The Eerie Similarities Between the Coronavirus and Climate Change Hoaxes

COVID-19: Certificate Of Vaccination ID. What do you think?

Source

thefreedomarticles.com

By Makia Freeman

April 15, 2020

AT A GLANCE…

• THE STORY: There are some interesting connections and similarities between the coronavirus and manmade climate change hoaxes.
• THE IMPLICATIONS: Some people are using the COVID-19 pandemic to push climate change propaganda, however, the fundamental point is that both of them exploit human emotion to modify behavior.

Learn the eerie similarities between the coronavirus and climate change hoaxes. Once you see the patterns of propaganda the narratives cease to work on you.

Coronavirus and climate change

may at first glance not seem to be connected. One is a tiny invisible virus, and the other is an issue as big as the planet itself. However, there are some eerie similarities. Firstly, look at their propagandistic value – they are both false narratives being used to manipulate your perception and centralize power in a NWO (New World Order) Global Government. Secondly, they are both hyped threats which play upon your emotions (fear, care, etc.). They create what is ultimately a fake emergency (even if there are legitimate problems connected to them). Recently Pope Francis has both implied and outright stated that the coronavirus outbreak was “nature’s response” to humanity ignoring ecological issues, and that “nature is throwing a tantrum so that we will take care of her.” Francis has long been a mouthpiece for Agenda 2030 sustainable development plans, a way to usher in global governance while pretending to care for the environment. Are the NWO manipulators achieving in just weeks and months with the coronavirus hoax what was taking them years to achieve with the manmade climate change hoax?

The Essence of the Coronavirus and Climate Change Hoaxes: Making Humanity Itself the Enemy

The key feature of the manmade global warming/climate change agenda is to convince you that the carbon dioxide (CO2) made by humanity is ruining the planet. This is in spite of the obvious biological fact the CO2 is a gas of life; plants breathe it in and need it to live, and we need plants to live to produce our oxygen, so without enough CO2, we would be dead. As I covered in the article Good Hearts, Fooled Minds: Top 4 Fallacies of the Hijacked Environmental Movement, the green movement has been hijacked. The Club of Rome is one of 6 groups that are close to the center of the Rhodesian Round Table (ultimately funded by Rothschild) which also includes The Bilderberg Group, the CFR, the RIIA, the UN and The Trilateral Commission. The Club of Rome’s 1991 document entitled The First Global Revolution? contains this passage:

“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together … all these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.”

Did you catch that? The real enemy is humanity itself. The NWO controllers want this insidious idea to infect people’s minds, erode their self-love and self-worth, and introduce the subsequent idea that you need to feel guilty just for being alive on this planet (after all, you’re breathing CO2, you traitor!).

Now compare this to what is going on with the fake pandemic of the moment, Operation Coronavirus. As I covered in 2 earlier articles (Deep Down the Virus Rabbit Hole – Question Everything and COVID-19 Umbrella Term to Operate a Fake Pandemic: Not 1 Disease, Not 1 Cause), we are still, amazingly, yet to have solid scientific proof that this virus exists. We have RNA fragments from lung fluid samples, but that doesn’t meet the standard of proof. The new coronavirus has failed Koch’s postulates; it has not been isolated; it has not been proven to exist. Thanks to work of Dr. Andy Kaufman and others, it has become apparent that certain organizations have taken an exosome and falsely claimed it is a new virus. Exosomes are secreted by cells as a natural response to toxins; they are pleomorphic and can turn into viruses. Exosomes are part of human body itself, as are viruses.

Thus, all the hype and hysteria has been generated by claiming that an exosome/virus is the new enemy, even though the exosome and virus are parts of the human body.

So we come full circle: the (human-produced) exosome/virus is the enemy (and thus humanity is the enemy, again).

CO2 is Like a Virus, Spreading Everywhere and Killing Us

You can find some examples of the absurd nonsense being written and spoken about coronavirus and climate change in James Corbett’s video here. Corbett exposes the propaganda and highlights how people are using the pandemic to further the AGW agenda. Some of the propaganda gems he exposed were how the so-called “climate crisis” is making the spread of infectious diseases like coronavirus more common and how a “study” found that climate change is releasing new and previously trapped viruses. So now, in addition to all the other NWO agendas (I’m at 21 and counting) that are being rolled out using COVID-19 as a pretext, you can add another layer to it: humans are “double plus bad” because we warmed the planet with CO2 and therefore helped release and exacerbate the spread of a killer virus. Wow. Do you feel so bad you want to kill yourself yet?

Fake Care: We Really Care for the Environment and We Really Care for the Elderly

These hoaxes are designed to hack human psychology by exploiting its weaknesses. The propensity for care and compassion for our fellow human being is naturally a wonderful thing that makes us human. Sadly, it can be exploited. The ruling class at the very top of the pyramid – the 1% of the 1% of the 1% – are characterized by their criminal, psychopathic and Satanic mindset. They don’t care. In fact, some of them even perform Satanic rituals to eliminate empathy and compassion (e.g. the cremation of care black magic ceremony at the Bohemian Grove). All their care is fake care, since they have suppressed it within themselves. However, they know how to pull the heart strings of the mass population, so they pretend they care and make deceptive appeals to “care for the environment” and “care for the elderly” to make people sign on to their agendas. While claiming they care for the planet, their corporations pollute the air, land and water with chemtrails, GMOs, heavy metals, microplastics and more. While claiming they care for the elderly, they think of them as useless eaters with no productive worth and constantly try to change the culture and the laws to make it acceptable to kill off the old people as soon as possible (see Dr. Richard Day’s account where he reveals the elite plan for a demise pill for the elderly).

The Creation and Exploitation of Fear: The Earth’s Going to Die and You’re Going to Die

Exploiting the natural human propensity to care is one side of the equation; the other side is ginning up and then exploiting fear. The NWO controllers are masters of this. The best types of propaganda mix truth with fiction, so they tell you that species are going extinct (true, except for the lie about polar bears declining), the planet will have more catastrophes, the planet will warm uncontrollably, you’re going to infect your loved ones, the planet’s going to die, you’re going to die, and on and on and on. They hire soul-for-sale scientists to “find” and “conclude” the theories the NWO paymasters want. It’s funny how you can “find” anything that you’re being paid to find. People can’t think rationally or clearly when afraid, since they are in their amygdala (fight-or-flight reptilian brain) not their pre-frontal cortex (the higher center of reason and logic). Plus, most people will believe anything as long as it’s repeated loud enough and long enough. Manipulating people is a piece of cake, really.

Mainstream Mouthpieces Try to Bring the Climate Change Agenda into the Coronavirus Pandemic

Check out this propaganda piece Time magazine, a very tenuous argument where the author even admits he has no evidence:

“I have no evidence that climate change triggered this particular virus to jump from animals to humans at this particular time, or that a warmer planet has helped it spread. That said, it’s pretty clear that, broadly speaking, climate change is likely to lead to an uptick in future epidemics caused by viruses and other pathogens. Scientists have understood for decades that climate change would change the way diseases spread, but, as the planet warms, those hypotheses are being tested and scientists are learning in real time. There are many links between climate change and infectious diseases, but I’m going to focus on one particularly novel—and concerning—area of knowledge: how rising temperatures are making our natural immune systems less effective.”

Here’s what MSM outlet NBC has to say about the coronavirus and climate change phenomena:

“And that is why, in the long term, the coronavirus will one day be seen as a fire drill for climate change.”

Here’s where this YouTube manmade climate change believer is taking it. The dangerous implication here is that if we can do all this for the coronavirus, why can’t we do the same for the climate; in other words, why can’t we utterly transform the shape of society because of climate change:

“The world jumps into action to deal with pandemics like the Coronavirus outbreak. But why don’t we respond in the same way for climate change?”

Final Thoughts

The coronavirus and climate change hoaxes have a lot of similarities, based on the way they make humanity – i.e. they make you – the enemy. They exploit emotions such as care and fear to modify mass behavior. Hopefully by reading this you can begin to see the pattern of these propaganda narratives so that they lose their effectiveness on you. Despite all the similarities, there is one big difference: the NWO have been able to achieve far more in far less time with the coronavirus hoax than with the manmade climate change hoax. We need to stay perpetually aware and vigilant if we hope to remain free.

*****

Makia Freeman is the editor of alternative media / independent news site The Freedom Articles and senior researcher at ToolsForFreedom.com. Makia is on Steemit and FB.

Sources:

*https://www.technocracy.news/pope-francis-is-pandemic-natures-revenge-for-ignoring-climate-change/

*https://thefreedomarticles.com/category/conspiracy/agenda-2030-agenda-21/

*https://thefreedomarticles.com/hijacked-environmental-movement/

*https://thefreedomarticles.com/deep-down-virus-rabbit-hole-question-everything/

*https://thefreedomarticles.com/covid-19-umbrella-term-fake-pandemic-not-1-disease-cause/

*https://www.corbettreport.com/coronavirus-and-climate-change-propagandawatch/

*https://thefreedomarticles.com/5-nwo-agendas-accompanying-coronavirus-epidemic/

*https://thefreedomarticles.com/satanic-black-magic-rules-the-world/

*https://thefreedomarticles.com/3-most-chilling-conspiracy-documents-accounts/

*https://time.com/5779156/wuhan-coronavirus-climate-change/

*https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/coronavirus-climate-change-pandemic-fire-drill-our-planet-s-future-ncna1169991

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoFWA43lebk

1973 Computer predicted the end of civilization (10 min)

ABC News In-depth

In 1973, Australia’s largest computer predicted trends such as pollution levels, population growth, availability of natural resources and quality of life on earth. ABC’s This Day Tonight aired this story on 9 November 1973.

 

Earth Changes Summary – October 2019: Extreme Weather, Planetary Upheaval, Meteor Fireballs

Source

Sott.net
Wed, 06 Nov 2019

Fire in the sky! Meteor/fireball sightings and barely detected asteroid flybys surely got our attention this past month. What is the cosmos trying to tell us?

Ireland, Scotland, Portugal, US, Canada, and China were witness to some of the most important meteor sightings in October, while NASA was put to shame by so many undetected NEOs, making it clear that we are defenseless against a possible ‘out of the blue’ hit by one of these rocks.

Severe storms and floods continued to wreak havoc around the world, leaving a trail of destruction in Saudi Arabia, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, India, Japan and Spain.

Hurricane season continued with Japan seeing its strongest storm in 60 years with the arrival of super-typhoon Hagibis and Korea suffering the effects of typhoon Mitag. The UK and Ireland also saw torrential rains in advance of, and in the aftermath of, hurricane Lorenzo, which severely damaged the Azores on its path northward.

In the Philippines, several were killed and many injured as the country was hit by not one, but three earthquakes registering over M6 in a two week period.

Snow in October is now becoming the norm. So much for less ice at the poles, dying polar bears, and record heat. October left a month’s worth of snow in a single day in the Southern Yukon; 10 inches of snow in Washington; unexpected cold and heavy snow in Texas as well as parts of Russia and Canada… and it’s still Autumn.

Watch it also on Sott.net’s Vimeo channel:

To understand what’s going on, check out our book explaining how all these events are part of a natural climate shift, and why it is taking place now: Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection

Check out previous installments in this series – now translated into multiple languages – and more videos from SOTT Media here, here, or here.

