Let's get on the same page in this climate catastrophe!

Jul 17, 2024

Recently Professor Dr. Demetrios Karis of Bentley University sent a link to his paper titled:

Civilization will Collapse (High Confidence): A Compendium of Biophysical, Political, Economic, Military, Health, and Psychological Information on Climate Change, herein referred to as “Karis-2024” which you can read by clicking this link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xHvUneUT-1xx1W72yZTXpqrtNfIqUKB5oooOvwcw1OM/edit?usp=sharing

I do suggest that you read it, at least the summary parts. This paper is frequently updated, so save the link and come back often. Don’t be like readers of my last post which failed to read the first link, so that they missed the entire context for writing that post! Note: if you are using gmail, this post will be cut short by that system, you may continue reading in your browser.

Prof. Karis’ paper should be sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Existential Risks (CSER) at Cambridge, rather than some of their mediocre topics and their total ignore of anything I fwd to them.

However, Prof. Karis’ paper is exhibiting examples of typical human thought process which fails to understand important aspects of Life, has pointers to conclusions with inadequate basis and I must reject most of the underlying framing of the topics.

So I will have to re-write much of what was already in my latest post, using a sharper scalpel, cutting to the bone, so hang in there, this could be as painful as amputations for Gazan children without anesthesia.

Readers will likely not click on the above link to Prof. Karis’ paper, so here I will include part of the executive summary. If you have read his article, you may skip over this block:

“We are now on a “Hothouse Earth” trajectory that will, if we continue on it, end human civilization as we know it. Humans are capable, however, of creating a new pathway to what Steffen et al. (2018) call “Stabilized Earth.” As a society, we must, on a global scale, rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This must be our number one priority; it is necessary but not sufficient. Simultaneously, we must protect our biosphere’s carbon sinks and actively cool the earth using geoengineering techniques such as solar radiation management. Research and development on directly removing CO2 from the air should continue because in the future, even after net zero is reached, it will be necessary to remove massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere.”

When I read the Karis-2024 paper, I’m thinking “ho, hum, this is old hat, and not especially up-to-date.” But when you read it, you might be thinking this is a bunch of alarmist conspiracy theory nonsense. No, it is not. It is based on good climate research by many authors, and by output from the World Economic Forum, as noted below.

Societal collapse is underway even if the present climate remained as it is for this century. The basic fallacy here is not the inability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which is merely a symptom; the error lies much deeper. I covered a lot of that ground in the previous post, but cutting deeper, I must re-order the errors of humanity.

In the following section, I am laying out some of the statements from the Karis-2024 paper on the dissecting table for further examination:

