Carbon pricing is busy-work bullshit

Stop spreading out drop sheets and start painting!

See the blue orb in this photo? (Earthrise from Apollo 8) That is perhaps the only living being in this universe. It is a rocky watery planet which has been colonized by what we call Life to the extent that it is essentially one living being, with all its minute parts interacting to maintain eubiosis which affects every mineral, gas and liquid cycle necessary to maintain its own existence. All that while hanging there in the hostile vacuum of Space.

In his latest post, Dr. James Hansen mentions these topics: (1) The human-caused climate forcing, more than an order of magnitude greater than in any other transition from glacial to inter-glacial warming; (2) the hope that young people will understand and support “the sort of policies that are needed”; (3) the importance of a rising fee on carbon emissions; (4) the possibility that young people will “need to take purposeful actions to cool off the planet faster than is possible with even the most aggressive phase-down of and removal of greenhouse gases”; (5) that “old people” are responsible for the present variety of geoengineering, that is, the geoengineering caused by over 200 years of massive amounts of fossil-fuel combustion; (6) the necessity of ready, low-cost modern nuclear power and (7) the fact that “old people” appear to be denying young people the option of “a life-jacket in the event that accelerating climate change” drives the system past a point of no return.

Although the climate science of Dr. Hansen et al. at Columbia University is the world’s best, sorry, but I need to tear these items (except the first) totally apart.

First, some backgrounders. I rank the existential threats to humanity in this order: Nuclear weapons, Proliferation of Plastics, and Earth’s energy imbalance, ergo climate change. Each of these issues: the construction and proliferation of nuclear weapons along with justification such as by President Truman for their building and usage; the development of plastics in spite of and because of their resistance to environmental breakdown, and the employment of energy slaves (fossil fuels) to drive an industrial society, were all seemingly justifiable and unquestioned outputs of the male brain. Similar outcomes from this faulty process are still seen today in examples such as the juvenile transit of balloons carrying manure from North Korea over South Korea, the adolescent angst of President Xi of China in sending a warning armada around Taiwan, the grandiose incursion into Ukraine by Putin to recover territory lost from the former USSR, Netanyahu taking the low-road in retribution against Gaza, the creation of NATO to do an end-run around the United Nations; all examples of typical male-brain logic. Going back to nuclear weapons, on any day of any year, we are as little as two hours from the beginning of a nuclear winter. All it takes is one man pushing a button. Thinking that some opponent has gone too far, and pushing the button. No, not a “mad man,” just a normal man in power, doing what comes naturally. The emerging issue with plastics, micro- and nano-plastics, is that perhaps in the next generation or two, in other words, the Young People, will find reproduction failing them, due to it being corrupted by plastic intrusions in the bodies of all life, significantly adding to the rapidity of the 6th Extinction. Building and usage of nuclear weapons and the development and dispersal of plastic and the burning of every fossil fuel that we could find, were extraordinarily grievous errors of humanity and can’t be undone. But we could learn from these disasters by seriously questioning the implementation of each and every new bit of “Progress,” rather than not paying attention to what the boys are doing out in the garage (as in the Manhattan Project). All such instances of male-brain logic must be sidelined from involvement in world affairs; the silver-backs have had their day in the sun and should be relegated to the dustbin of history.

Yes, calling use of fossil fuels a form of geoengineering is a suitable analogy, but don’t put the blame on us “old people”; we made numerous attempts to change The System (i.e.: google Kent State 1970) but were always beaten back into line by the two entities that endure: business and their enforcement arm, euphemistically called “government.” And the situation is no better for the present Young People, to wit: Columbia University 2024. And it is not possible to get money out of elections - as John Dewey said in 1905, yes 119 years ago, “Politics is the shadow cast upon society by big business.” Just about all of us “old people” were born after the nuclear bombs were dropped, they being the ultimate climax of industrial development and human “Progress.” You know, in other cultures, the accumulated life experiences of the “old people” is valued, whereas these days, with the decreasing emphasis on education, the suitability of younger people to take roles in governance is becoming questionable.

Regarding the numbered remarks from above:

(3) The importance of a rising fee on carbon emissions

Wait, you had me at “fee.” Every attempt to monetize an issue or bit of nature results in the opening of new turf in the wild west of financial markets, as is happening with carbon offsets. The proposal for putting an artificial price on carbon, by a fee or tax, and redistributing those funds back to taxpayers is illegal all over North America - by law, all money going in to government MUST flow into general revenue and cannot be earmarked for any specific purpose. As well there is the issue of any stream of funds flowing in to government, that group of salary-pullers and buffoons standing in the social space where actual governance should reside, who have proven themselves time and again to be incapable of managing public funds. As well, a redistribution scheme via government always carries a high overhead cost to administer. That, and any funds collected from use of carbon in the global North should rightly flow to the global South as our commitments to climate mitigation and adaptation.

Regarding putting a price on carbon along with a rebate scheme, the only visible benefit of that so far is that it gets the beer-belly in his pickup to think that something might need to eventually be done about this matter and allowing government officials to feel like they have taken meaningful action. But this educational phase about climate is four or five decades past due, it shouldn’t be just materializing recently. An increase in the price of carbon is only meaningful if the fossil energy content is stated on every product and your carbon debt totaled up on each invoice; only then can the consumer make an informed choice. But such labelling and content-tracing would be prohibitively expensive. The rebate or dividend scheme is simply to get democratic (voter) buy-in while the price is low, and hope they don’t notice the ongoing increases. And again, such a scheme is a short-circuit; those funds should really be going toward the rich Global North’s commitment to funding mitigation and adaptation in the Global South. Not to mention that you can’t balance that set of books, while you can with oxygen pricing. And worse than all that, a carbon tax/fee is a deflection, a form of busy-work and or hand-waving - along with carbon offsets, promises of “net zero” by a future date, various forms of greenwashing - that look like something meaningful is being done while the real work lies there undone. Stop spreading drop sheets and start painting! The time for educating the beer-belly is long past; the time for little busy-work chores is long gone - if “we” are serious about the climate disaster, some strenuous lifting needs to be done, not soon, but now! Instead of cities like Vancouver, BC harassing restaurants about cooking with gas - if a city wants to get serious about climate change, they close their airport! Ground all flights now and forever, and that’s just for starters.