The ‘Greta Effect’: Are We Really This Time, for Certain Certain, Heading for the End Times?

Source

http://www.strategic-culture.org

Cynthia Chung

November 7, 2019

In a little less than a year and a half, Ms. Thunberg has garnered a great deal of media attention for her passionate pleas that the world finally take heed to the very real crisis of climate change affirming that if we fail to meet the requirements laid out for us by the IPCC we will most assuredly have no planet to live on 11 years from now. Ms. Thunberg has confidently and frequently stated this in almost every interview or speech she has made since her media blitz began.

This is of course very disturbing news indeed.

What is just as disturbing is that it is seemingly all up to the children around the world to take matters into their own hands, since all adults have apparently become the equivalent to the walking dead, with children being the supposed organisers behind these immense marches across Europe, Canada and the US, to save the planet from total annihilation. This regard for the adults in the west and their seeming encouragement of this regard of themselves is very disappointing, but hardly surprising when you realise that many of them are from the ‘Make Love Not War’ live in the moment movements from the 60s that used as one of their main slogans “Never trust anybody over 30”. Interestingly, these are the parents of the dejected youth of today, who seem to have all taught their children the same lesson: don’t trust adults. Apparently something really terrible happens to you once you turn 31 and either you have to accept the fact that you are now analogous to a sack of potatoes or maintain a 20 something year old mental state for your entire life in order to stay “relevant”.

‘Forever young’ justice warriors such as Jane Fonda are a model for us all on how to never mentally develop past the age of 30. At the age of 81, Jane has made the vow to get arrested once a week for 14 weeks until she has to film her tv show ‘Grace and Frankie’, where at that point she will have fulfilled her part in making the world a better and safer place and will have earned her entrance into sainthood. As Jane stated in an interview with Washington Post, “Greta said we have to behave like it’s a crisis…We have to behave like our houses are on fire”. Jane apparently has a strange understanding of what she would do if her house was on fire since she continues to fly frequently and supports the eating of meat, the two top “no-no’s” from Greta. Regardless, Jane is on a mission to send a message to everybody else that even though she does not follow what Greta asks, if others also do not, we will all die horrible deaths in 11 years. After all, Jane will be 92 at that point…but with the mind of a forever young 20 year old.

As Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, put it, “If we don’t work together, we are going to die together”. Bone-chilling words to be sure. The way things are going we might end up seeing baby boomer NATO Defense Ministers holding hands singing “We Are the World”, wait…that already happened in 2015.

However, it is no longer good enough to distrust anybody over 30, and those now leading the charge are just entering their teens since people in their 20s are becoming part of ‘the problem’ and are just not willing to do enough to save the planet. In a world that up until recently was obsessed with whether someone had a PhD title before they could make any public statement on the climate change subject, now could care less about academic titles and don’t even require a high school diploma to dictate world policy. Why? Well, because “all the science is already in” on climate change and now it is just about getting action done and since adults have been the problem that has got us to where we are today, it is only fitting that the children take matters into their own hands…right?

Before we dare to answer that question I thought I would share some interesting periods in history that may help provide a new perspective about the current situation we find ourselves in. Bare with me, I am past 30 years in age.

The Art of Prophesising

On January 23, 2019 Greta made the prediction: “The date is January 23, 2031. The world has just ended. No humans are left on the planet once known as ‘Earth’ ”.

Have we really come to a point where we are at the brink of the end times? I have spoken with a great many people who believe this to be the case. Whether they believe it will be in 11 years or 50 years, the consensus among the many is that we are certainly approaching the end of the world, something that used to be associated to the crazy guy who pulled out all his teeth so they could no longer hear his thoughts, holding up the sign “The End is Nigh” and babbling apocalyptic lines from the Book of Revelations…now the majority of us would look at that guy and say “You know, I think he has a point.”

But in all seriousness, are we truly living in the darkest period of humanity’s existence?

I will come back to that question because I truly do not take it lightly, but it should be known that there is not only a long list of false prophecies for the end of the world that had massive followings throughout history, but there are a lot of parallels to those periods and to that of our present day.

In 1345 the biggest financial collapse of history hit Europe. Food became increasingly hard to come by and water sanitation could not be maintained. It was not long after that the plague, carried by ships travelling from Asia, consumed a vulnerable Europe. During this time, many cities suffered up to a 50-70% mortality rate, killing much of the very young and old.

Many thought this to be the end of the world. There was no seeming solution to the problem and many believed that they were either being punished or had been abandoned by God, and since their condemnation seemed certain, took the path of living in the most hedonistic lifestyles imaginable as death and despair surrounded them. Others tried to buy their entrance into Purgatory with “indulgences” issued by the Church (somewhat reminiscent of today’s purchasers of carbon offsets). The basic idea was that one could reduce the amount of punishment one would undergo for committing a sin in exchange for money. This gave individuals, who could afford it, a way to partake in this end of world orgy-fest while avoiding their soul’s eternal damnation, or at least so they were told.

Others took matters a little more into their own hands to make it right with God. They set out onto the streets whipping themselves profusely. It was thought that if they punished themselves God would spare them from the plague, while others who had already contracted it thought it would move God to take the sickness back. These were known as the Flagellants, and they had a very large following. Later on they would blame the Jewish people for God’s wrath and resorted to the slaughter and burning alive of these groups of people in the hope that God would finally relent.

Another interesting period to take note of was during the Roman Republic. One of the most illustrious positions that one could hope for, outside of being Consul, was to be an Augur. This was an incredibly prestigious position within the Roman government that was usually assigned for life. An Augur was basically the interpreter of ominous and fortuitous signs, which included interpreting animal entrails (considered an exact science at the time), behaviour of birds and so forth to dictate future policy of the Republic.

There was also the period between the 4^th and 5^th Crusade known for its ‘Child Crusaders’. According to George Zabriskie Gray’s research on this subject, in 1212 a twelve year old boy named Stephen, from the village Cloyes in France claimed he had been selected by God to lead a Crusade of Children to rescue the Holy Land. He would recruit 30, 000 children to join him. Around the same time, a 10 year old boy named Nicholas, from Cologne, would also begin to preach and recruit children for the same mission. He too claimed that he had been selected by God and recruited a following of at least 20, 000 children. What little is known of the fate of these children is that the majority of them died of either starvation, were murdered or sold into slavery. Of the few thousand that actually set sail for Palestine, it is not known what happened to them, but only that they never arrived to the Holy Land.

And the list of examples goes on…

In Praise of Folly

So what is the point of all this? I think it is useful for us to have a memory of our past folly. And I think we are in the greatest danger of committing folly when we forget the foolish whims and beliefs of the past that were not just based on religious misconceptions but also on misconceptions of what passed for ‘science’. I think it is very dangerous when a population cannot even remember its recent ecstasies in folly in end of world prophecies such as the Y2K scare only 20 years ago, with a massive following of believers who were prepared for end times. This was a subject that was constantly being talked about on mainstream media and even by the governments of countries, President Clinton being no exception.

I think it is also very dangerous when there are absolute statements made such as “all the science is in” on a subject. Climate science is a relatively new science, and an extremely complicated one with many unknown variables. It is interesting that a group of scientists in this field have claimed that they know everything there needs to be known on this subject, when I don’t think we can say that for any other subject in the sciences to this date. Either climate science is far more simple than we thought or we are skipping steps.

What is also concerning is that although this grouping of climate scientists speak with such certainty about what the climate will be 10 years from now and what is influencing it, they are still unable to accurately predict the weather 2 weeks from now (let alone when a cold or hot front will be entering a region months or years from now). Meteorologists admit that their forecasts are at best an “educated guess” from measurements they take in change of atmospheric pressures. This does not even take into account the role of the Sun, which is an obvious contributor to global climate cycles, nor other factors within our galaxy such as supernova emissions of radiation and cosmic rays. Yet despite this lack of understanding we can be certain that climate scientists can with confidence predict the climate trend of the WORLD 10 or even 50 years from now!

We are told that the climate is completely chaotic now and unpredictable but moving towards a measurable point in the future. This confident prediction is being calculated by super computers. Computers that are ultimately limited to their programs’ parameters and variables. It is claimed that these computers can ‘learn’, can ‘problem solve’, but it still is operating within a human-made program and is thus limited to the assumptions of that program. A computer cannot decide to start taking into account the Sun’s role in climate change for instance. It does not even have a concept of what the Sun is. There seems to be an almost mystical faith being put into these super computers, likened to a shaman who shakes a bag of bones and dumps its contents out to form some random pattern that somehow will reveal our fate.

How can a computer have all the answers when we don’t even know all the variables let alone how they interact in order for it to calculate the outcome years from now? Well the answer is we obviously can’t. It is not an accurate prediction. Just like the Y2K scare.

I would further add that when a movement forms vehemently asserting that the end of the world is nigh, that is a reflection of the breakdown of that society. It is a reflection that the people of such a society no longer have faith in that society’s fitness for survival. I think it is no coincidence that the leading nations supporting the prophecy of Greta are largely first world western countries, countries that at one time enjoyed the highest standards of living but now are experiencing decay and economic collapse.

There are already answers to the clean energy crisis. Namely nuclear power, with fission power (and soon fusion) not only being the cleanest forms of energy but by far the most efficient and most powerful source of energy human civilization has ever had access to, making actions once impossible turn into the possible, such as long-distance space travel. The technology of the plasma torch has the capability to break down matter into its ionic components, this means that landfills could be cost-effectively broken down into their elemental forms which would thus turn them into resource mines. It is a wonder that those who seem to care so much about solving these problems never seem to bring up these very evident solutions.

So how did European civilization ultimately survive the mayhem of the Black Death? Fortunately there were those who did not believe that this was the end of the world and sought to not only rebuild but improve upon the conditions of the past. They did not believe that people needed to resort to some form of supplication to avoid the end of the world (somewhat reminiscent of today’s concept of all humans being innately polluters who must repent and minimise the negative effects of their mere existence). Rather those that brought Europe out of the Dark Ages believed that the avoidance of the end of the world could only come about through human intervention, which had the highest capacity for the good and depended on scientific discoveries that could only be brought about through the creative imaginings of an optimistic human mind.

A Worldwide Revolution Is Underway

Source

http://www.democracynow.org

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Puerto Rico. Hong Kong. Ecuador. Haiti. Lebanon. Iraq. And now, Chile. People are rising up around the world against austerity and corruption, defying police forces unleashed to suppress them. Many of these mass movements share a fierce critique of capitalism. In Santiago, Chile, more than 1 million people flooded the streets last weekend, and mass protests continue. There, the brutal Pinochet dictatorship from 1973-1990, during which thousands of progressive activists and leaders were tortured, disappeared and murdered, was followed by decades of neoliberal policies, with rampant privatization, union-busting, stagnant wages and increased costs for education, health care, transportation and other services. Chile, among the richest countries in South America, is also one of the most unequal. At least 20 people have been killed during recent protests there, further angering and emboldening the crowds.