p. 5: Although a global mobilization is required to deal with climate change, political forces in many countries, as well as resistance from fossil fuel companies, are preventing the required action.
p. 6: When it is clear that it is impossible to adapt to our changing climate, geoengineering via solar radiation management or other means will become inevitable. In fact, some scientists now already argue that any realistic approach to the climate crisis must include “climate cooling” via geoengineering.
p. 7: Although global societal collapse is probable, it is not inevitable, and the paper ends by describing what you as an individual should do, and what we as a society should do. In the short term, political action, mass mobilization and civil resistance, plus working for a carbon tax will be the most effective actions for individuals. Only after there is agreement that a worldwide mobilization and extreme actions are required will it be worthwhile to focus on reducing one's carbon footprint.
p. 8: Work for a carbon fee and dividend (or tax), and work to elect politicians who are willing to take the necessary – and drastic – steps to solve the crisis.
p. 56: Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote in a personal reflection in the journal Nature in March, 2024, about why he and other scientists are worried. …/… “this sudden heat spike greatly exceeds predictions made by statistical climate models that rely on past observations….the 2023 temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap perhaps for the first time since about 40 years ago…”
p. 66: International cooperation will be required to reduce the use of fossil fuels. “Absent international coordination, constraining supply from some countries can increase economic incentives for others to increase production” (van Asselt & Newell, 2022). Van Asselt & Newell discuss different types of international cooperation, including an International Coal Elimination Treaty and a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. (See Burke and Fishel, 2020, for details on a Coal Elimination Treaty.)
There will continue to be incremental improvements, but no quick and radical decarbonization. A tax on carbon is probably the most effective way to rapidly reduce fossil fuel use, but despite efforts by several organizations, this is very unlikely to happen in the near future.
p. 89: Growth has been destructive in the past, but there is no logical reason why economic growth can’t be sustainable and decoupled from negative environmental impacts. Growth cannot continue as in the past, of course, and perhaps the definition of “economic growth” may need to change.
p.136: We are now, unfortunately, on a “hothouse earth” trajectory that will end human civilization as we know it. Humans are capable, however, of creating a new pathway to what Steffen et al. (2018) call “Stabilized Earth” by taking actions that result in negative feedbacks that will keep the global temperature at 2°C or less.
“The negative feedback actions fall into three broad categories: (i) reducing greenhouse gas emissions, (ii) enhancing or creating carbon sinks (e.g., protecting and enhancing biosphere carbon sinks and creating new types of sinks), and (iii) modifying Earth’s energy balance (for example, via solar radiation management, although that particular feedback entails very large risks of destabilization or degradation of several key processes in the Earth System).” (Steffen et al., 2018)
p.138: …as Taylor et al. (2023b) write, “It is impossible to adapt to irreversible, catastrophic impacts like species extinction, the loss of glaciers, rising sea levels, and the release of methane from permafrost and oceans.”
from: Taylor, G. M., Wadhams, P., Visioni, D., Goreau, T., Field, L., & Kuswanto, H. (2023b). Bad science and good intentions prevent effective climate action. https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/6244/
p. 139: Conclusion
We are now on a “Hothouse Earth” trajectory that will, if we continue on it, end human civilization as we know it. Humans are capable, however, of creating a new pathway to what Steffen et al. (2018) call “Stabilized Earth.” As a society, we must, on a global scale, rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This must be our number one priority; it is necessary but not sufficient. Simultaneously, we must protect our biosphere’s carbon sinks and actively cool the earth using geoengineering techniques such as solar radiation management. Research and development on directly removing CO2 from the air should continue because in the future, even after net zero is reached, it will be necessary to remove massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere.
Pope’s message in Apostolic Exhortation (see p. 176)
“If there is sincere interest in making COP28 a historic event that honours and ennobles us as human beings, then one can only hope for binding forms of energy transition that meet three conditions: that they be efficient, obligatory and readily monitored. This, in order to achieve the beginning of a new process marked by three requirements: that it be drastic, intense and count on the commitment of all. That is not what has happened so far, and only a process of this sort can enable international politics to recover its credibility, since only in this concrete manner will it be possible to reduce significantly carbon dioxide levels and to prevent even greater evils over time.”

Hereafter is point-by-point comments re above. If you are having trouble following these points, stop reading these posts in your pathetic Device, read it on your computer - put the above section in one window and the comments below in another window. These posts are written in MS Word-2013 on a Windows-7 computer with ASUS Z97-A mother board. In this form it is a decent-looking document, but when I load it into substack, they make a mess out of it, which I have to correct as much as possible. The main culprit is they convert every CR carriage return into a paragraph break! We need to find a simpler life rather than this industrialized city-scape. Take a break here and have a look at some lovely English countryside, virtually unchanged in centuries, on a Ben Maton video.

1 - (p. 5) Yes global mobilization is required which requires an effective world government, discussed below.

2 - (p. 6) The “impossibility to adapt to our changing climate” is a predicament, not a problem. It is the result of several grievous errors (discussed below). Initiating geoengineering which would need to go on for at least 10,000 years when you KNOW that societal collapse is very possible is just selfish and sets the stage for collapse of all other life when societal collapse curtails the geoengineering, thus subjecting all other creatures to a sudden rise in temperature (known as “termination shock”). Not to mention the lack of food due to reduced light.

3 - (p. 7 and 8) An agreement on world-wide mobilization is a pre-requisite to reducing one’s carbon footprint? Seriously? Yet isn’t reducing one’s carbon footprint the principal reason for a carbon tax?

Prof. Karis mentions carbon tax (or fee) 17 times in his paper, but as pointed out in my previous post, that sort of educational scheme was suitable for the 1980s. Its main purpose is to shift responsibility for climate action onto individuals whereas up to now, the population has left that responsibility up to governments to achieve some magical result at the COP meetings.

4 - (p. 56) re Dr. Gavin Schmidt: “has come out of the blue…” this is BS, the temp anomaly came from reducing marine fuel sulphur content, as noted in my recent posts.

5 - (p. 66) re: reducing use of fossil fuels, see notes on population growth, below. Since our addiction to fossil fuels enabled this massive population, guess what?

