turns the land into single-use human consumption for centuries, if not millennia. No extraction or use of oil does not happen without petrol spilling and polluting.

The fouling of the air & water which is causing global warming is just one aspect of the endless poisoning which has turned green fields into brownfields, strangled sea life in plastic, and made precious freshwater forever undrinkable for animals or plants.

Another aspect of resource extraction, to use the concept loosely, has been the wanton killing of wildlife, including chronic overfishing. Beyond merely taking away the homes of other life, men have actively killed off any animal that might be of some use or got in the way of how he wanted to live.

The ubiquitous system of free-market trade seemed to have worked well enough until the machine age. The terminal problem with industrial capitalism is that it just does not scale into sustainability; quite the opposite. There are a few ways to look at this holistic dilemma, but one sticks out: there simply are too many people on the planet, all aspiring to unsustainable lifestyles.

The application of technology cannot possibly remedy what technology created in the first place. There is no “green” energy. There is only more taking.

At this late juncture in civilization’s fragile existence, the only possible path to species survival would be an abrupt change in collective lifestyle and way of living: away from do-as-you-like individualism to a conservation-oriented communalism.

Even that would prove inadequate given what has already gone down. The Gaia momentum now ushering humanity to its own demise isn’t going to stop just because we change our minds. The momentum instead is only picking up speed.

The plutocracy which reigns over the status quo remains unmoved, and the masses are not calling for a revolution toward unpalatable frugality.

With democracies holding sway in most of the world, radical action would require a public consensus which is nowhere in sight. Humanity does not have decades to come to this critical revelation.

The road ahead is, alas, clear. It is a dead end.

awesome post by Raelle Kaia, worth posting in full

The Moral Reckoning. by Raelle Kaia. April 23, 2022


To where have we arrived? Has the New Normal truly come and gone?

This spring, many of us find ourselves warily adjusting to the apparent conclusion of two utterly surreal years in human history. We wonder if it is really possible to cast aside the legacy our leaders left us—the mask and vaccine mandates, the terror, division, social paranoia, and isolation—free to resume to the numb, hypnotic trance of life as we once knew it. Shall we continue our march into the soul-sucking banality of digitally mediated virtual life, with ever-increasing surveillance, alienation, and ubiquitous technological overwhelm of our humanity? Are we really free to wake up from the nightmare-dream of covid-induced fear, condemnation, segregation, and authoritarianism?

We wonder whether our fearless leaders have truly released us from our obedience training—from our dutiful imperatives to serve the greater good through compliance and self-sacrifice. It kind of looks that way on the surface, but an eerie feeling hangs in the air. In my old life, I still clung to scraps and shreds of trust in our society’s leadership. Now, in the wake of the calamity wrought through the course of these past two years, my trust has been irreparably broken. Millions share in this journey with me.

As one result of this, I no longer tune into the promulgations of the mainstream media and its corporate press. But through my contacts with others who remain plugged in, I still pick up on some of its prevailing messages and narratives. As such, I’ve gleaned that our leaders have radically altered their instructions to the populace in recent months. Previously, we were all supposed to be obsessed with covid at the exclusion of all else, implored to eliminate the virus by harassing, haranguing, and expelling the unvaccinated and maskless from society. Now it seems we’re supposed to believe that the most important thing is “standing with Ukraine,” vilifying Russia and Russians, and worrying about World War III. Or at least we were for a while. Then it seemed like the thing we were all supposed to care about was Will Smith slapping Chris Rock.

This 1984-style narrative shift has us all confused about whether Eurasia or East Asia is the enemy we’ve always been at war with. We seem to remember it both ways. Meanwhile, behind our muddled confusion, all the foundations of covid tyranny are still lying in place—just waiting to be reactivated. Governments have established their prerogative to abrogate all personal freedoms and human rights any time they declare an emergency. We are now supposed to accept total surveillance, the automation of everything, the end of medical privacy and bodily autonomy, and the unaccountable rule of technocratic corporations, NGOs, and oligarchs. We are supposed to have internalized our new role as obedient soldiers in the fight against (insert cause célèbre here), ready to surrender our speech, our minds, and our critical thinking the moment we receive instructions to do so. We are now supposed to vilify and persecute whatever proffered enemy our masters supply us with whenever the narrative changes.

This is called “getting our freedoms back.” On April 18, I was waiting for a flight at the Tucson Airport when one of the staff announced that the federal mask mandate in airports and airplanes no longer applied, effective immediately. And just like that, almost two years of forcing masks on travelers was gone. One moment, it’s absolutely necessary we do this—the next moment, it makes no difference at all. I wandered around the airport, observing as others gradually got the news and began to show their faces, the hallways still littered with imposing signs about the grave necessity to keep one’s face covered at all times—artifacts of an ancient bygone era that ended 10 minutes earlier.