These global protests also occur at a critical inflection point in history, with as few as 10 years remaining for humanity to transition from a fossil fuel economy to one powered by renewable energy. On Wednesday, Chile’s embattled, billionaire president, Sebastian Pinera, abruptly announced that his country was canceling plans to host two major international summits, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in mid-November, and the United Nations climate summit, the 25th “Conference of the Parties,” or COP25, in the first two weeks of December.

Carolina Schmidt, Chile’s COP25 president-designate, said, “The citizens have expressed in a strong way their legitimate social demands that require the full attention and all efforts from the government.”

Chile’s cancellation of the COP could be a setback for global action on climate. But climate activists should take heart: This renewed spirit of rebellion around the world signifies a rejection of the status quo, and could portend accelerated, grassroots mobilization to avert irreversible, catastrophic climate change.

“Social injustice and the climate crisis have a common root cause,” the Climate Action Network said in a release not long after Chile’s COP cancellation. “Climate justice and solidarity is fundamentally about the protection of human rights and a better quality of life for all.”

The climate crisis touches everyone, first and most forcefully the world’s poor. The mass uprising in Puerto Rico that forced the resignation of Gov. Ricardo Rossello was the culmination of decades of frustration with Puerto Rico’s colonial status and the more current exploitation by Wall Street vulture funds. But the discontent was fueled by the utter devastation of the back-to-back hurricanes Irma and Maria two years ago. “The austerity policies that have been implemented have put the people of Puerto Rico in a position of vulnerability. Social inequality has increased to levels that we have never seen here,” Manuel Natal, a member of Puerto Rico’s House of Representatives, said on the “Democracy Now!” news hour days before Rossello’s resignation. “We need more democracy, not less democracy. We are on the brink of a political revolution here.” Rossello’s ouster was the first time in U.S. history that a governor was forced from office by popular protest.

Indigenous people are also leading the way, often at the front lines, confronting resource extraction with disciplined, nonviolent resistance. Hundreds of indigenous and campesino social leaders in Colombia have been murdered in recent years, simply for standing up for justice and environmental protections.

The Paris climate agreement specifically notes the importance of climate justice, and pledges to work “in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty.” One of the enduring conflicts that has hampered international climate negotiations has been the refusal by wealthy nations, principally the United States, to accept the simple premise that “polluters pay.” The United States is the wealthiest nation in human history because, in part, it has polluted its way to the top, using cheap, dirty power: coal-fired power plants, diesel locomotives and now, so-called clean-burning fracked gas.

The Green Climate Fund was supposed to raise billions of dollars to finance renewable projects in poorer countries. The fund’s pledging conference last week fell short of its goal, primarily because the Trump administration reneged on the U.S.’s $2 billion commitment. Australia and Russia followed suit, refusing to make contributions.

A new study by Climate Central, a news and science organization, shows that climate-induced coastal flooding will likely be far worse than previously predicted, forcing between 200-600 million people, rich and poor, to flee their homes later in the century. Climate change-fueled wildfires are now raging across California, with hundreds of thousands of people evacuated from their homes and at least 1 million people without power.

Popular uprisings are also spreading like wildfire, though, against corrupt autocratic leaders, austerity and inequality. People are also flooding the streets, globally, linking the movements against inequality with the fight for a just, sustainable world powered by renewable energy.

Von Greyerz: The Problem Is The Economy, Stupid! Not The Climate

Source

http://www.zerohedge.com

From Egon von Greyerz at goldswitzerland.com:

Sat, 10/19/2019

 

The earth is about to get much cooler and so too is the earth’s economy.

“Sic Transit Gloria Mundi” (Thus passes the glory of the world). This phrase was used at the papal coronations between the early 1400s and 1963. It was meant to indicate the transitory or ephemeral nature of life and cycles.

As we are now facing the end of a major economic, political and cultural cycle, the world is likely to experience a dramatic change which very few are prepared for. Interestingly, the peak of economic cycles often coincide with the peaks in climate cycles. At the height of the Roman Empire, which was when Christ was born, the climate in Rome was tropical. Then the earth got cooler until the Viking era which coincided with the dark ages.

THE PROBLEM IS “THE ECONOMY STUPID” AND NOT THE CLIMATE

Yes, of course global warming has taken place recently as the effect of climate cycles. But the cycle has just peaked again which means that all the global warming activists will gradually cool down with the falling temperatures in the next few decades. The sun and the planets determine climate cycles and temperatures, like they have for many millions of years, and not human beings.

The climate activists are spending their efforts on the wrong issue. The big disaster looming for the world is not climate change but “the economy stupid” (phrase coined by Clinton).

So let’s instead look at the real coming disaster that the world needs to focus on and a number of facts that are self-evident even though very few are aware of them.

Instead of worrying about global warming, which we humans cannot effect, we should instead issue a GLOBAL WARNING about the coming economic cataclysm so that the world can be prepared for the extremely serious problems that will hit us all in the next few years.

Below I outline a potential scenario for the next 5-10 years:

• BIGGEST ECONOMIC DISASTER IN HISTORY
  The world is heading for an economic disaster of a magnitude that is much greater than the 1930s depression. There is really nothing to compare with in history since the world has never been in a similar situation before when every single major economy is at risk.
• GLOBAL DEBT WILL KILL THE WORLD ECONOMY
  Never before in history have all major countries lived above their means for such an extended period. And never before has global debt been almost 4X global GDP.
• $2 QUADRILLION DEBT AND LIABILITIES
  In addition, unfunded liabilities, like medical care and pensions, are at least $300 trillion globally. If we add gross derivatives of $1.5 quadrillion, which are likely to turn into real debt as counterparties fail, the total debt and liabilities are above $2 quadrillion.
• DEBT AT 30X GLOBAL GDP CAN NEVER BE REPAID
  $2 quadrillion is almost 30X global GDP. Who is going to repay this debt? Certainly not the current generation which has incurred most of it. And certainly not future generations which will neither have the means, nor the inclination to pay for the sins of the previous generation.
• DEBT IS GROWING AT AN EVER FASTER RATE
  Most major economies are continuing to spend money they haven’t got and thus to print money and expand credit at an ever faster rate. The US for example has increased debt by $800 billion since June. As the US economy falters, annual deficits of $1-2 trillion will increase manifold in the coming years. And when the banking system comes under pressure, which is happening right now, money printing will accelerate at an ever faster pace. As the global economy falters, most major countries will see deficits and debts rising quickly.
• NEGATIVE RATES – A RECIPE FOR DISASTER
  Negative rates are a disaster for the world. Over $17 trillion debt now carries negative interest. Firstly, it kills the incentive to save. A fundamental economic principle is that savings equal investments. The world cannot grow soundly with investments financed solely by debt or printed money. With no savings, most banks do not have funds to lend to businesses. Thus investments will slow down dramatically. Negative rates also lead to investors chasing ever riskier investments to get a higher return. Also, pension funds will not achieve adequate returns to cover outstanding liabilities.
• DEBT AND ALL BUBBLE ASSETS LIKE STOCKS AND PROPERTY WILL IMPLODE
  Like the climate virtually all asset classes are overheated. The bubbles that the credit expansion has created will implode in the next few years together with the debt that created the bubbles. Central banks around the world will make a desperate attempt to save the world economy by printing unlimited amounts of money.
• ALL CURRENCIES WILL GO TO ZERO – DEFLATION WILL FOLLOW HYPERINFLATION
  As money printing accelerates, paper money will become worthless and a depressionary hyperinflation will hit the world. Hyperinflationary periods on average last for around 1-3 years and are followed by a deflationary implosion of all asset values in real terms. At that point substantial parts of the financial system will cease to function properly or go bankrupt.
• GOVERNMENTS WILL LOSE CONTROL
  Before new financial and political systems emerge, there will be social upheaval and unrest. Criminality will be widespread as desperate and hungry people will do what they can to feed themselves and their children. In many countries, immigrants will be blamed for the misery of the people. Right and left wing radicals will fight immigrants. There are likely to be periods of anarchy as governments lose control. I do not believe that an elite will control the world at that point. The disorderly unwinding of asset bubbles and the world economy will be uncontrollable.

GLOBAL MARKETS ON THE CUSP OF CRASHING

The above scenario could start at any time. In many respects it has already started. The world will only be aware of the next phase when global markets start the first severe phase of the coming secular downtrend. We could see this already in October which is a notorious crash month. Or it could start as late as in early 2020. We will also start to see increased pressures in the financial system including problems in many European banks as well as US banks.

Once bubbles burst, the course of events could be very rapid. The above scenario could all happen over a few years and probably not more than five. This doesn’t mean that the economy will start recovering rapidly in five year’s time. It just means that markets and the worst problems reach a bottom. But after that the world will crawl along that bottom for many, many years.

There is no absolute protection against this scenario since it will hit all aspects of life and virtually all people. Obviously, people living off the land in remote areas will suffer less whilst people in industrial and urban areas will suffer considerably.

The best financial protection is without hesitation physical gold and some silver. These metals are critical life insurance. But there are clearly many other important areas of protection to plan for. A circle of friends and family is absolutely essential.

Just 100 Companies Will Sign Humanity’s Death Warrant

Just 100 Companies Will Sign Humanity’s Death Warrant

The 100 corporations actively suffocating us in a blanket of global warming emissions are the same ones that run our government. They have wrapped their tentacles around our politicians, the regulatory agencies and the criminal justice system. by Lee Camp

“As Tamara Pearson writes for Common Dreams, “The CEOs making these calculated decisions are hubristic-parasites with a fallacy-fetish, who treat wealth as a game—declaring themselves winners when they have more zeros than whole countries, while treading all over our magical habitat in their race for wealth. … Spoon-fed elitists who are so white and male and wealthy that they aren’t touched by the problems they create.”

http://www.mintpressnews.com

By Lee Camp 

October 15th, 2019

Only 100 companies will sign humanity’s death sentence. That’s it. One hundred corporate boards filled with sociopaths. But I’ll get back to that in a moment.

In recent weeks, climate activists in New York City jammed up foot traffic on Wall Street with a die-in, covering themselves in fake blood and lying on the ground. Other activists in Washington, D.C., blocked intersections using a variety of tactics, gridlocking traffic and pissing off a lot of people. It seems clear that when it comes to our impending extinction, practically no one cares, unless it means they have to sit in traffic for 10 extra minutes. Apparently, there is nothing that upsets Americans more than being stuck in their car, moving at a negative MPH, completely unable to get to the jobs they fucking hate.

And that’s why those are the types of protests that matter—the ones that interrupt the flow of capitalism, not the colorful marches where we all show up for two hours while the politicians we’re ostensibly trying to influence go play golf. I’m not saying don’t get involved in the friendly marches—I’m just saying our rulers don’t care that you did. It’s like when you dress up your baby in a costume: I’m not saying you have to stop, but you’re only doing it for yourself. The ruling elite, like your baby, doesn’t actually care.

But since I aim to please, here’s a point for those of you who don’t give a shit about the climate crisis. The corporations that are screwing up your life, tainting your water, polluting your air, buying up your favorite coffee shop and turning it into a gas station, sucking your tax dollars up through subsidies, and all the while paying their employees a warm can of farts per hour—those corporations are the same ones creating the climate catastrophe.