And there he is back at carbon pricing again, which is total nonsense. As per my previous post, if you want to show the population that you are serious about this climate catastrophe, ground all flights NOW! See the new study “Understanding the large role of long-distance travel in carbon emissions from passenger travel” by Zia Wadud, Muhammad Adeel & Jillian Anable in Nature Energy (2024)

6 - (p. 89) on economic “growth.” An article by Sir Nicholas Stern and Joseph E. Stiglitz, titled “Climate change and growth” in Industrial and Corporate Change (Vol. 32(2) pp. 277-303) talks about growth. Professor Stiglitz (among others) states that the environment is an externality to the economy. I’m sorry, Professor Stiglitz, but that is incorrect. Now listen up, class, this is important and you heard it here first: The economy is an externality to the environment. Many make that incorrect statement, it is a meme in economics passed around so many times that it becomes incontestable, like the carbon-tax meme passed around by the marginally climate-aware. The economy is the sum (monetary) of all human activity generated in the direction of the capitalist progress project. All this activity exists entirely in the world of money, extraction and dominance; a human-created realm separate from Nature.

Quoting from the Stiglitz article:

"To put the issue in stark form, we surely do not want to get to net-zero emissions by having zero consumption. The “no growth” argument diverts attention from the key issue of breaking the relation between consumption and production on the one hand and destruction of the environment on the other. That will be achieved by consuming and producing in different ways, and many of the technologies needed to do so exist already. We can also change our patterns of consumption toward goods and services that are “greener”—and this too is already happening."
"Emissions cannot be reduced from their very high levels of close to 60 GtCO2e per year simply by stopping growth. Halting growth just freezes emissions, here at very high levels.”

But then he goes on to say:

“To say that investment and growth are essential in the coming two or three decades, it is not, however, a statement that growth should go on forever. Planetary boundaries do impose constraints (Rockström et al., 2009). In the next two or three decades, climate action is likely to help in addressing these problems. In the later part of the century and moving into the next, the boundaries may well constrain growth (both in GDP and population) and should already be prominent in thinking about public policy."

Well, duh, we’ve passed so many planetary boundaries already, but nobody has even begun to think about constraining the two third-rails, GDP or population. This statement about growth and public policy is very like many notions put forward by environmentalists: grand, yet essential schemes, but impossible to implement. Another virulent commentary on the economy and climate is by Martin Wolf, titled “Market forces are not enough to halt climate change - Investor returns imply that the welfare of future human beings is close to irrelevant” in The Financial Times. This is a great article, not long, so do read it. The author ends with this:

“A hundred years from now, people are likely to remember our era as the time when we knowingly bequeathed a destabilised climate. The market will not fix this global market failure. But today’s political fragmentation and domestic populism make it almost inconceivable that the needed courage will be forthcoming either. We talk a lot. But we find it effectively impossible to act on the needed scale. This is a tragic failure.”

7 - (p. 136) So here we are back at geoengineering again. As mentioned below, humanity’s original error was in trying to make Nature into something else. We had essentially a “Garden of Eden” with a relatively stable climate that allowed this species to evolve. But We (“We” being the refuse known as humanity) wanted something else. We wanted cities, away from cold and danger. We wanted towers, huge expressions of hubris. We wanted to travel. We wanted to fly! So we began exploiting Earth as if it was a nearby resource planet, tearing it apart searching for materials to build more and more unnatural things. And we looked at our cities and found them beautiful, while sight of such unnatural beauty should have instead revealed to us the depravity of our crime. We had a wonderful spaceship with everything needed for life, but we damaged it, severely, altering every natural cycle you can think of. So we now want to risk further damage by trying geoengineering? Because the planet warmed up a few degrees? According to the paleoclimate record, this planet has had much higher CO2 levels and much higher temperatures. There were massive ferns, dinosaurs, etc. True, the continents were in other places. But it was this same planet. If this rogue species can stop damaging it, this planet will be fine. But some people want to do anything to hold down the temperature for a while, to preserve this false “normal” for a while, to keep business returns flowing in and to be able to keep spewing CO2 above the level where rain can bring it down, by continuing air travel. We have to risk geoengineering for THAT? Our primary goal should be ending our original sin against Nature rather than continuing ever farther into the crime. (see below)

8 - (p. 138) this is about adaptation, meaning that you supposedly adapt to the world that humans have wantonly destroyed (see paragraphs above this) Adaptation now supposedly means “CARE,” Cutting emissions, Adapting, Removing greenhouse gases an Exploring sunlight reflection. But “adapting” is ruled out as impossible, leaving carbon capture and geoengineering. Do either of these mitigate our war against Nature? No, they are just a desperate attempt to carry on with “Normal”: extracting more from the sea and land and the labour of others for a few more years.