The largest existential question becomes just what ARE the prospects for life of humans, old or young, on this planet if we cannot agree to tackle the underlying issue preventing the development of a genuine civilization on this planet - the abdication of absolute sovereignty and the establishment of proper international governance. Every day that this issue is brushed aside while we occupy ourselves by distractively burrowing into subsidiary issues, is another day in which we as a pretend-civilization slide farther and farther away from the attempts at establishing a world order of peace following WWII. The Future lies not on that path. On a topic only slightly oblique to this issue, Madame Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella of Harvard Law School, writes in the Globe and Mail:

“When I was younger, I believed in, and took for granted, the majestic world order we had created after the Second World War. I assumed that this world order would be protected by the international laws we had put in place, and that everyone else accepted international law’s transcendental importance in protecting a global human-rights consensus.

Then I grew up. Now I believe that international law is more important than ever, because the more the moral vision and consensus we codified and ratified after 1945 was eroded by expedience and exhaustion, the more it seemed to me we needed to recommit to the legal principles that animated a Copernican legal revolution in the aftermath of the Second World War.    …/…

We are in a moment. I think we have to acknowledge that this is not, by any stretch, the best of all possible worlds.

We’re at the edge of a future unlike any I’ve seen in my lifetime.”

If you want to pass on a better chance for young people, you first fix the world governance issue after which disarmament naturally follows and you all agree to attempt to live more in harmony with this planet and other forms of life. In that case, “we” do not need ever-increasing amounts of energy or any other resource and we learn how to manage that third-rail issue: population numbers. Just why does Germany, for example, have 80 million people on land the size of Montana; exactly why does a new person, either by birth or immigration, expect to have yet another new tranche of energy provision and a place to live. No, you determine the optimal population for an area, build that infrastructure, and that’s it. You cannot expect a percentage annual increase in population growth - that is an exponential increase which by definition is not sustainable, regardless of how hard Business tries to push “Normal” ever farther into the future. And that Future becomes simply a glorified version of the past. You CANNOT have that “normal” any longer, you cannot pretend to solve the climate catastrophe without any personal “sacrifice” of this so-called normal. “Progress” must be limited in type and extent and carefully scrutinized and submitted to free, informed, prior consent before being foisted on the commons; air travel and Space launches except for Earth monitoring satellites, must cease immediately, and that’s just for starters. The population in Germany, as per the previous example, is sustained by fossil energy, plastics (clothing etc.) and nitrogen fertilizers as well as vast imports of protein sources and other materials from all over the world - by definition, not sustainable. And it is impossible to drastically reduce use of fossil fuels or plastics without a corresponding drop in population numbers, since this industrial civilization was itself the driver of growth. As regards being in harmony with this planet and other life - except for nuclear weapons, what is more anti-life than nuclear energy (especially when we do not NEED more energy)? And without leadership as we have never before seen, there is no hope of proper world governance and the avoidance of world-wide all-against-all civil war as per Pankaj Mishra’s book Age of Anger. But energy use can be drastically curtailed if we constrain the major driver of the economy in the rich North, which is the alleviation of human boredom.

We have to accept that the ever-advancing human Progress Project is an abject failure which is leading to catastrophic outcomes for this planet, yet too many people propose further initiatives of progress to supposedly “save” the planet (in other words keep it safe for City life) while intending to apply the same techniques of “Progress” - extractivism and exploitation, to Space adventure, whether it be the Moon, Mars, or farther-away orbs, asking “What resources can we mine here?” We can see how well that went with Earth, yet we intend to carry on with the same?

Yes, it would be a glorious future for coming generations of young people, assuming that reproduction continues to be possible, if only they had bountiful clean and safe nuclear power and could re-program this planet, this only living being in Space, to better accommodate this industrial cityscape culture of ever-increasing growth. What’s that up in the sky? A bird, a plane? No, it’s pie. And just who would you trust to begin tampering with the fragile system of Life on this small blue planet, when we hardly understand how it all works? Yes, we geoengineered it with CO₂ emissions, but is that somehow an excuse to do deliberate tampering?

A recent article suggested geoengineering via spraying salt water into the air from ships to increase cloud cover over the oceans. But this was before “we” understood a just-discovered property of water regarding the action of light on water, which changes just about everything “we” thought we knew about clouds. This was in a report by Guangxin Lv et al., (2024) Photomolecular effect: Visible light interaction with air–water interface, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2320844121

In other words, we had again (almost) put the cart before the horse in this cloud-creation proposal. You can’t even trust people to give you the straight goods regarding “informed consent,” when you have people such as Professor Gwynne Dyer packaging the information so as to show only one suitable response.

Dear reader, if you are not just doom-scrolling and really are interested in climate science, please donate to Dr. James E. Hansen, Climate Science and Solutions Program, Earth Institute, Columbia University, 475 Riverside Drive (Room 401-O), New York, NY 10115 USA or click the link:

Donate to CSAS Columbia