In fact, The Guardian reported that just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions. These include Exxon Mobil, Saudi Aramco, Shell, Chinese and Russian coal, Chevron, BP, CNPC, ConocoPhillips, Gazprom, Lukoil, Total, Petrobas and many others.

One hundred incredibly rich yet morally bankrupt companies. That’s it.

It gets even worse. The Carbon Majors Report revealed that more than half of all industrial emissions over the past 30 years were put out by just 25 corporate and state-owned entities. Twenty-five companies are killing us, smothering us, stealing our futures while choking us (and not the fun kind of consensual choking done in the bedroom. This is the bad kind of choking that results in drought and hurricanes and your dog stuck in a tree!).

Basically, a tiny number of sociopaths make the decisions that are currently dooming us all, and as much as I’d like to tell you otherwise, those people don’t even notice if we all march outside in colorful hats. The marches are kinda like those “rate your experience” things at airports and restaurants, with giant color-coded buttons that feature four choices, ranging from a smiley face all the way down to the dreaded frowny face. I hate to get conspiratorial, but I’m 84% certain that those buttons aren’t even connected to anything. The powers that be just know that you feel better if you think you gave your opinion. Although I will say that the last time I “rated my experience,” I actually did get a response from TSA at the airport. I was only halfway through taking a dump on the frowny face when guys with guns showed up.

Point is, the only protests that create change are those that interrupt the flow of business because these corporations will not give up easily. Too much profit rests in the balance for them to stop their prolonged execution of the human race.

The Guardian article continues: “Fossil fuel companies risked wasting more than two trillion dollars over the coming decade by pursuing coal, oil and gas projects that could be worthless in the face of international action on climate change and advances in renewables – in turn posing substantial threats to investor returns.”

They have made a two trillion-dollar gamble that we will all keep using fossil fuels even as society collapses. So they don’t just have a dog in the race, they have a goddamn elephant riding on top of a T. rex riding on top of Mike Pompeo. (One can argue that such an animal would not fare well in a race, but it is undeniably a significant beast to have in said contest.)

And I realize that for the average American—the regular person scraping by, trying to get the kids to eat, the dogs to poop and the grandpa to shut up for one second—climate change isn’t his or her top concern. But the truth is, your daily troubles are connected to the same corporations that are causing the largest existential threat we fleshy apes have ever faced. The higher-ups at those organizations control our governments, and therefore, our day-to-day lives.

As Tamara Pearson writes for Common Dreams, “The CEOs making these calculated decisions are hubristic-parasites with a fallacy-fetish, who treat wealth as a game—declaring themselves winners when they have more zeros than whole countries, while treading all over our magical habitat in their race for wealth. … Spoon-fed elitists who are so white and male and wealthy that they aren’t touched by the problems they create.”

While I love Pearson’s analysis, she’s wrong about one thing. These parasites are not only white and male. As President Obama pointed out last year in a speech, “American energy production, you wouldn’t always know it, but it went up every year I was president. … And you know that … suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer … that was me, people.”

Our former president is actually proud of the fact that he helped put the nail in our coffin. When the ruling elite doesn’t think you’re paying attention, they brag about their crimes—the same way you or I might sit around privately and say, “Man, you wouldn’t believe how much weed I smoked last night.” Our powers that be sit around boasting, “Man, you wouldn’t believe how many regulations I gutted last night.”

The 100 corporations actively suffocating us in a blanket of global warming emissions are the same ones that run our government. They have wrapped their tentacles around our politicians, the regulatory agencies and the criminal justice system. It’s now one big, incestuous, money-obsessed pile of X-rated nastiness—and you and I are not part of it. We are the cannon fodder, the collateral damage, the chum. Until we stop these corporations, the expiration date of the human race is set in stone.

 

Lee Camp is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor and activist. Camp is the host of the weekly comedy news TV show “Redacted Tonight With Lee Camp” on RT America. He is a former comedy writer for the Onion and the Huffington Post and has been a touring stand-up comic for 20 years.

You can join Lee Camp’s free email newsletter here. This column is based on a monologue written by Lee Camp and performed on his television show “Redacted Tonight.”

This article was originally published at Truthdig! and was republished with special permission from the author.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MintPress News editorial policy.

Greta Thunberg – Right here, Right now (3 min)

Climate activist Greta Thunberg rebukes world leaders (4min)

Saving this for posterity

 

BOMBSHELL: GEOENGINEERING EXPERIMENT FUNDED BY BILL GATES IS TIED TO DEPOPULATION

BOMBSHELL: Geoengineering Experiment Funded By Bill Gates Is Tied To Depopulation

Who the heck do they think they are fooling? This has been going on for years! 

SHTFplan.com

Mac Slavo
September 22nd, 2019

A global geoengineering experiment, which is being pushed by Bill Gates and funded by a Nazi-linked foundation has been tied to a depopulation and eugenics agenda.

According to Natural News, the globalist propaganda network CNBC has just released a new video (see below) which is a blatant infomercial for chemtrails. In the video, the media is touting the “benefits” of polluting the skies with calcium carbonate and sulfur dioxide, two pollutants that would devastate life on Earth.  The mainstream media is now openly pushing for harmful geoengineering practices and chemtrails as a solution for their so-called “global warming” fear-mongering.

The project is called SCoPEx, and it’s being masterminded by the who’s who of eugenicists and depopulation pushers at the highest levels of world government and academia. It’s funded and endorsed by Bill Gates, for example, who openly calls for reducing the human population by billions.

The Free Thought Project stated that chemtrails and geoengineering are no longer a conspiracy. Rather the mainstream media now supports the spaying of chemicals into the sky to “dim the sun.”  It sounds like a wonderful way to completely screw up the entire global ecosystem and ensure no food can be properly grown to feed anyone.

The video is nothing short of an infomercial for chemtrails. It is truly bizarre how this subject has moved from the fringes of conspiracy circles and into the mainstream and no one is even batting an eye. Now that Bill Gates has endorsed and funded it, the world is suddenly open to the idea of attempting to modify the planet’s weather by spraying chemicals into the atmosphere to block out the sun. -Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project

While people were once called crazy for suggesting chemtrails have been destroying the planet for years, now propaganda outlets are all in on using them to fight the nemesis, climate change.  Geoengineering has become the subject of congressional debate, peer-reviewed studies, and now a Harvard experiment. Harvard scientists want to use geoengineering in an attempt to replicate the climate-cooling effect of volcanic eruptions (which can simulate a nuclear winter.) The university announced in July of 2019 that it has created an external advisory panel to examine the potential ethical, environmental and geopolitical impacts of this geoengineering project, which has been developed by the university’s researchers.

According to Nature Magazine, Louise Bedsworth, the executive director of the California Strategic Growth Council, a state agency that promotes sustainability and economic prosperity, will lead the Harvard advisory panel, the university said on 29 July. The other seven members include Earth-science researchers and specialists in environmental and climate law and policy.

This SCoPEx project would pollute the skies across the entire planet, dim the sun, impair photosynthesis and lead to a collapse of the global biosphere. This, of course, would lead to mass starvation around the world as food crops fail and famine sets in. This is the goal of the project, by the way, not an unintended side effect, reported Natural News. 

The SCoPEx project is being funded in part, by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.  Sloan himself has long sought to carry out the mass murder of human beings, according to a separate report by Natural News. Industrialist Alfred P. Sloan, as head of General Motors, was a Nazi collaborator, and an ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler.

Sloan’s hatred of blacks was almost as intense as his hatred of Jews. He had a close connection with the eugenics movement which eventually became the Human Genome Project. The Sloan Foundation, together with the Rockefeller nexus, held a long-standing interest in population reduction, including their involvement with the introduction of mysterious new vaccines together with the World Health Organization, which has a stated policy of population reduction, as clearly set forth in Agenda 21. –Natural News

[H/T] Mike Adams at Natural News

Climate SOS: 5-year period ending 2019 to be hottest on record

The vast majority of scientists on the planet have been warning us for years about global warming but many people still don’t believe it. They are like the proverbial frog being boiled alive. Unfortunately, all of us are that darned boiling frog.

Source

http://www.aljazeera.com

Sept 22, 2019

If greenhouse gas emissions do not start falling soon there will be ‘hell to pay’, researchers warn.

Millions took part in global climate change protests last Friday with a new report suggesting the last five years will be the hottest ever recorded [Lucas Barioulet/AFP]

A damning new UN report published on Sunday warned the world was falling badly behind in the race to avert climate disaster as a result of runaway warming, with the five years ending 2019 set to be the hottest ever.

The report comes ahead of a major United Nations climate summit on Monday when Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will push countries to increase their greenhouse gas reduction targets.

The report “highlights the urgent need for the development of concrete actions that halt global warming and the worst effects of climate change,” said its authors of the Science Advisory Group to the summit.

The average global temperature between 2015 and 2019 is on track to be the hottest of any five-year period on record, according to the report, which was compiled by the World Meteorological Organization.

The period “is currently estimated to be 1.1 degrees Celsius [34F] above pre-industrial [1850-1900] times and 0.2 degrees Celsius [32.4F] warmer than 2011-2015,” it said.

The past four years were already the hottest since records began in 1850.

“I think the danger is growing – that means we have much less time to solve the problem than we thought we had. Basically if we want to tackle climate change, we have stop burning fossil fuels,” Tom Burke, chairman of anti-carbon group E3G, told Al Jazeera.

Planet SOS: Voices from the front lines of the climate crisis

‘Hell to pay’

Guterres said last week the world was “losing the race” on climate change with the latest report spelling out the extent to which the gap between what is required and what is happening is widening.

Rather than falling, carbon dioxide grew two percent in 2018, reaching a record high of 37 billion tonnes.

More importantly, there is also no sign yet of reaching what is known as “peak emissions”, the point at which levels will start to fall, though these are not growing at the same rate as the global economy.

Patrick Verkooijen, chief executive of the Global Centre on Adaptation, told Al Jazeera that governments needed to show more ambition on their commitments – not only in mitigation, but also in investments for adaptation.

“The effects of climate change are here and now,” Verkooijen said from New York. “Whether you are an auto worker in Bangkok or a farmer in Africa or an elderly woman in Paris we are all impacted by climate change today.”

The 2015 Paris Agreement saw countries lay out national targets to reduce their emissions in order to limit long-term temperature rise by either 2C (35.6F) or 1.5C (34.7F).

These are benchmarks that will limit in important ways the effect of warming on world weather systems.

But even if all countries meet the goals they set themselves, the world will warm by 2.9C (37.2F) to 3.4C (38.1F), the report found.

The current levels of ambition would need to be tripled to meet the 2C goal and increased five-fold to meet the 1.5C goal – technically still possible.

“This reads like a credit card statement after a five-year long spending binge,” said Professor Dave Reay, chair in Carbon Management at the University of Edinburgh.

“Our global carbon credit is maxed out. If emissions don’t start falling there will be hell to pay.”

Deadly heatwaves

If the world keeps temperatures to the 1.5C goal instead of the 2C, 420 million fewer people will be exposed to heat waves and 10 million fewer will be vulnerable to sea level rise, NASA climate scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig said on Sunday at a UN session.