10 - (p. 139) This is more on ( should I say “moron”? ) geoengineering. The “Hothouse Earth” trajectory is actually the beginnings of the “Venus syndrome” as described in James Hansen’s writing and referred to in my previous posts. Burning millions of years’ worth of properly-sequestered carbon in fossil fuels was stupidity of the highest order. Like virtually all human activities, including proposed geoengineering, it was done not just with unintended consequences, but rather with a completely cavalier and purposefully thoughtless disregard for the possibility of any negative consequences. Instead of “rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” we must totally and forever end all air travel. Normal? You can no longer get there from here. The most important action to avoid the Venus syndrome is to absolutely end all ocean fishing NOW. The actions of ocean life help to keep water on this planet. The number-one task to protect biodiversity is to ensure that there never is even ONE MORE sacrifice zone on this planet. When you stop tearing it up, whether by mines or wars or extractive land use, after that you may start enabling species recovery.

11 - (p. 176) The Pope’s message - well said, especially about the “new process marked by three requirements: that it be drastic, intense and count on the commitment of all.” Killing off air travel would certainly be drastic and intense; I wouldn’t count on the “commitment” part, it seems that the primary driver of the economy is alleviation of human boredom.

The whole section: Glacial-Interglacial Cycles and Possible Future Trajectories, page 33-37 could be questionable following recent research into the solar system’s pathway through the galaxy: Opher, M., Loeb, A. & Peek, J.E.G. A possible direct exposure of the Earth to the cold dense interstellar medium 2–3 Myr ago. Nat Astron (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-024-02279-8

The World Economic Forum 2024 interconnections map (also in Karis p. 46) shows risk categories as circles connected by lines. Actually, the basic errors of humanity often nest in each other, like matryoshka dolls (diminutive of matryosha, in Russian).

Humanity’s attempts to build an artificial system of living on a planet which has been fully engulfed by a living Being which depends on all parts of its system to be fully controlled by and recyclable in its ecosystem, is our original error. From this living being emerged a rogue species (humans) which refuses to operate within the constraints necessary for a sustainable ecosystem. This was the original sin, our war against Nature, the outer matryoshka. The bright colouring often seen on these dolls is represented by our abuse of the physical properties of the planet, such as burning every accessible fossil fuel and the creation of plastics, in order to create a separate human “city world” on an industrial scale outside of nature. Within that error of the war against Nature lies the error of a total lack of an actual civilization. Within that error lies toxic sovereignty, wars and war’s ultimate weapon: nuclear bombs.

WAR is US. "US" being both humans and USA. The Owners of America have slipped the bounds of the attempts at a peaceful world order following WWII in order to keep the arms manufacturers in business. War is the default human means of "agreement"; Peace takes a lot more work and a rational thought process rather than an emotional knee-jerk. So until you see a purposeful path to peace being implemented, all else is preparatory for war after war, bearing witness to yet more human failures. Perhaps a good definition for a rogue species. Meanwhile, any day lacking the start of nuclear winter is a Good Day, so enjoy while they last, hour by hour. This paragraph was a comment I posted on Professor William Astore’s substack post titled “Build Submarines.” In this post he tells about massive new US submarines with incredible destructive power, being built right now. What climate catastrophe? All nations are increasing “defence” procurements, preparing for the coming great conflagration. If we are truly serious about keeping a livable planet, where does endless preparing for war fit with that?

We could undo some of the damage from our war against nature (I recommend removing all Settler artifacts from the Great Lakes watershed) but failing that, we could at least go no further with the damage, by constraining all initiatives of “Progress,” by which I mean technological progress rather than social progress which is actually in decline.

This planet is devoid of actual civilization; society has devolved from the previous (short-lived) attempts at a peace-oriented world order into tribalism, both nationally and internationally. In that regard, societal collapse is underway anyway, with or without climate change, heading as I have repeatedly noted into all-out civil war of all against all. This of course is not pre-destined; actual rational thought, if that is possible in humans, can overcome this tendency. Although, as I have previously stated, the tendency in America lies not in that direction, as the immediate into-the-street protests in the Black Lives Matter situation revealed. Consider the American creed: “… with Liberty and Justice for all.” Liberty is a precursor for greed and justice is an enabler of grievance. The polarity of greed and grievance enable tribalism thus the seeds of destruction were planted at the first tilling of democracy. These attributes are mentioned in Karis-2024 on page 48, referring to Chandler et al. 2023.