When I got on the plane, I took note of how many people continued to wear a mask of their own volition. It seemed to be about half the people. I also noted that none of the airplane crew chose to continue wearing masks. In the airports, very few of the airline staff continued to wear masks either. Are people who work for airlines naturally disposed to right-wing, anti-science, white-supremacist, conspiracy-theorizing, anti-mask sentiments? Or is it possible that having existed at the center of this mask controversy for the past two years, airline employees actually looked into the thing on a deeper level than the average person—and in so doing discovered the absurdity of the whole enterprise?

Later, I discovered why the mandate had been lifted. Earlier that day, a federal judge ruled that the mandate had been illegal all along. It seems that as long as someone in authority (or with presumed authority) orders anyone to do anything, most people will just obey as if they had no rights at all. They will never look into the question of whether that authority is illegally derived, or whether the orders are morally grounded or rationally sound. Instead, most people will act as if they were subjects of a monarch or a dictator rather than citizens with inalienable rights, governed by representatives with limited powers. They will assume it’s someone else’s job to tell them whether they have to stop following the authority’s dictates or whether they have to continue. They will defer to another authority to tell them which authority they must obey. All this time—even though half of airline travelers and almost all airline staff did not believe in wearing masks—they all collectively went along with illegally promulgated mask orders until the moment they were told not to anymore.

What else will people do as long as they are ordered to? What else have people already done? This is the moral reckoning that faces us as people.


Segregation and Discrimination

During the nightmare of covid governance, the populace has been strongly encouraged to practice segregation and discrimination. Millions enthusiastically answered the call in their private lives as well as public lives. Millions more went along with the segregation and discrimination without enthusiasm, but simply because they were told to.

When I was a child in the ‘80s, I learned about how in the bad old days of America, black people were banned from all kinds of jobs, were banned from restaurants, hotels, and other public venues, were segregated from white people regarding the neighborhoods they could live in, the section of the bus they sat in, the schools they attended, and even the swimming pools and water fountains they drank from. This system was called Jim Crow. I also learned that this was still going in in South Africa, but it was called Apartheid there. I was told that these things were wrong, but I also didn’t need to be told that. I immediately identified them as wrong as soon as they were described to me.

“You don’t need to explain to me what Jim Crow was or what Apartheid was,” I hear you say. “I know what those things were. I know they were wrong.”

Well, that’s a relief. Because it seems as if a lot of people either don’t know what those things were—or they do know, but they don’t realize they were wrong. How else could so many people have supported the discrimination and segregation regime of vaccine passports and mandates? These regimes also segregate and discriminate against a targeted class of people, but apply even stronger restrictions than Jim Crow or Apartheid did. Instead banning the targeted people from some jobs, some commercial establishments, and some schools, they were (in many places) banned from all jobs, all commercial establishments, all schools, and all public places. Instead of being forced to occupy the back of the bus, they were banished from the bus entirely.

The justification seems to be as follows: “Jim Crow and Apartheid were only wrong because those systems targeted the incorrect people to be stripped of their humanity, rights, and equality under the law. It’s actually good to institute segregation and discrimination regimes as long as the correct people are targeted to lose all their rights and humanity—and as long as it’s for an important enough reason.

This is different from the moral lesson I took away from Jim Crow and Apartheid. The lesson I learned was that it is always wrong to discriminate against people, and that it is always wrong to segregate society. It doesn’t matter how good your reasons are, or how good you think your reasons are. It’s wrong to treat human beings this way, no matter who they are, no matter how superior one believes oneself to be, no matter how inferior or dangerous the targeted group is believed to be.

Perhaps I’m the one who’s mistaken here. Perhaps I’m the one who is morally undeveloped. Perhaps I’m the one who has not realized that although we used to believe discrimination and segregation were always wrong—were always a gross violation of human rights and dignity—we know better now. We received a new memo: it teaches us that from now on, segregation and discrimination are not only permissible, but are good things. Our leaders will inform us when it is appropriate to do so, and who the new targeted classes of people are to be stripped of human considerations. My moral failing was in questioning this memo rather than abandoning my own moral sense when instructed to do so by the powerful.

Perhaps I’m the one who dropped the moral ball here, but I really don’t think so. I think we had it right before. In fact, I’m quite confident that the wrongness, dare I say the evils, of segregation and discrimination are as reprehensible today as they ever were in the past. I’m quite confident there is no correct group to discriminate against or segregate from society. There is no correct group to strip of basic human rights as a consequence of belonging to that group.

As society regains its (relative) sobriety, the depth and gravity of the moral crimes committed in the name of fighting covid will become increasingly apparent. The moral bankruptcy of leaders across the world will become evident, and the moral weight that adheres to those who followed them will be felt. Some will come to recognize their support for systems of segregation and discrimination after years of believing they had just been “doing what’s right.” They will look at their old Black Lives Matter signs lying in their closets and will start to ask themselves “Who am I really? What have I become? How did this happen?” Others will come to recognize that they are willing to support (or at least go along with) any atrocity, any societal crime, as long as it enjoys popular approval and the plaudits of our brave leadership class. It will be someone else’s responsibility—someone wielding power—to tell them what is right and wrong.