In 2018, global carbon dioxide was 407.8 parts per million (ppm), 2.2 ppm higher than 2017 and set to reach or exceed 410 ppm by 2019.

Youth across globe demand action on climate change (2:37)

“The last time Earth’s atmosphere contained 400 parts per million CO2 was about 3-5 million years ago,” the report said.

At that time, global mean surface temperatures were 2C to 3C (35.6F to 37.4F) warmer, ice sheets at both poles melted, and seas were 10 to 20 metres higher.

Other major findings show that the extent of Arctic summer sea ice has declined at a rate of 12 percent every 10 years over the past 40 years, with the four lowest values recorded between 2015 and 2019.

Overall, the amount of ice lost from the Antarctic ice sheet increased by a factor of six each year between 1979 and 2017, while glacier loss for 2015-2019 was also the highest for any five-year period on record.

Sea level-rise is also accelerating as is the process of acidification, with an increase of 26 percent in acidity today compared with pre-industrial periods, as a result of absorbing increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The report also found that heatwaves were the deadliest weather hazard in the 2015-2019 period, affecting all continents and setting new national temperature records.

The summer of 2019, which included July as the hottest ever month on record, saw unprecedented wildfires in the Arctic.

In June, these were responsible for emitting 50 megatonnes of carbon dioxide.

Serious conflict

The report also comes at a time of increasing mobilisation over the question of climate change with millions taking part in a youth-led global strike on Friday, before the first UN youth climate summit on Saturday.

Al Jazeera English

✔@AJEnglish

“We deserve a safe future. And we demand a safe future.” – @GretaThunberg, climate activist.

Millions of people around the world, from New York to Paris, Nairobi, Seoul, Bangkok, Islamabad and Johannesburg, have taken part in a global protest, calling for climate action.

8,033

9:05 AM – Sep 22, 2019

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2,634 people are talking about this

Guterres wants nations to be carbon-neutral by 2050 – in other words, they will not add more heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the air than are removed by plants and perhaps technology each year.

UN chief praises youth-led climate action

There is a sense of urgency, Guterres said, because “climate change is the defining issue of our time”.

“For the first time, there is a serious conflict between people and nature, between people and the planet,” the UN chief said.

A larger, more international report looking at climate change and oceans and ice will be released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Wednesday.

“This new WMO report highlights the importance of making more progress on reducing emissions of carbon dioxide,” Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald said.

“Hopefully this latest UN Climate Summit will motivate more action.”

THE LISTENING POST

Climate crisis: Are the mainstream media part of the problem?

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES

Climate Catastrophe Comes for Europe

Source

http://www.strategic-culture.org

dispatchesfromtheedgeblog

Conn M. HALLINAN

September 19, 2019

• On Aug. 18, several dozen people gathered around a patch of snow in Iceland to commemorate the demise of the Okjokull glacier, a victim of climate change. Further to the west, Greenland shed 217 billion tons of ice in the month of July alone.
• Paris reached 108.7 degrees on July 25, and normally cold, blustery Normandy registered 102 degrees. Worldwide, July 2019 was the hottest month on record.
• Melting Russian permafrost—which makes up two-thirds of the country—is buckling roads, collapsing buildings, and releasing massive amounts of methane, a gas with the ten times the climate-warming potential of carbon dioxide,
• Some 1.500 residents of Whaley Bridge were recently evacuated when a dam—overwhelmed by intense rainfall that pummeled northern England—threatened to break. The rains washed out roads and rail lines and swamped homes and business.

Ever since coal was partnered with water to generate steam and launch the industrial revolution, Europeans have been pouring billions of tons of atmospheric warming compounds into the planet’s atmosphere. While scientists were aware of the climate-altering potential of burning hydrocarbons as early as 1896, the wealth generated by spinning jennies, power looms and drop forges was seductive, as was the power it gave countries to build colonial empires and subjugate populations across the globe.

But the bill is finally coming due.

Swedish fires 2019

When most people think of climate change, what come to mind are the poles, Asia’s fast vanishing glaciers, or Australia, where punishing droughts are drying up the sub-continent’s longest river, the Murray. But climate change is an equal opportunity disrupter, and Europe is facing a one-two punch of too much water in the north and center and not enough in the south.

According to recent projections, drought regions in Europe will expand from 13 percent of the continent to 26 percent and last four times as long, affecting upwards of 400 million people. Southern France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece will be particularly hard hit, though how hard will depend on whether the planet’s temperature hike is kept to 1.5 degrees centigrade or rises to 3 degrees centigrade.

Northern and Central Europe, on the other hand, will experience more precipitation and consequent flooding. Upward of a million people would be effected and damage would run into the hundreds of billions of Euros. While weather is battering away at Europe, sea rises of from four to six feet over the next century would inundate Copenhagen, the Netherlands, many French and German ports and London. If the Greenland ice sheet actually melted, the oceans would come up 24 feet.

Food production will be another casualty. According to David Wallace-Wells in “The Uninhabitable Earth,” cereal crops will decline 10 percent for every degree the temperature goes up. When crops fail, people will move and the logical place to go is north. It is not just war and unrest that is driving refugees toward Europe, but widespread crop failures brought about by too little or too much water.

The warming climate also allows insects, like the bark beetle, to attack Europe’s forests. The beetles are increasingly active in the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Norway and, particularly, Russia, which host the largest temperate forests in the world.

Each tree that dies is one less carbon sink to transmute CO2 to oxygen. And dead trees are also more susceptible to forest fires, which can pump yet more of the climate warming gas into the atmosphere. Fires are not only increasing in countries like Spain, Greece and Portugal, but also in Sweden and Finland.

Black Forest fires

For many years climate change deniers—funded by hydrocarbon industry think tanks and sophisticated media campaigns—managed to inject a certain amount of doubt concerning global warming, but a rash of devastating hurricanes and last year’s wildfires in California have begun to shift public opinion. Last spring’s European elections saw Green parties all over the continent do well, and polls indicate growing alarm among the public.

A number of different European parties, including the British Labour Party, are pushing a “Green New Deal For Europe” based on a call by the United Nations to reduce green house gas emissions to zero by 2050.

The European Green Deal proposes using public investment banks to fund much of the plan, which is aimed at keeping rising temperatures to 1.5 degrees centigrade. While the price for rolling back emissions will certainly be high, the costs for not doing so are far greater, including the possibility that worldwide temperatures could go by as much as 5 degrees centigrade, a level that might make much of the world unlivable for human beings.

A jump of that magnitude would be similar to the kind of temperature rise the world experienced at the end of the Permian Era, 250 million years ago. Called the “Great Extinction,” it killed 96 percent of life in the sea and 70 percent on land.

A major reason for the Permian die off was the expansion of cynobacteria, which produce a toxic cocktail that can kill almost anything they comes in contact with. Such cynobacteria blooms are already underway in more than 400 places throughout the world, including a large dead zone in the Baltic Sea. Some New York lakes have become so toxic that the water is fatal to pets that drink from them.

The major fuel for cynobacteria is warm water coupled with higher rainfall—one of the consequences of climate change—that washes nutrients into lakes and rivers.

Of the 195 countries that signed the Paris Climate Accords, only seven are close to fulfilling their carbon emission pledges. And one of the world’s biggest sources of global warming gasses, the US, has withdrawn. If all 195 countries met their goals, however, the climate is still on target to reach 3 degrees Celsius. Even if the rise can be kept to 2 degrees, it will likely melt the Greenland ice cap and possibly the Antarctic ice sheets. Greenland’s melt would raise ocean levels by 24 feet, the Antarctic by hundreds of feet.

As overwhelming as the problem seems, it can be tackled, but only if the world mobilizes the kind of force it did to fight World War II. It will, however, take a profound re-thinking of national policy and the economy.

The US organization most focused on climate change these days is the Pentagon, which is gearing up to fight the consequences. But our enormous defense apparatus is a major part of the problem, because military spending is carbon heavy. According to Brown University’s “Cost Of War” project, the Pentagon is the single largest consumer of hydrocarbons on the planet. Yet a number of European countries—under pressure from the Trump administration—are increasing their military spending, exactly the wrong strategy to combat the climate threat.

The world will need to agree that keeping hydrocarbons in the ground is essential. Fracking, tar sands and opening yet new sources for oil and gas in the arctic will have to halt. Solar, hydro and wind power will need to be expanded, and some very basic parts of the economy re-examined.

This will hardly be pain free.

For instance, it takes 1,857 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef, compared to 469 gallons for a pound of chicken. Yogurt uses 138 gallons. While beef production uses 60 percent of agricultural land, it only provides 2 percent of human caloric intake.

It is unlikely that people will give up meat—although growing economic inequality has already removed meat from the diet of many—but what we eat and how we produce it will have to be part of any solution. For instance, a major source of green house gases is industrial agriculture with its heavy reliance on chemical fertilizers.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, close to 30 percent of food production goes to waste, most of it in wealthy countries. A fair distribution of food supplies would not only feed more people, it would use less land, thus cutting green house gasses up to 10 percent. Add to that curbing beef production, and hundreds of millions of square miles of grange land would be freed up to plant carbon absorbing trees.

Can this be done incrementally? It may have to be, but not for long. Climate change is upon us. What that future will be is up to the current generation to figure out, and while there is no question that concerted action can make a difference, the clock is ticking. When next the bell tolls, it tolls for us all.

 

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

Weathergirl goes rogue (3 min)

From 3 Sep 2012

 

The Splendiferous Serpent Is Awakening

Source

eventhorizonchronicle.blogspot.com

Richard Sauder

Aug 1, 2019

Paul Craig Roberts has wrapped his head around part of what is coming:America’s Collapse: What Is Left Will Be A Ruin
Source

That’s right, Golden America, the Shining City on the Hill, is on the verge of utter, complete ruin. Put it this way: “Making a Garbage Heap Great Again” is nothing but a fool’s errand. Lamentably, there do seem to be a lot of fools running around who have not yet come to grips with that starkly brutal fact.

I have been blogging for years about precisely this salient reality, the rapidly unfolding Event Horizon that will change everything and everyone in a comparatively short period of time. In fact, the changes will be so dramatically severe that a whole series of mass mortality events of all kinds are all but baked in the cake at this point. To be blunt, large hordes of people will most likely be going bye-bye. Whether there will be a resident human population on this planet in 2050, or even in 2035, remains to be seen. What comes next will be vertiginously fast, kaleidoscopic pandemonium.

The causes of the upheaval(s), which have already begun, are and will be myriad: abrupt climate change and associated massive crop failures due to unseasonable cold, heat waves, drought or alternatively flooding/too much rain; rampant deforestation of the large tropical and boreal forests; death of the global ocean, i.e., poisoning of and industrial overfishing of the world’s seas and oceans; ongoing radioactive contamination of the environment from Chernobyl, Fukushima and 400 other nuclear power plants around the world, all of which have grave problems; plagues of dangerous pathogenic organisms, whether naturally occurring or bio-engineered; the already begun, chaotic collapse of the global economic order; profoundly-unfriendly-to-humans-and-other-living-things 5G communications technology and related A.I. and robotic technologies, including on a swarming micro- and nano-scale; major warfare employing various weapons of mass destruction, both novel and non-novel; ongoing accumulation of plastics and hundreds of other toxic substances in the global ecology; the continuing, run-away global extinction event that not one person in one hundred has yet fully grokked — but they will! they will! – though only when it is already far too late to do anything about it but weep in desperation, and the concomitant collapse of the global food chain; the already underway, confused failure of national governments all over the world; powerful geological, volcanic and seismic events, some of them impressively large; and very much more.