The probability for a meaningful world government is zero, therefore you cannot open that matryoshka to access its next inner child, wars and nuclear weapons. In a previous post I listed existential threats in this order: nuclear weapons, plastics, climate change. That list represents the immediacy of the danger of each; it does not represent the layers of the matryoshka, which reveal the underlying errors in human judgement.

From Wiley online library, summary of chapter 8, in D.R. Sampson: Our Tribal Future:

“The difference between [a] problem and [a] predicament. The distinction boils down to this: problems have solutions; predicaments have outcomes. A solution to a problem fixes it, returning all to its original condition. Once a suitable solution can be found and made to work, a problem can be solved. A predicament, by contrast, has no solution. Faced with a predicament, people can develop responses, but not solutions. Those responses may succeed, they may fail, or they may fall somewhere in between, but no response can erase a predicament.”

Parallel to no civilization, within the error of that war against Nature, is the error of exponential population growth enabled by expanding energy consumption and industrial fertilizers, as noted in previous posts. Since fossil fuel usage enabled the population explosion, it is wishful thinking to imagine reducing fossil fuel consumption while not reducing population. The world population has DOUBLED since 1970! WTF?

Karis-2024 mainly suggests societal collapse will result from consequences of climate change, but deeper social malaise is underway already. People have generally lost faith in all aspects of government. True, they mainly sat on the sidelines: governance is not a spectator sport. There are fools and charlatans taking up the social space in which real governance should reside. People have lost trust in police, the enforcement arm of the state, and that deficit goes back to the types of people entering and the training of police forces. “Forces” is a strange word to use since it implies imposition and avoids the possibility of engendering public trust. Trust is further diminished when cops can’t control their desire for the adrenaline-rush from shooting a Black kid in the back. Democracy is a sham; the “People,” the mugs, control nothing, business does. Big business is now tapping in to the national security apparatus to keep track of protesters and help clear the way for the advancement of business. See this article in The Narwhal for the example of TC Energy: "some senior officials at the company believe they are locked in an existential battle as governments around the world move away from fossil fuels." Business should exist within the realm of governance, rather than having become a controller of government. Real government could be set up like a utility, you set it up with its tasks and let it run. Imagine having elections for your electric utility. Four years from now you could be switched back to DC power. Or 50 Hz. Or 240V mains like in Europe. Why “elect” people to make more laws? Think of one thing that’s not already illegal. Having elections for something that should run as a utility invites ideological manipulators to try to harness that public revenue stream for their own purposes. Then four years later another “link on the sausage (as per Marx)” reverses what the previous jerks accomplished. And government has lost public trust by demonstrating over and over that they are incompetent to manage public funds. And the state MUST back up all police actions regardless of how egregious they may be, otherwise the enforcement arm of the state loses its power. Therefore, with ineffectual governance worldwide, societal collapse is a natural outcome.

A recent post by George Monbiot states:

“Oligarchs seek the destruction of oversight, which is why UK bodies such as the Environment Agency and the Health and Safety Executive have been comprehensively gutted. The same desire was the driving force behind Brexit. They want the cessation of protest. They want a failing NHS, to justify privatisation. They want malleable politicians and a tame BBC. They get what they want, distorting every aspect of national life. They pour money into neoliberal and far-right political movements, which help capital to solve its perennial problem: democracy. The arc of history bends towards injustice. But every so often it is broken over the knee of catastrophe.”

Since the “original sin” was our war against Nature, shouldn’t we be trying to end that battle rather than venture into more and more technofixes? Does geoengineering reverse our conquest of Nature or advance it? Does changing the type of vehicle from fuel to electric calm our addiction to travel or enable it?

Although we can accomplish a form of abstract thinking, we cannot describe it as logical reasoning because we do not question the underlying framing and cannot escape the emotional roller coaster. Let us begin by separating wants from needs, finding ways to use less energy slaves and tread lightly on this fragile spaceship.

From Karis-2024, p. 135, on actions that individuals could take:

· Elect politicians who will take action on climate change

· Work to pass a tax on carbon (a “fee and dividend” if “tax” scares you)

· Support research on negative emissions technology, nuclear power, geoengineering, and climate research in general

· Protect our biosphere, especially carbon sinks such as peat bogs, the Amazon and boreal forests

· Convince our family, friends, community, and as many other people as possible that there is a climate emergency that requires immediate action

· Organize and participate in a mass movement to combat climate change

· Participate in non-violent civil disobedience and civil resistance

Let’s look at these recommendations for individual action.