Jobs lost. Careers ended. Families riven. Homes and livelihoods shattered. Friendships destroyed. Hearts broken. Humanity divided. These are some of the consequences of the vaccine segregation and discrimination regime that thankfully seems to have receded, gradually passing into the annals of history as a moral stain on the human conscience of the 2020s. But no problem, right? There was never anything to worry about. It was always safe to do nothing and say nothing in protest of what was happening. It was always inevitable that other people would resist these measures and prevent them from becoming permanent.

Except it wasn’t inevitable. These measures would have become permanent if no one had resisted them—if there hadn’t been protests around the world, week after week, month after month—protests like that of the Canadian trucker convoy. We owe it to those truckers and other protestors whose very bank accounts were frozen by the Canadian government for the crime of opposing official state policies of segregation and discrimination. We owe it to them, and to everyone the world over who saw what was happening and said a word against it, lifted a sign or a voice in protest, donated a dollar to resistance movements, or refused to comply with an immoral mandate. We owe it to them for sparing us the horror of plumbing the depths of humanity’s moral weakness and vacant conscience—spared from witnessing how far human beings of the ‘20s are willing to be led down the path of moral atrocity.

No Reckoning for the Leadership

Most will not wish to invite a moral reckoning regarding these matters. It doesn’t feel great. And if no one is forcing a moral reckoning to occur, it’s only natural to push that reckoning aside and retreat into denial and amnesia. If our brave leaders implore us to forget what was done in the name of fighting covid, to let it all flutter down the memory hole, why not permit ourselves to do so? Didn’t we allow ourselves to be led by them without question? Didn’t we trust them when they assured us that anyone who questioned their policies, their reasoning, their morality, or their scientific assertions should be censored, silenced, and ignored? Why not trust them again when they assure us that no moral crimes were committed—that no lies or deceptions occurred, only mistakes—that we can continue to trust them in silencing and stripping rights from their enemies? Why not do so? Why have a moral reckoning when the corrupt leaders of society are willing to give you a free pass? It’s an all-around good deal: no moral reckoning for them, and no moral reckoning for us either.

Among the most astonishing examples of memory-hole denialism the general public seems willing to offer these leaders is in regards to the origins and existence of covid and SarsCov2 itself. Do you remember how they self-righteously proclaimed back in March 2020 (and for the next year) that SarsCov2 had a natural origin, that it couldn’t possibly have originated in a bioweapons research lab? Do you remember how they censored and deplatformed anyone who insisted that a laboratory origin made sense, or that evidence pointed to this as a reality? Do you remember how Dr. Fauci and others denied having funded the gain-of-function research that resulted in the creation of SarsCov2 in American and Chinese laboratories? Do you remember how the funding for this research was found to have originated in DARPA, the technological development arm of the Pentagon? Do you remember how the government and the media quietly retracted everything they said about the natural origin pangolin/bat/wet market mythology they had invented from whole cloth and foisted upon the public? Do you remember how our corporate press eventually admitted that SarsCov2 was “probably” an artificially created chimeric virus? One that would never have existed but for the illegal and immoral bioweapons research of the US and Chinese governments?

It doesn’t seem that anyone remembers these things aside from me and a few other disreputable troublemakers who can’t just let bygones be bygones. We can’t seem to accept that part of the price of having governments is that highly contagious bioweapons are going to be created by them and released from time to time. We can’t just accept that when our hapless governments create and release these microscopic frankenviruses, we will all be duty-bound to allow those same governments to strip our rights away from us, to institute immoral segregation and discrimination regimes, and to issue illegal mandates in order to “win the fight” against the atrocious bioweapons they were responsible for creating and unleashing on us in the first place.

“Let’s not get crazy,” I hear you say, speaking with the voice of kind, gentle, wise reason. “Let’s have compassion for our brave leaders in the military and government, and for their courageous talking puppet heads in the corporate press. You can’t possibly be saying they would release such a virus on purpose! It was just an accident! It could happen to the best of us.”

Does it matter if it was on purpose or an accident? They created it on purpose. They violated international treaties on bioweapons in doing so on purpose. They lied about doing so on purpose. I don’t care if they released it on purpose or if it was just an accident. I demand accountability. Every citizen in the world ought to demand accountability. Where is the reckoning for our morally reprehensible leadership class? It’s nowhere to be found. Even among those of us who have protested all of these covid measures and the long-term technocratic agenda behind them—there is little interest in a moral accounting for the creation and release of SarsCov2, nor for the lies about doing so. It’s as if both supporters and opponents of unaccountable government and military criminality have just resigned themselves to this as the inevitable state of affairs. Of course we’re going to have criminal governments that create bioweapons with no other purpose than infecting and harming as many human beings as their mad scientists can figure out how to achieve. The only question is whether or not to allow those governments to impose authoritarian public health regimes on the populace after their bioweapons are unleashed on them.