It goes almost without saying that ordinary politics, as we have known political affairs, are about to be completely swamped by a great tidal wave of turbulent, unpredictable change that will have much greater momentum. Think about it: the present cohort of stupid, ignorant, sleazy, lying, thieving, corrupt politicians who think they run the world, can scarcely manage the greatly degraded, declining, poorly functioning societies and political, monetary, industrial, agricultural, diplomatic and military affairs that currently fall under their purview. Imagine how that corrupt, mobbed-up, marginally competent, global political class will perform when the system(s) that they ostensibly oversee catastrophically fail.

It is not a pleasant prospect, and yet, that is precisely what is on the way, as surely as night follows day.

đεŧ

I have repeatedly been shown this word or symbol inwardly, in dreaming and visionary states. The way I have rendered it is a close approximation of the way it appears, the nearest I could find in my word processing program’s special character list.

I have always seen it written or tattooed on the back of a serpent that closely resembles the copperhead pit vipers native to the eastern region of the mainland USSA.

In recent days, I have again seen this symbol or word, as well as the serpent on which it invariably appears. It is clearly written on its back, right behind the head. My subconscious deems this viper and the message that it bears to be important, because it keeps showing it to me. The serpent itself was a bit lethargic and groggy. I sensed that it was warming up, gathering itself. I had the distinct impression that it was awakening from a long period of hibernation, and was soon to be released into the wild.

đεŧAs I looked at it and wondered about the meaning of it all I was shown this:

Is. : a) venomous b) additive, cumulativeI had the certain knowing that it would be pronounced very similarly to the English word, “debt”; though it is not a mere word, but rather a living entity, an energetic archetype, if you will, of an awakening, fundamentally cold-blooded, reptilian reality, whence its serpent-like manifestation in my subconscious.

For me, the clear purport of the vision is that the heavily leveraged, debt-based, vastly criminally corrupt, global financial and economic systems are about to catastrophically unwind with deadly effect, not unlike the way a coiled pit viper unwinds when it bares its fangs and suddenly strikes its prey.

đεŧ

Debt. Death. Dead.

I don’t doubt for one second that Paul Craig Roberts is correct about the future of “America” — what is left will be a ruin.

‘Elites’ Flock to Google Summit in 114 Private Jets, Mega Yachts to Talk Climate Change

Source

humansarefree.com

By Emily Smith and Ebony Bowden, PageSix.com

Aug 1, 2019

The world’s rich and famous have flocked to a posh Italian resort to talk about saving Mother Earth — but they sure are punishing her in the process.

The billionaire creators of Google have invited a who’s who of A-list names — including former President Barack Obama, Prince Harry, Leonardo DiCaprio and Katy Perry — to the Sicilian seaside for a mega-party they’ve dubbed Google Camp.

The three-day event will focus on fighting climate change — though it’s unknown how much time the attendees will spend discussing their own effect on the environment, such as the scores of private jets they arrived in and the mega yachts many have been staying on.

“Everything is about global warming, that is the major topic this year,” a source told The Post.

Their three-day summer camp will cost the tech giant some $20 million, sources said.

Many of the guests, including Obama and DiCaprio — who has his own climate change foundation — have described global warming as the biggest threat to future generations.

But according to Italian press reports, the attendees were expected to show up in 114 private jets, and 40 had arrived by Sunday.

The Post crunched the numbers and found that 114 flights from Los Angeles to Palermo, Italy, where Camp guests landed, would spew an estimated 100,000 kilograms of CO2 into the air.

“Google Camp is meant to be a place where influential people get together to discuss how to make the world better,” one regular attendee told The Post.

“There will likely be discussions about online privacy, politics, human rights, and of course, the environment, which makes it highly ironic that this event requires 114 private jets to happen,” they said.

Attendees pay for their own travel to Sicily, but then Google foots the bill for everything at the opulent Verdura Resort, which reportedly features two golf courses and where rooms start at $903 a night.

Sources tell The Post that guests were personally invited by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Stars there also include Harry Styles, Orlando Bloom, Diane von Furstenberg and Barry Diller, who arrived on their enormous $200 million yacht Eos, which has both sails and two 2,300-horsepower diesel engines.

Billionaire Dreamworks founder David Geffen, meanwhile, gave Perry and Bloom a ride on his $400 million yacht, Rising Sun.

Also on hand for the environmental gabfest was the megayacht Andromeda, a 351-foot behemoth owned by a New Zealand billionaire and which features its own helipad.

Many of the attendees were seen in photos tooling around the island in high-speed sports vehicles, including Perry, who has made videos for UNICEF about climate change and was seen in a Maserati SUV that gets about 15 mpg city.

Stella McCartney, Bradley Cooper, Nick Jonas and Priyanka Chopra plus Gayle King will also be on hand. Even Mark Zuckerberg of Google’s rival, Facebook, was invited, according to local reports.

Guests dine among ancient temples and are treated to performances by the likes of Sting, Elton John and Coldplay’s Chris Martin, before retiring to their suites at the Verdura Resort.

The tech company goes to extreme measures to keep its camp a secret — all hotel staff and security have to sign non-disclosure agreements, a source told the Daily Mail in 2018.

 

The American West as Judeo-Christian Artifact

The American West as Judeo-Christian Artifact

http://www.counterpunch.org

by CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

JULY 23, 2019

Storm over the Madison Range, Montana. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

I.

It is fair to say that most people in the modern world regard nature as a collection of “resources” that exist solely for our aggrandizement. Even the foremost putative “progressives” now on the national stage (Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, et al.) argue that we should continue to exploit resources to keep the capitalist growth machine humming, but that we must do it more gently, more ”sustainably,” with more intensive application of advanced technology, with “green” production of energy from wind, solar, hydro, and the like.

The central problem of our time, I’ve come to conclude, is that humanity now consists predominantly of “resourcists” — which is to say, humanists. I mean humanists in the ugliest and most benighted sense of that word: that man is the center and measure of all things, and all other life is subordinate, reduced to a resource.

Too much of Earth, as we know, has been subjugated by techno-industrial Homo sapiens, and that we regard this collectively not with the horror it merits is a testament to our complacent self-regard as vaunted humanists. Maybe in this late hour of modernity, when our dominance is leading to suicide via capitalogenic climate upheaval, it is time to imbibe a dose of anti-humanism.

Toward that end, I would suggest a strenuous interrogation of the anthropocentric principles at the core of Western civilization, which is fundamentally a Judeo-Christian civilization. This sounds like an odd place to start for the establishment of a truly progressive view of the natural world. Bear with me.

In 1966, a professor of medieval history named Lynn White Jr., attending the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, presented a lecture that would go on to live in infamy. Later published in Science, it was titled “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Ending the ecological crisis was White’s primary concern. White singled out Judeo-Christian religion as the historical villain, calling it “the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.”

He argued that the Judeo-Christian conception of a planet made solely for man’s exploitation, as laid out in the book of Genesis, freed humankind to lay waste to the environment. The message of Judeo-Christianity is that man alone is infused with the spirit of the one true God while everything else is soulless matter relegated to human use.

Pause a moment to recall the words of Genesis:

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

It was this worldview, White argued, that replaced pagan animism, with profound consequences. In pagan animism, “every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit,” wrote White. “Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.” With this disenchantment “man’s effective monopoly on spirit [was] confirmed” — and the inhibitions that held back the total pillage of the natural world crumbled.

Then White made a fascinating leap:

The present increasing disruption of the global environment is the product of a dynamic technology and science which [originated] in the Western medieval world [and which] cannot be understood historically apart from distinctive attitudes toward nature which are deeply grounded in Christian dogma. The fact that most people do not think of these attitudes as Christian is irrelevant. No new set of basic values has been accepted in our society to displace those of Christianity. Hence we shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.

This was the claim which earned him infamy: that the ideology of techno-scientific humanism, forged in the crucible of the European Middle Ages and bequeathed to the world by Western civilization — an ideology that now holds sway over every corner of the planet — grew directly out of Judeo-Christian values. Humanism was the secular realization “of the Christian dogma of man’s transcendence of, and rightful mastery over, nature.”

II.

The subject of This Land, my first book, is the American West, a region that can be understood in part as a Judeo-Christian artifact, as a province whose native people and wildlife have been colonized by a civilization that regards nature, and will never regard it otherwise, as an object to be exploited. Dig beneath the skin of the livestock rancher, the oilman, the coal miner, the logger, the wildlife manager, the Chamber of Commerce official, the tourism booster — you’ll find a dominionist.

The killing of wild predators to protect cattle, the damming of wild rivers for hydro energy and irrigation to feed industrial agriculture, the logging of forests for what the timber industry calls “sustained yield,” the landscape-scale fracking of the public domain, the management of national parks as zoos for mass visitation: they are all expressions of the same urge to use and control, with wild nature as an afterthought, subsidiary to the all-encompassing vision of resourcism.

It’s always about use — and that’s the problem. That’s where we are intellectually defective, unable to grasp what’s at hand, unable to forge a humble, reverent, altruistic relationship with the natural world. Even among those who claim to be environmentalists I see a secularized variant of this same toxic Judeo-Christian anthropocentrism that views the natural world as providing, for example, “ecosystem services” — clean air, clean water. A resource!

But what about the natural world that doesn’t provide any resource for the chosen ones? What about the rich tapestry of useless lovely wild things whose vast intelligence we will never know? Unveiling and celebrating the wild that serves no human end is the unspoken purpose of my book.

A version of this article originally appeared on Powells.com

More articles by:CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

Christopher Ketcham is the author of  “This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption are Ruining the American West” (Viking-Penguin).  He can be reached at cketcham99@mindspring.com.

French MPs call for boycott of address by environmentalist ‘apocalyptic guru’ Greta Thunberg

Source

http://www.rt.com

22 Jul, 2019

FILE PHOTO: Greta Thunberg speaking at a climate protest in Berlin © Reuters / Fabrizio Bensch

With 16-year old Swedish environmentalist Greta Thunberg set to address the French parliament, a group of MPs have vowed to boycott the doomsday speech by the person they called an “apocalyptic guru” and “prophetess in shorts.”

Invited to the session by an environmental caucus called Accellerons – formed to fight what its members call “the climate emergency” – Thunberg will speak before French lawmakers on Tuesday.

However, some MPs from the conservative Republicans and National Rally parties are unimpressed.

“We don’t need apocalyptic gurus to fight climate change intelligently, we need scientific progress and political courage,” Republican Guillaume Larrivé tweeted, calling on his colleagues to give the session a miss.