The first two cancel each other out - is “climate change” something that politicians “can do something about”? Or is it truly up to individual actions, so we should institute a carbon tax to get the little people to find other energy sources? Politicians could end air travel, that action would actually reduce emissions and show the populace that something serious needs to be done about this climate catastrophe!

The third is puzzling: note we jump from what magic politicians are expected to do and a carbon tax, but nothing about genuine emissions reduction, instead going directly to negative emissions, nuclear power, geoengineering and general climate research. Until emissions start actually dropping, there’s no point in negative emissions and no moral grounds for geoengineering. For what? So Normal emissions can continue? And I have written a lot about nuclear power already. Nuclear waste is a huge problem, something you do not want to tackle unless you can guarantee at least 500 generations of stable social order. Read this quote from Paul Murray, who became the Department of Energy’s deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition in October. This appeared in Grist and then in The Bulletin:

“It’s a pet peeve of mine, to be honest. Everybody talks about the shiny new reactors, but nobody ever talks about back-end management of the fuel that comes out of them.”

Here’s a photo (in same article) showing an aerial view of Onkalo (“cave” in Finnish) the world’s first permanent depository for nuclear fuel waste, during construction. It opens later this year on the Finnish island of Olkiluoto.

Photo credit: Tapani Karjanlahti/TVO - A sad fate for a nice island.

Protect biosphere (of course!) but let that begin with no new sacrifice zones, not even for making EVs.

The last three items, “Convince, Organize” and Participate” are reasonable goals.

To really consider what individuals can do about this catastrophe, we start with the second-layer matroyshka, the total lack of a real civilization. Perhaps popular pressure can encourage the enforcement arm of business (governments) to act on this matter. It could possibly require a world-wide general strike, as a last resort. People drive on the interstate highways past the ICBM installations in the northern Plains and simply carry on with their (pathetic) lives, ignoring the greatest existing threat to all live on the planet. WAKE UP! Everyone, everywhere (and all the ships at sea, as Tom Meyer used to say) should lay down their tools and not do another day’s work until First Strike, launch-on-warning and high-alert protocols are abandoned and these weapons begin to be taken down. The necessary action to initiate those changes is vastly improved world governance, starting with making the United Nations organization effective. The Elders organization has just released a post making recommendations on reforming the Security Council”

“The Security Council, and in particular the veto power, must evolve if the UN system is to prove itself fit for purpose in the 21st century.”

However, regardless of what prior office these people held in their long lives, they are just amateur thinkers. I have already made the better proposal in March, 2023: A Possible Path to Peace. Do read it again, if you don’t remember. Until we have a working system of world government, all other activities toward the main existential threats (nuclear weapons, plastics and the climate catastrophe) are just fragmented busy-work. But within that system of disarray, there are things to do to counter denialism which is making gains again, and you should try to keep people out of office (such as tRump) who will do everything in their expanding power to gut environmental protection. I write these posts (to a small audience of subscribers) but also write letters (and you could do the same) to our national and local newspapers, such as this one in The Province (Vancouver, BC) June 21, 2024, p. 12:

It’s time to end subsidies to the fossil fuel industry
“As reported, various cities are banning ads for fossil fuels; if cities were truly serious about climate change they would close their airports and ban auto ads. For the industries that we do not have the guts to close down, such as fossil fuels and tobacco, the best remedy is to end all fossil fuel industry and tobacco farming subsidies, and totally disallow all business expense deductions for fossil fuel and tobacco companies. That should really clear the air and bring in massive government revenues.”

Here’s another from The Vancouver Sun, June 12, 2024, p.A7:

We need to limit our energy use
“In your column "It's time for a fossil fuel emissions cap" by Meghan Fandrich, the author is pushing for a constraint on fossil fuel supply. In actuality, we need a constraint on the demand side, a limiting of energy consumption. That would mean actions like ending air travel and restricting the greatest driver of the economy - the alleviation of human boredom. In trying to restrict emissions, Ms. Fandrich is working at the wrong end of the horse.”

So there are two letters which will have many eyes, thousands more than will read this post. People will likely reject those ideas, but at least they have seen it, perhaps for the first time.

Limits to Progress

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