We ought to have Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Peter Daszak, Tony Fauci, Xi Jinping—and anyone else who had any part or responsibility in this happening—on trial and under oath. They ought to be giving us the names of the scientists, politicians, financiers, officials, generals, and journalists who had a hand in creating this damned thing or covering it up. Head should roll (figuratively of course). If all those who are guilty don’t go to jail, they should at least be removed from their positions of power. There should be consequences for this kind of crime. Any of these amoral leaders who have us all by the balls in this world ought to think twice before afflicting the planet with their reckless science experiments in the future. They won’t think even once about it if there are never consequences; they’ll just keep making more of these diseases. And it seems almost certain there will be zero consequences for these people or for those who follow in their footsteps in the years to come. Our leaders have a blank check to do whatever they want to us and the world because the people of that world are suffering from collective amnesia, denial, and moral resignation.

When one truly stops to consider this issue, the situation is utterly abhorrent. Billions around the world have been panicked and terrorized by their fear of this virus for two years. Some have lost their lives to it. And yet there is no public discussion about the fact that these bioweapons programs exist, no questioning about whether they should exist, no scrutiny regarding who has responsibility for oversight of these programs, no scrutiny of safety procedures, no risk evaluations of the programs themselves, no discussion of accountability for those who lied about these programs, no demands for those responsible for SarsCov2 to be affirmatively identified and removed from power. Nothing. Nothing but the deafening silence of a terrorized, demoralized populace that has come to expect that their governments will spend years creating viruses designed to harm human beings, infect the world with such viruses once created, lie about doing so, and then impose draconian lockdowns and mandates on the afflicted populace, along with ubiquitous propaganda and censorship campaigns to control public perception and protect the criminals responsible for it. All of this is accepted as a matter of course.

We are living in a moral vacuum—a dreamspell of hypnosis, denial, and programmable reactivity. The public has been trained to export their moral agency to the institutional leaders of government, science, medicine, academia, business, and the mass media. The public has been instructed that the way to be a good person is to obey whatever rules and commands are promulgated by these leaders—to leave the moral reasoning to them. It’s no wonder the public does not demand a moral reckoning. Once the abject lack of any recognizable moral sense is clearly revealed and acknowledged among this leadership class, the people would no longer be able to abdicate their own moral reasoning to them—they would be forced to engage in this reasoning themselves, to assume personal responsibility for it—and this would bring up a whole host of further moral reckonings.

The Moral Consequences of Medical Malfeasance

There is much more to reckon with. At the time of this writing, in April 2022, large numbers of people still have no idea at all that the covid vaccines have caused high numbers of deaths and injury. Most Americans have no idea what VAERS (the vaccine adverse event reporting system) is; they have no idea that the CDC runs this database to catalog vaccine deaths and injuries. They have no idea that over 25,000 American deaths and 1,000,000 injuries from the covid vaccines have already been catalogued in this database, nor do they suspect that these deaths and injuries may be vastly underreported. Please consult prior articles of mine for information and external links that will confirm these facts—that is, if you really want to know. The wealth of links and resources I provided in How to Inform Oneself While Living Under a Censorship Regime will be more than adequate as a starting place.

Most people likewise have no idea that numerous studies have demonstrated time and time again that ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and vitamin D3, among other covid treatment and preventative protocols have stellar efficacy and safety records. They have no idea that in countries around the world where these medications and protocols were employed, cases of covid and deaths from the disease plummeted to very low levels. They have no idea that these treatments were deliberately suppressed by Western governments, and by their institutional and media leaders, in order to pave the way for the covid vaccines as the only accepted remedy. They have no idea that officially sanctioned hospital treatments of ventilators and Remdesivir have resulted in thousands of needless deaths rather than saving lives. They have no conception of the hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths these policies have wrought across the world, or the millions of injuries.

In most cases, when paragraphs like the ones I’ve written above somehow sneak through the censorship dragnet and enter the eyes of a reader who still trusts and obeys the institutional powers that shape our perception, the words and meaning they convey will never register. The dutiful reader has already been informed that any negative information about covid vaccines and any positive information about other treatments are all to be considered dangerous misinformation. This information is to be considered so dangerous and so insidious it should never be examined to determine whether it might actually be true, other than by clicking on a spurious debunking blurb from a self-appointed “fact-checker.” Misinformation, you see, is so powerful, and so cleverly constructed that anyone who actually engages with it is bound to be deceived into believing it is actually true. The actual truth has no chance to prevail in the light of day when challenged by covid misinformation, probably created by Russian assets to turn the minds of pliant Westerners into mishmash and mush.

That’s what happened to me, I’m afraid. You see, I’m one of those people who trusts my own ability to discern truth and logic more than I trust established authorities to decide for me what is true and what I should believe. 

I should have known that these elite authorities are the only people in the world who have the mental power and acuity required to unweave the mind-altering deceptions promulgated by Putin and other enemies of decency. As a result, I listened to both sides of every dispute, I reviewed the evidence cited on every side, I considered the critiques and counter-critiques offered in all directions, I applied reasoning, logic, and context, informed by values and moral principles—and became hopelessly transformed into a deranged QAnon, Trump loving, right-wing fanatic and Putin puppet. My feeble mind proved too weak for their dastardly manipulations.