 Guillaume Larrivé

✔@GLarrive

J’appelle mes collègues députés à boycotter @GretaThunberg à l’Assemblée nationale. Pour lutter intelligemment contre le réchauffement climatique, nous n’avons pas besoin de gourous apocalyptiques, mais de progrès scientifique & de courage politique.https://twitter.com/LCP/status/1152590233000714247?s=20 …

LCP

✔@LCP

[ÉVÈNEMENT] La jeune militante pour le #climat @GretaThunberg sera à l’Assemblée nationale, le mardi 23 juillet.

Suivez son allocution sur les comptes Twitter et Facebook de LCP. #DirectAN Cc @amisdelaterre @PrFeuillage @EncoreTemps_ @Alternatiba_ @RACFrance @Reporterre

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Calling Thunberg the “winner of the Nobel fear prize,” Republican Julien Aubert announced that he wouldn’t show up to “applaud a prophetess in shorts.”

ALSO ON RT.COM‘F**k you Greta’ bumper stickers appear on German roads, taking aim at youth climate activist

Thunberg has been referred to in similar terms before. Rising to fame for organizing school strikes against climate change last year, Thunberg has since switched her rhetoric from demanding action to welcoming the apocalypse with religious fervor.

“We probably don’t even have a future anymore,” she told British lawmakers in April, in a likely preview of her upcoming address in France.

“I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day,” she told the power-brokers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, several months earlier.

Against the dying of the earth, Thunberg offers only one solution: the immediate lowering of carbon emissions to net zero, a move that would see modern civilization – including car and plane travel, electricity, and affordable food for the masses – essentially wiped out.

ALSO ON RT.COMTeen climate change campaigner Greta Thunberg to take year off school for US trip

While European politicians have yet to put any of her radical proposals into policy, they have still applauded her speeches and lined up for photo opportunities with her.

“If I say that I do not want to prostrate myself before Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old child invited to the Assembly in front of the national representation, am I (still?) Politically correct?” asked National Rally MP Sébastien Chenu.

Criticism came from the political center too. Echoing criticism of Thunberg’s messianic worldview, Lawmaker Benedicte Peyrol of President Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! Party asked why France couldn’t “honor its own scientists who’ve been active for years in trying to save the planet,” albeit with less theatrical flair.

Toward an Eco-Socialist Revolution

Toward an Eco-Socialist Revolution

With permission from

http://www.counterpunch.org

by ROB URIE

JULY 12, 2019

The most important political project of the modern era is an appropriately conceived and implemented eco-socialist Green New Deal. If done right, such a program would facilitate a transition away from the environmental and social pathologies of industrial capitalism to a world where people exist in symbiosis with the bounty of nature. If done wrong, it would be the last gasp of a relationship with the world that has brought a collective ‘us’ to environmental ruin.

The social problem is one of transformation, of taking apart the ways of doing things that aren’t working— and they are myriad, to create new relationships that work in concert with ‘the world,’ most particularly for its inhabitants. Given the trajectory of environmental decline, Western political economy will either be used to ring-fence rich from poor to leave the poor to their own devices, problems will be deemed unsolvable and decline will take its course, or capitalism will be overthrown and replaced with something workable.

The logical and humane path forward is to undertake a profound transformation of global political economy beginning with reconsidering the human condition— what meaningful existence entails, with a grounding in social justice. Given that background political and economic relations aren’t conducive to collective action, the path forward— should such be possible, will come through creating the conditions in both spheres for democratic participation.

Graph: The sources of environmental decline are easy to identify through CO2 concentrations. First came industrialization. Then following WWII came the distribution of the American capitalist model around the world. Competition to control industrial inputs, e.g. oil and gas, led to most of the military conflicts of the modern era. The solution to current environmental woes is to stop creating them. Doing so would mean the end of capitalism. Source: ourworldindata.org.

Urgency comes through the relationship of existing ways of doing things to the rising costs of correcting environmental imbalances. The greater these become, the more cumbersome, and therefore the less politically likely, solutions will be. It is long-term environmental relationships that have been altered, meaning there are no quick fixes. The only guarantee is that whatever the costs in the present, they will be exponentially greater in the future.

Analysis and arithmetic argue against capitalist solutions to capitalist problems. Green production is neither green, nor can it replace existing dirty technologies fast enough to sufficiently reduce environmental harms. The issue gets to the heart of the capitalist conundrum. In a narrow sense, making products that are more environmentally efficient will lower their carbon footprint. In a broader sense, making clean products is intrinsically dirty.

The popular imagining of ‘the problem’ emerges from the logic of capitalism where intended outcomes are considered unrelated to unintended outcomes even though they 1) both emerge from the same production process and 2) are indissociable in the sense that one can’t be produced without the other. In like fashion, green technologies solve specific problems while creating others. When the total costs of green technologies are considered, what becomes apparent is that the broader logic is flawed.

The arithmetic problem is laid out by the IPCC, sort of. The realm of the IPCC report is climate change, meaning that species loss (mass extinction) is considered in a separate silo. To limit global warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade requires radically reducing carbon emissions as well as actively de-carbonizing the atmosphere. The popular conception of a Green New Deal is to 1) increase carbon emissions to build low emission technologies while 2) gradually phasing out existing technologies.

A typical way of calculating the impact of green production is to reduce estimated emissions from existing technologies as more efficient green technologies replace them. But the old and new technologies both exist in broadly integrated webs of economic production. By analogy, an electric car may (or may not) produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions than a gasoline powered car, but this tells us little about the environmental impact of manufacturing cars more generally.

What of the infrastructure— factories, roads, transmission lines, industrial inputs, etc. that must be built and maintained to produce them? And what of the inputs that must be mined, transported, processed, transported (again), processed (again) and transported (again) to production facilities? This research paper by economist Jan Kregel provides a description of the distribution of capitalist production. The environmental impact of ‘green’ products is the totality of what went into their production, not end-use calculations.

Regarding the manufacture of solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles, not only should the environmental costs be calculated as carbon emissions, but also in terms of the arable land, breathable air and drinkable water consumed. And what of the natural systems destroyed? These have bearing when habitat loss is considered. Habitat loss is also both a product of industrial agriculture and it impacts the future viability of all agriculture. These in turn are aspects of natural systems, interrelated webs of life that people disrupt at our own peril. This is a central finding of research into mass extinction.

A Green New Deal conceived as tampering around the edges of industrial capitalism— employing the un- and under-employed to manufacture solar panels and batteries for electric vehicles, would add to carbon emissions and other environmental harms at a point in history when the collective ‘we’ can’t afford it. However, when considered more broadly as a social and environmental program operating under a strict carbon budget, it is the best chance for making the transition to a sustainable and just future.

The carbon budget should both be taken to heart and broadened to include a concept of sustainability beyond just the climate. Within the carbon budget laid out by the IPCC, there is no way to implement the conception of a GND (Green New Deal) as existing political economy with green manufacturing added to it. In fact, there is no conception of a GND other than as funding a radical transition away from almost everything that defines current economic production. And the alternative isn’t business as usual— environmental decline will force the issues.

Given the central role of agriculture in both climate change and species loss, land reform is needed to decentralize, rescale and localize agricultural production. This has historically been among the most contentious issues between capitalist and socialist visions of political economy. Powerful corporations currently own or control vast swaths of agricultural land. A GND could compensate large tract owners for their land and the proceeds be taxed to assure that democratic political control is maintained.

Second, agribusiness should be removed from anything related to agriculture in favor of regenerative farming methods. Animal agriculture should be nationalized, with humane conditions mandated and the price of animal products made to reflect their true production costs, including environmental costs. Local and regional agricultural cooperatives should be created as autonomous and democratic collectives, with legal mandates to grow and distribute nutritious food to everyone in the region while minimizing the environmental footprint.

Local and regional agricultural collectives could serve as models for green production of non-agricultural goods. Using comprehensive environmental accounting methods that have been around since the 1970s, all environmental costs related to producing and distributing goods should be mandated to 1) minimize environmental production costs while 2) prioritizing the production of necessities (housing, clothing). Inclusive employment would be used to produce and distribute necessities according to need.

Prototypes for this system already exist across the U.S. Amish communities use organic and regenerative farming methods, minimally participate in consumer culture, avoid energy intensive technologies, support specialized production within their communities and grow what makes sense for their respective regions and growing seasons. They also partake of modern medicine and dentistry, participate in the cash economy and trade goods and services locally and regionally.

There is no agrarian romance at work here. In the poor rural areas where I meet the Amish, they are conspicuously healthier than the non-Amish, have established community support systems and seemingly functioning lives, relationships and economies. This, despite having little to none of the consumer accoutrement considered essential in the wider culture. Life is hard everywhere, but the essential nature claimed for capitalist culture— of consumption, acquisition and individual self-realization, seems improbable given this focus on community. Left largely unconsidered regarding ending capitalism is that there really might be better ways of doing things.

Despite the deep instantiation of agrarianism in the American imagination, most Americans don’t / won’t see reversion to primitive agrarian collectives as viable. And such a vision is utopian without taking apart the large, complex and deeply integrated relations of Western political economy. And even if these were addressed, the rest of the world shows little indication of abandoning capitalism.

If the world could be sectioned off and environmental decline with it, these would be good counter arguments. However, that China has been reinvented with a heaping helping of green technology has done little to slow global environmental decline. Russia is a petrostate with a long history of human-inflicted agricultural calamities. Like the rest of us, the Russians will need a functioning climate and the species-abundance that makes agriculture possible.

The proposals deemed realistic— green tinkering around the edges, won’t solve the environmental problems the world faces. And the reason that potential solutions are so complicated is that social complexity has been built into modern political economy. Addressing the parts means addressing the whole— witness the systemic carbon footprint that green production is indissociable from. The problem isn’t aspects of capitalist modernity, it is the whole of it.

The attractiveness of pre-modern political economy is that there is several thousand years of accumulated knowledge to support it. Homes built before the existence of mechanical systems were situated to capture sun and shade and could be opened to allow air flow in summer and closed to restrict it in winter. They were built using materials and methods that allowed single rooms or areas of houses to be heated with degrading the broader integrity of the buildings.

Traditional agricultural methods likewise descended as accumulated knowledge to ‘passively’ control insect damage, use the entire growing season to maximize fresh food production and produce crops that last through the winter. Monoculture production is an industrial package that includes genetically modified seeds and chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. Agribusiness and regenerative agriculture are fundamentally incompatible.

Industrial agriculture has historically replaced traditional farming methods by externalizing costs. In economic terms, industrial food costs less to grow than through traditional farming. However, regenerative agriculture has low environmental costs while industrial agriculture has high environmental costs. Through this mismatch between economic and environmental costs, what is efficient by capitalist logic is suicidal by environmental logic. The environmental reckoning that is upon us tells the true story.

The idea of commensurability is crucial here. A forest felled to build a shopping center represents the loss of a functioning ecosystem. A price or tax charged for doing so, e.g. a carbon tax, doesn’t replace the forest in environmental terms. Money is to a forest as a horse is to a rocking chair. Outside of capitalist theology, the concept is nonsensical. And neither God nor the forest set the price or received the payment. Even in capitalist terms the market price is contextual— it depends on factors like scarcity to which the forest bears no relation.