Or did it? If the above narrative about my brainwashing (and that of millions of others) is losing credibility in your mind, dear reader, perhaps you might consider the alternative—that I, like millions of others, have arrived at these views because evidence, logic, and reason support these views. And if that is true, it means our leaders have abused their power in unconscionable ways—and their moral reckoning awaits.

Coming to Terms with Responsibility

It’s quite understandable that most people would choose to continue believing the prevailing narrative of the institutional leaders, rather than come to terms with the moral consequences of what has been done. The gravity of the harm inflicted on the people of the world is truly staggering, especially since they recruited all of us to be willing (but unwitting) accomplices. Like good soldiers, we were supposed to do our part. We were supposed to sacrifice, follow orders, remain faithful and loyal, and harm the enemies selected for us by our generals. We were supposed to trust—and we were promised that we could contribute to the greater good by doing so. The noblest instincts of care and compassion for humanity were activated in the people of the world and then callously subverted and betrayed. This has enriched and empowered the predator class who issued our orders and grievously harmed millions throughout the world.

Let us summarize some of the harms:

1. Creating and (intentionally or not) releasing a highly contagious bioweapon on the people of the world—then lying about having done that.

2. Deceiving the public regarding the nature of the harms and dangers of the bioweapon (including exaggerating these harms to instill greater levels of terror and justify stricter lockdowns and mandates).

3. Deceiving the public into rejecting safe and effective covid treatments already available at the time the bioweapon was released.

4. Preventing the public from accessing these treatments, resulting in untold thousands of preventable deaths and injuries.

5. Using lockdowns to psychologically terrorize the people of the world, devastate world economic systems, seize power, transfer wealth upwards, and induce unquestioning obedience to authority.

6. Disrupting food security and access to medical care for millions through these lockdowns, causing uncounted thousands of deaths.

7. Afflicting millions with psychological distress through imposed isolation, job loss, and business closures, with uncounted thousands of additional deaths as a result.

8. Forcing masks on people (through more deception), which impaired health through lack of fresh air, disrupted social connections, turned people against one another, and psychologically abused them further.

9. Promoting dangerous and ineffective vaccines that did almost nothing to protect people from covid while exposing them to risk of injury and death, killing or maiming many thousands in the process.

10. Imposing a censorship regime to stifle knowledge, restrict access to the truth, and shield the powerful from all criticisms and accountability.

11. Introducing societal systems of discrimination and segregation to separate people from their rights, their dignity, and their humanity.


None of these measures did anything to prevent the spread of covid. None of these measures were capable of stopping the spread of SarsCov2, let alone eliminate it. Yet at the time of implementation, those who critiqued or even questioned the measures were met with bile and opprobrium. Consider the harm that could have been prevented if critiques had been permitted. Consider the lives that could have been saved if not for the self-righteous surety that our institutional leaders could never lead us astray—and if not for the willingness to act on that misplaced surety. The moral reckoning beckons.

The only measure that could have spared the world from SarsCov2 would have been to refrain from creating it in the first place. Since it is not possible to go back in time and prevent global military biotech interests from creating SarsCov2, the only measure left to us—the only measure that makes sense—is to demand accountability and consequences for those who did so. This, at least, may prevent the creation and release of new bioweapons in the future. The measure we need, and the one that is not happening, is that of a moral reckoning.

Worse than all the harms listed above are the harms that have been done to the children of the world. As adults, we can be held responsible for ourselves and our actions, even though most of us have abdicated that responsibility to leaders in government, media, and industry. But our children have no choice but to rely on us for guidance and provision of safety. They have no choice but to trust us, and that trust has been deeply betrayed. Our children have been psychologically terrorized as well. They have been forced into masks at school that distort their sense of their own humanity, warp their social relationships, and humiliate them into obedience training while stifling their breath and access to fresh air. They are left utterly confused about questions of risk, health, and safety. Moreover, millions of children have received covid vaccines they do not need (and which do very little to protect against covid anyway), bearing almost zero risk from covid at that age. Thousands of these children have been injured or killed as a result.

In particular, the potential long-term damage done to the immune systems of millions of children and adults by these vaccines represent another massive harm, the scope of which still remains to be seen.

A River in Egypt

When it comes to the harms caused by these vaccines, we are all encouraged, even implored, to deny any possibility of the harm they have caused. Denial is the coin of the realm in our global technocratic biohacking medical regime. We are required to believe that synthetic toxins in our food, water, air, and medicine cannot possibly be harming us. We are required to believe that DNA and RNA modification imbedded in our food and vaccines could not possibly harm the natural immune function of our bodies. All over the world, people discover themselves to be suffering from mysterious bouts of chronic fatigue, inflammation, malaise, allergies, and digestive disorders. We discover ourselves to be suffering from neurological conditions and autoimmune disorders with no understanding of their origin. We are told that such conditions must be due to our own faulty genetics, that they occur spontaneously. We are told to ignore the explosive rate of growth in these conditions over the past 30 years as our bodies have become bombarded with glyphocate, GMO foods, EMF radiation, and a vastly expanded childhood vaccine schedule.

To understand the role of this denial, consider a lens on two different worlds.

In World A, we view masked children at school with appreciation. We are thankful for this precaution to guard their safety. As parents, we dutifully learn the steps to take from our trusted leaders to provide for our children and keep them safe from harm so they can grow and flourish. We conscientiously ensure they receive every recommended vaccine at the scheduled time throughout their lives to protect them from disease, and we get them vaccinated and boosted with covid shots as soon as we’re able, adding a further layer of protection, love and care. Our children’s autism, ADHD, allergies, immune disorders, and other chronic health conditions are all the consequence of genetic circumstance. When our children receive these diagnoses, we lovingly provide them with recommended pharmaceutical interventions to support them as best we can. We are thankful to live in a world of advanced medical science and trusted authorities so our children are able to receive treatment for these conditions and stay safe from infectious disease.

In World B, on the other hand, we view masked children at school as victims of psychological child abuse, forced to cover their faces in service to a series of lies, training them to view their own breath as a threat to themselves and others, obscuring the unique and precious humanity expressed by their beautiful faces, instilling them with fear, shame, and conformity, arresting their spirits. We are wracked with guilt and doubt, wondering if the food we fed them, or the vaccines they received at our insistence were responsible for their immune, neurological and allergic conditions. We see a medical-state-industrial establishment that refuses to answer our questions about these pharmaceuticals, refuses to acknowledge or engage with the evidence we’ve found of the risks they pose to our children’s health. We see this establishment with its mask and vaccine mandates, conveying one uniform message: your body is not your own, you are not allowed to question, you do not deserve honest or thorough answers—your only duty is to obey, and to place your health and body, and the health and body of your child, wholly in the hands of a faceless, profit-driven bureaucracy that views human beings as numbers. And your duty is to socialize your children to do the same when they come of age.

It’s thoroughly clear why most parents would choose to live in World A, given the option. And it’s so easy to do. All that’s required is to trust authority and leave the decision-making to them. There is one more requirement: one must never look into the perspective that informs the parents who live in World B. One must never honestly engage in the research and evidence that supports it. One must never listen to the stories of parents with vaccine-injured children, or to those children themselves, or to the doctors who have studied the issue. One must simply look the other way. Just look the other way.

I’ve never met someone who honestly looked into the perspective of World B in good faith and came away from it still living in World A. 

One does not always emerge with total confidence regarding what’s true after engaging in World B—there may be questions about some, but not all vaccines; some, but not all pharmaceuticals; some, but not all synthetic foods; some, but not all covid restrictions. But however one emerges, there will be grave doubts about the tenets of World A. There will be deep concerns and distrust regarding the ways that these doubts are forbidden to talk about and are never adequately answered by the keepers of the World A reality. The profound moral implications of refusing to bring these concerns to light will cut deep to the bone.

The Crux of the Moral Reckoning

At the heart of this entire dynamic lies a social contract that props up the World A narrative and forbids a moral reckoning. Under the terms of this contract, we, the good citizens, are perpetually kept in a state of childhood. We are not responsible moral agents. Our leaders and institutions assume that responsibility for us. They remain forever our parents. Father knows best. There can be no moral reckoning, because we are not morally responsible. It is therefore unthinkable to attempt to hold our parents morally responsible. We implicitly trust that they are good parents, not abusive parents. We train our children to regard them the same way. As child-parents to our own children, our job is to successfully condition our children to remain moral children forever, as we have. They, and we, are to be socialized as respectful, obedient, and cooperative. We are not to become self-responsible as full adults with moral agency. Our responsibility is to be good children: to listen attentively for our instructions and carry them out to the letter. Our entire school system is designed to produce adult children of this character.

We live in a complex world with innumerable demands on our time, energy, and thought. The social contract acknowledges this and assures us the only possible way such a world can function is by accepting our roles as children, obedient to the institutional parents. We have never been prepared for adulthood. Our entire conditioning has forcefully dissuaded us from assuming the role of a self-responsible moral agent. We have never been prepared for sovereignty. It’s completely understandable that stepping into ourselves fully in this way seems impossible and absurd.

And yet, for those of us who have discovered ourselves to be living in World B, assuming our moral responsibility and sovereignty is the only possible response, given the realities of our world. Our institutional parents are not wise; they are not loving; they are not truthful. They are abusive. They are immoral. And from this perspective, we are able to recognize that the parent/child dynamic of the social contract we’ve been offered could never have led to a different result. The contract has been shattered, trust has been betrayed, and no leader can arise to restore morality to the system. A system of leaders and children can never be moral. This is because children cannot hold adults responsible. Only sovereign moral agents can hold another moral agent responsible. Only adults are equipped to experience a moral reckoning, or to deliver the reckoning to others. Absent these adults, only the unscrupulous and corrupt are able to achieve leadership and maintain power.