As it regards land redistribution, the Amish way of spreading their communities isn’t scalable because of land costs. They go where arable land is cheap. Any large-scale redistribution of land as part of a Green New Deal could only work if land costs are near zero. Borrowing money to buy agricultural land immediately imparts the logic and relations of capitalism. The lender would own the land until the debt is repaid, giving it say over how the land is used. The same would be true for agrarian collectives globally.

In the most basic sense, capitalism must be gotten out of the way for a GND to produce environmentally sustainable political economy. Gresham’s Law implies that solar panel producers can undercut their competition by externalizing their costs (polluting). This leaves the firms that can most effectively pollute as the survivors of market competition. Regenerative agriculture can’t compete with industrial agriculture because the competition is rigged.

The proposition laid out here isn’t that the whole of Western political economy be shifted to primitive agrarian production. It is to suggest that there exists accumulated knowledge about how to get by in the world that preceded capitalist modernity. The ‘end of history,’ the broad and deep replacement of the knowledge, methods, relationships and logic that preceded modern capitalism, leaves few places to turn as it is proved unworkable.

The first battle to be fought toward environmental and social justice is political. The politicians who used a Green New Deal as a talking point, as well as the few who actually thought about it, can’t win the political battle without a broad political movement backing them. However, such a movement would be foolish to muster the political strength and then hand it over to stewards of the existing order.

The 2020 presidential election seems the time and place to raise the political stakes. Given the improbability of resolving environmental problems within capitalism, and that Bernie Sanders is the only national political figure to take a stand, however qualified, against capitalism, his candidacy can serve as a rallying point. Unless radical action is taken quickly, events will unfold that pose a risk to large numbers of people. Once Mr. Sanders has been pushed out of the way by establishment Democrats, and he will be, events can take on a life of their own. Crisis by default or with a purpose, the choice is yours.

 

More articles by:ROB URIE

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is published by CounterPunch Books.

Trudeau Should Cut His Losses on the Trans Mountain Pipeline

Source

Justin Trudeau is in over a barrel. In 2015, he made a deal with Alberta. He would get an oil pipeline built to a coast if the province joined his pan-Canadian climate plan. After his election this past April, Conservative Alberta Premier Jason Kenney ripped up Alberta’s side of the bargain and declared war on Trudeau’s climate plan.

What should Ottawa do now after being jilted by Alberta?

Should the Liberal government maintain its side of the bargain, and proceed with the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline from Edmonton to the Vancouver area and lose credibility as a climate warrior? Or should it kill the pipeline expansion now and say this was a bargain gone bad?

In the long run, the latter course would save Ottawa lots on further subsidies. But there’s that little short-run thing – the looming federal election on or before Oct. 21.

How could Trudeau explain taking a big loss of taxpayer money on a pipeline that no private sector investor would touch last year? Either choice will look bad. No good options is a predicament.

Kicking the can down the road beyond the federal election is one way out. But Natural Resources Minister Amarjeet Sohi promised a decision by June 18.

Remember Justin Trudeau’s grand entry onto the world stage at the Paris Climate Summit in November-December 2015? Canada is back, my friends. That was just six weeks after his stunning electoral upset, leapfrogging his party from third to first place, winning a solid majority.

In Paris, Trudeau and Environment Minister Catherine McKenna promised to catapult Canada from environment laggard under Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper to a global climate leader. While most rich countries at the Paris talks aimed to limit global warming to a 2 C rise above pre-industrial levels, Canada joined low-lying island states to champion a stricter 1.5 C global limit.

Canada’s Trans Mountain Pipeline, Civil Society to Justin Trudeau: “The Time for Investment in New Fossil Fuel Infrastructure Is Over”

How then did Trudeau get stuck with a pipeline that makes no environmental or financial sense?

The pipeline is not going to change the fundamental disadvantages of Alberta’s oilsands. At $90 a barrel for new projects, their break-even cost is among the highest in the world. And their emission intensity is through the roof. Environment and Climate Change Canada scientists found that CO2 emissions were more than 60 percent higher than industry had calculated.

The sands are in a remote part of a remote, landlocked province. Their main market – the U.S. – where 99.9 percent of Canadian oil exports now head, is now their main competitor. The U.S. produces cheaper, lower-emissions oil.

The idea that the Trans Mountain expansion would open new markets in Asia is illusory. The price of heavy, sour crude oil in the Far East is $1 to $3 a barrel lower than on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Transport costs via the Trans Mountain line and tankers will be at least $2 a barrel higher to Asia. China does not have the capacity to refine bitumen. Besides, the world is swimming in light crude oil.

In recent years, only a few oil tankers have left Vancouver harbour. Most of that oil has gone to the U.S., not China. So the premise behind the Trans Mountain pipeline is faulty. The pipeline expansion will likely be a white elephant, owned or subsidized by taxpayers.

The pipeline expansion could cost up to $10 billion, in addition to the $4.4 billion purchase price that the auditor general said was $1 billion too much.

If by some miracle the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion is built, gets filled to capacity and finds markets, it would encourage the production of 590,000 barrels a day more oil from Alberta’s sands. That would add another 13 to 15 megatonnes of carbon pollution.

So it doesn’t make environmental sense either.

The Trudeau government got a special exemption in the new NAFTA (USMCA) to enable it to subsidize the Trans Mountain pipeline.

Why would a government so publicly committed to climate action throw more good money at a dodgy pipeline expansion, especially when Alberta has torn up its side of the climate understanding? Better to cut your losses now.

Gordon Laxer is a political economy professor emeritus at the University of Alberta and author of the Council of Canadians report “Billion Dollar Buyout. How Canadian taxpayers bought a climate-killing pipeline and Trump’s trade deal supports it.”

Featured image is from Canadian Dimension

The original source of this article is The Star (Opinion)

Copyright © Gordon Laxer, The Star (Opinion), 2019

Sign Of The Times? Weather Patterns All Over The Planet Are Going Absolutely Nuts

Source

endoftheamericandream.com

by Michael Snyder

June 25, 2019

 

We have never seen global weather patterns go as crazy as they have so far in 2019.  Record high temperatures are being shattered all over the planet, but meanwhile, some parts of the U.S. were just buried by massive amounts of snow.  The sixth largest city in India is literally running out of water due to extremely dry conditions, but in middle America, it just won’t stop raining.  In fact, the Midwest is getting hammered by more severe storms as I write this article.  Meanwhile, Australia is being forced to import enormous amounts of wheat due to the extraordinary drought that the nation is currently experiencing.  Everywhere you look around the globe we see bizarre weather extremes.  Worldwide weather patterns are shifting dramatically, and many believe that what we have witnessed so far is just the beginning.

Do you have an explanation for what is going on?  Because the truth is that most of the experts don’t.

Just look at what is happening in Colorado.  Some parts of the state got up to 20 inches of snow on Saturday, and as a result, Colorado’s snowpack is currently more than 4,000 percent above normal…

Due to the new snow Friday into the weekend, the Natural Resources Conservation Service reported that the state’s snowpack ballooned to 4,121 percent above normal as of Monday. This number is so high because ordinarily very little snow is left by late June, and cold temperatures late into the spring helped preserve what fell earlier.

After the weekend blanket of white, the scenes in the high country west of Denver resembled midwinter. Enough snow fell to close roads, while many ski areas reported accumulation, including Breckenridge, Vail, Beaver Creek, Arapahoe Basin and Steamboat Springs.

On the other side of the world, the problem is that there isn’t any meaningful precipitation at all.

More than 4.6 million people live in the city of Chennai, India.  Thanks to a drought that never seems to end, the main reservoirs that normally supply that city with water are rapidly going dry…

The floor of the Chembarambakkam reservoir is cracked open, dry and sun-baked. About 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) away, in Chennai, India’s sixth largest city, millions of people are running out of water.

Chembarambakkam and the three other reservoirs that have traditionally supplied Chennai are nearly all dry, leaving the city suffering from an acute water shortage, said Jayaram Venkatesan, an activist in the city.

So what do you do when you have millions of people that need water but you don’t have any to give them?

Well, the temporary solution that has been implemented for now is to truck water in.  That means that “hundreds of thousands of residents” are forced to stand in line for hours in the hot sun as they wait for the water trucks to arrive.  The following comes from CNN…

With the reservoirs dry, water is being brought directly into Chennai neighborhoods in trucks. Every day, hundreds of thousands of residents have no choice but to stand in line for hours in soaring summer temperatures, filling dozens of cans and plastic containers.

Over in Europe, it looks like this could be the hottest week ever for the month of June.

In the next few days, high temperatures are expected to exceed 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in Spain, and that prompted one meteorologist to warn that “hell is coming”…

Meteorologists said temperatures would reach or even exceed 40C from Spain to Switzerland as hot air was sucked up from the Sahara by the combination of a storm stalling over the Atlantic and high pressure over central Europe.

High humidity meant it would feel like 47C, experts warned. “El infierno [hell] is coming,” tweeted the TV meteorologist Silvia Laplana in Spain, where the AEMET weather service forecast temperatures of 42C by Thursday in the Ebro, Tagus, Guadiana and Guadalquivir valleys and warned of an “extreme risk” of forest fires.

In 2003, a terrible heatwave killed tens of thousands of people all across Europe, and many expect this heatwave to be even worse.

And things will be extraordinarily hot in France as well.  In fact, some parts of France are expected to hit 109 degress Fahrenheit by the end of this week…

High temperatures are expected to skyrocket above above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) on Wednesday for a huge portion of France, including Paris. The forecast for Carpentras, a town of 28,000 about 50 miles north of Marseilles, is even worse. There, temperatures are expected to reach 43 degrees Celsius (109 degrees Fahrenheit) on Friday and Saturday. That would easily cap the monthly high temperature record for France of 41.5 degrees Celsius (107 degrees Fahrenheit) set in June 2003, according to Reuters.

Temperatures are likely to climb above 40 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of Spain and approach that in Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium. Overnight temperatures will stay balmy, which poses particularly acute health risks to children and the elderly.

Needless to say, none of this is normal.

Here in the United States, we have been witnessing month after month of extremely unusual weather in the middle of the country.  The rain has been endless and the flooding has been unprecedented, and those living in the heartland keep thinking that all of this weird weather has got to end eventually at some point.

But it hasn’t.

In fact, more severe weather is rolling through middle America as I write this article…

More than 50 million people are bracing for severe weather from the Plains to the Southeast as scattered thunderstorms prompt flash flood alerts, possible tornadoes and hail.

A large weather system is expected to bring damaging wind gusts and large hail for parts of the South and into the Appalachians, Ohio Valley and Great Lakes.

Heavy rain and flash flooding inundated parts of southwest Missouri during the weekend, prompting water rescues and evacuations.

For much more on the immense devastation that all of this wet weather is causing for U.S. farmers, please see my previous article entitled “Shocking Before And After Photos Reveal The Truth About The Widespread Crop Failures The U.S. Is Facing In 2019”.

Will global weather patterns ever return to normal, or is this “the new normal”?

Let us certainly hope for a return to normalcy, because if weather patterns continue to go absolutely haywire that is going to have enormous implications for all of us.

Accurate picture of how the spring of 2019 has been so far. (Yes, that is a turtle swimming in the corn) pic.twitter.com/LUAoDbnY03

— Peter Bergkamp (@pbergkamp791) June 23, 2019