It is not our destiny to remain perpetual children. This cannot be the purpose or proper outcome for the life of a human being. Our moral reckoning must begin with ourselves, and it must begin by assuming responsibility for ourselves, our beliefs, our actions, and our values. We may not be prepared for adulthood. It may come as a shock to discover that although we have held jobs, paid bills, and raised children, we did not become adults by doing so. There is no need for shame in this. There is no need for condemnation or defensiveness. These are the tools used to cow and condition children into obedience and collapse. It is time to set these tools aside; they have no use in our moral reckoning. All that is needed is to assume self-responsibility as a moral agent from this moment forward.

Two years to flatten the curve has brought many of us to this reckoning. Since the summer of 2020, I’ve been writing articles about our collective hypnosis, seeking ways to raise consciousness on these issues, to release our minds from the grips of our morally bankrupt leaders and institutions. The moral awakening must arise from the people themselves. Humanity has reached a crisis point in its spiritual evolution. We are called to reclaim our sovereignty as individuals and remake our societal collective in alignment with that principle. Failure to do so will perpetuate our arrested development. We will remain helpless, disempowered children, ruled over by leaders who are children themselves. The technocratic leadership class has vacated its own moral agency as well, you see. As such, they are no more adults than we. They defer to the principles of the machine, of power for the sake of control—spiritual oblivion for the sake of illusory order.

Our moral rebirth will require an understanding of spiritual principles and truths. It will require a deeper knowledge of our own psyches. We are called upon to confront our shadows, reclaim our exiled parts, and bring daylight to bear on disturbing truths. My future articles will increasingly be written in service of this calling. Evidence already abounds of the moral failings present in our leadership and institutions—of their lies, deceptions, and power grabs. But such evidence can find no purchase among hearts and minds closed to their own moral agency. The systems of containment that perpetuate our prolonged childhood must be identified and dissolved. In casting aside moral abdication through deference to authority, we must rediscover ourselves and reclaim our self-respect, dignity, and responsibility. We must become the spiritually aware adults we truly are.

A New Earth awaits. Join us.

IPCC WGIII (posted April 7; updated April 10)

Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change

The Working Group III report provides an updated global assessment of climate change mitigation progress and pledges, and examines the sources of global emissions. It explains developments in emission reduction and mitigation efforts, assessing the impact of national climate pledges in relation to long-term emissions goals.

'It is time to stop burning our planet'. The Ecologist. Apr.7, 2022.

.... "We used to chant “1.5, we might survive” - 1.5 was already a compromise for frontline communities suffering the worst climate impacts. The IPCC’s WGII climate scientists told us only last month that breaching this guard-rail, even temporarily, could push us over a series of tipping points that would lead to uncontrollable warming.

"It would be grossly negligent for economists to ignore those warnings and propose inequitable mitigation plans that allow for an overshoot, as is now on the table with this new report."

Shortcomings of IPCC AR6 WGIII - Mitigation of Climate Change. Arctic News. Apr. 5, 2022.

********** added April 10 **********

 The Age of Climate Limits. Albert Bates. Apr. 10, 2022.

"Science has given us a three year deadline to end growth as we know it."

The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) consists of contributions from each of the three IPCC Working Groups and a Synthesis Report, which integrates all the reports produced in the 10-year cycle. While “net-zero by 2050” is a slogan that gives everyone permission to slack off, the latest and final working group report released this week puts the challenge into sharper focus: carbon emissions must peak by 2025. We are three and one half years from the End of Growth. We then enter the long awaited Age of Limits. Will we do it? Former UNFCCC President Christiana Figueres sounds like she is scolding an unruly teenager:

I’m lacking words for this…. What is suicidal is our inability to take the decisions and enact the behavioral changes that we perfectly well can in order to align our planet with the Paris Agreement. That’s the problem. There is nothing new that any report can tell us about what we should be doing. The gap that we identified years ago is not closing; in fact, it’s enlarging. That’s the news. It’s tragic.

Scornful daddy António Guterres, UN secretary-general, said the kid was a “file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world.”

Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals. But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels.

........

If Covid taught us anything, it was that the status quo is a frail construct. It can vanish in an instant, or at least over the course of a few weeks. This is what the people in Ukraine witnessed, at least one by a hail of machine gun fire as he bicycled to the grocery. It is what happened to those in Lismore and Byron Bay who saw their homes rain bombed underwater to the rooftops for the second time in a month, or to those who watched their lifetime possessions vanish in wildfires of scale and speed no one had imagined possible. The shock of sudden change is how a two-year (and soon to be longer) pandemic convinced so many to leave their professional careers and switch to a different life path rather than go back to what they had been doing before. We have been shaken from dreary normalcy and been made aware of how precarious the world of our making has become, and how we could be spending our days in more meaningful pursuits.

Many think the solution to climate change is public education. I don’t. I think people know. Most just don’t want to admit it, or do anything, unless they have to.

.....

The report could not have set the agenda any better.

If humanity still needs a climate strategy, I think these thousand scientists, finally reaching their difficult 150-hour marathon consensus in the early hours of Monday morning, provided it. Our effort must address the existential issue of our era: changing our cultural habits and deciding to live as if there will still be a tomorrow.

......

We could stop there, but if you are a glutton for punishment there is more. Here are some things the IPCC got wrong:

• “Unabated” coal must be “completely” phased out by 2050. The “U” word is inserted at the insistence of coal producers (Joe Manchin, N. Modi, V. Putin) who still believe “clean coal” is a real thing. Instead, all coal should be phased out by 2025.
• IPCC still forecasts that economic growth, coming on the back of ever growing energy supply, will continue into the indefinite future. There is little recognition of the caloric return of different energy types, EROIE, or rare mineral depletion — technocornucopian bias.
• The Carbon Budget. Going all the way back to AR-1, IPCC has followed the chimera of a carbon budget that would allow underdeveloping countries (India, Nigeria, etc) to make up for the lost ground stolen by the overdeveloped nations in the 19th century by continuing to emit — and grow emissions annually — long after everyone else is forced to curtail. Originally the budget was 450 ppm, but when it was realized that would take us to 3 to 5 degrees warming, it was cut to 350, and then replaced with the 2 degree goal. This report says “a significant but very small carbon budget remains” to limit warming to 1.5°. It says the path to limit warming to 1.5° is extremely narrow, therefore this small budget should be used only by hard-to-decarbonize sectors, like steel mills, maritime shipping and airlines. This is preposterous! Even if all emissions stopped tomorrow, Earth would continue to warm. The budget concept is based on the flawed premise that if India were given 20 more years of Russian coal and gas every Indian will be living like a Swede or Dane does today, driving a Tesla and wintering in Ibiza. This is dangerous nonsense and should have been discarded long ago. We are already over budget and building huge stockpiles of atmospheric of carbon that must be removed at unknowable expense.
• Natural climate solutions — biochar, carbon farming, agroforestry, land use changes and the like — are consistently undervalued (all can be cost negative, ie: profitable, if managed in a regenerative fashion) and excluded from the predictive models — while high tech solutions like BECCS, DACCS, and CCU are overvalued (they will cost trillions and rely on unremitting energy inputs) but included in the predictive models. The former consistently surprise by overperforming expectations. The latter consistently disappoint. And yet the IPCC refuses to admit it is betting its whole inheritance on the wrong horse.
• For instance, while the value of biochar for Carbon Dioxide Removal has been elevated from 1.4 GtCO2/y potential to 6.6 GtCO2/y, that number is almost entirely based upon soil applications, with a slight nod to animal feed and water filtration. As I pointed out in my formal critique a year ago when the IPCC invited me to be a reviewer, the non-agricultural applications for biochar have 10x the drawdown potential, profitability and speed of deployment. I offered BURN and its hundreds of current references, but that was not mentioned. Paul Hawkens’ Drawdown (2017) was referenced but his more accurate biochar recalculation in Regeneration (2020) was overlooked.
• A word search on “pets,” “dogs,” “cats,” and “ornamental fish” came up blank. The report estimates with high confidence that shifts to sustainable healthy diets have a “technical potential” to reduce emissions by 3.6 GtCO2e, with a range of 0.5 to 8 GtCO2e but says nothing about the carbon footprint of pets and pet food. Big blind spot. Creature comfort seems to be a taboo subject.
• IPCC forecasts nuclear will expand 70% above 2019 by 2030 and 305% by 2050. Besides being economic fantasy, this demonstrates the callous willingness of engineers to burn future children to produce light, heat, and steam. It is unconscionable.

Here is what they got right:

• Watching the breathtaking speed of the solar and wind build-out and price drop since the last report, the IPCC admitted it had gotten that wrong: “future energy transitions may occur more quickly than those in the past.”
• They also admit that nuclear energy and clean coal technology, the darlings of earlier reports, have been “slower than…anticipated.”
• It is beyond dispute now that reversing climate change will be far less expensive (and futile) than trying to live with it, or trying to tame nuclear fusion.
• “Decommissioning and reduced utilization of existing fossil fuel installations in the power sector as well as cancellation of new installations are required to align future CO2 emissions from the power sector with projections in these pathways.” Stranded investment must happen. Live with it, Joe Manchin, Marsha Blackburn and Charles Koch.
• “Bioenergy and BECCS are found to pose a risk to biodiversity, water, soil, air quality, resilience, livelihoods and food security.”
• Global CO2 emissions must peak “at the latest before 2025” and then fall to 48% below 2019 levels by 2030, then 84% below by 2050.
• The central impediment is not lack of solutions but human behavior, much of which is hard wired. What could expedite shifts would be “novel narratives” in the media and entertainment industry to “help to break away from the established values, discourses and the status quo.” For example: portray plant-based diets as healthy and natural; portray climate resisters as normal and climate polluters as regressive or evil (e.g.: Icelandic film: Woman at War).
• For the first time, there is a chapter on “demand-side,” including diets and consumption patterns. Strapline: sustainable food systems that provide healthy diets for all are within reach. Healthy habitats — rural, periurban, or urban — are within reach. There is a better world waiting.