Do You Really Want to Know?

In view of these observations:

Chris Hedges - The Last Civilization to Collapse
The Enemy of Nature
Burning Down the House - New York Review of Books
The End of Illusion - Excerpt from The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink
Human Extinction 2026
David Attenborough: Collapse of Civilization is on the Horizon 
Bipartisan panel: US must prepare for horrendous, devastating war with Russia and China
Is Climate the Worst Casualty of War?
Here's What You'll Pay for Neocon Wars: $5,900,000,000,000
Marketing War: the Incessant Drumbeat of Mortal Danger
Reality Asserts Itself - Daniel Ellsberg - The Doomsday Machine

Yes, Virginia, There Is a Deep State and Bob Parry Exposed It
Veneration Of Power Leading To Climate Catastrophe
Exposing the Giants: The Global Power Elite

America Has No Peace Movement
Resistance Is the Supreme Act of Faith - on the Catonsville Nine
Martin Luther King: The U.S. is The Greatest Purveyor of Violence in the World Today
Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence - Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

THEN THE FOLLOWING:

Immediately ALL NATIONS must:
        Terminate ALL armed conflicts. Any idiots who wish to continue fighting must do so with no weapons, i.e., fisticuffs only.
        Terminate ALL funding and manufacture of weapons and cease all shipments of existing weapons to foreign nations
        Close ALL foreign military bases
        Bring home all military personnel and put them to work on the restoration of infrastructure including renewable energy projects and projects aimed at decreasing energy consumption. Some military, international, should be used against nations destroying climate-preserving forests such as Brazil.
        Immediately begin an international program to rapidly eliminate all nuclear weapons.
        Introduce world-wide rationing of all greenhouse-gas-producing products, services and activities. Equal share for everyone. An individual who does not use his share may sell it.
        Guaranteed minimum income for every citizen.
        These last two items will require birth-control measures.
        Seizure and nationalization of banks, insurance, pharmaceuticals and other industries that currently make a profit on providing human necessities.
        
Many other measures will be necessary as well.

        Naturally, these measures will cause the collapse of capitalism, so international organization will be required to plan and carry out measures to prevent cessation of trade, manufacturing, agriculture; to prevent widespread hoarding, starvation, black-market profiteering.

The original Port Huron Statement from 1962 still remains a practical guide to what must be done.

The articles and reports at the top of this message will demonstrate beyond any doubt the necessity for these measures to be implemented with extreme haste.

Protests of all kinds, million-man-marches to surround the centers of government and corporate power and military at a scale never seen before will probably be required. Many will be injured and killed.

Impossible? Well then, as they say, kiss your ass (and planet) goodbye.


WWII Lessons for the Climate Emergency

by Judith Deutsch
from COUNTERPUNCH May 31, 2019

The bad news is that if history teaches us one thing, it is that there never has been an energy transition .The history of energy is not one of transitions, but rather of successive additions . . . Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene

The New Deal and World War II are reminders of past transformative times, reverberating in many current hardships and extreme dangers. Emergencies can bring clarity and reason about what to do, though at the opposite end, crises can elicit the worst outcomes, such as outlined by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine. A rational and responsible response to the intersecting climate and political disasters is the rationing of energy. There are historical precedents. Yet rationing, moratoriums, and a range of measures that could immediately cut emissions and address intersecting emergencies are largely ignored in climate policy.

As detailed in examples below, solutions to climate change proffered since the 1960s have not worked. Increasing greenhouse gas [GHG] emissions from multiple economic sectors and from amplifying feedbacks are rapidly driving the climate to a runaway state in which human interventions will not alter the physics, biology, and biochemistry of the climate system. An implicit illogic allows for the constant expansion of destructive high greenhouse gas emitting sectors until they can shift to renewables: the Kyoto-exempt military and international shipping and aviation, the agro-industrial complex, wide-ranging extraction, deforestation for biofuels, ever-increasing production of plastic and large vehicles, building codes favoring massive production of steel and cement. Logically, these sectors need to be stringently curtailed or eliminated until the basic needs of the world population are prioritized and met without adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, until GHG concentration is drawn down to a safe level, and until these sectors are actually fueled by renewables.

The rationality of rationing is readily apparent in times of extreme life threats, when distribution of basic necessities involves demonetizing life's necessities and making them part of the commons...

[Read the complete Article at COUNTERPUNCH]

References for the article:

[1] Dave Webb, "Thinking the Worst: The Pentagon Report." P. 68. in David Cromwell and Mark Levene. Surviving Climate Change: The Struggle to Avert Global Catastrophe. Pluto Press. 2007

[2]Nnimmo Bassey. To Cook a Continent: Destructive extraction and the climate crisis in Africa. Pambazuka Press. 2012.

[3] Eric Toussaint. The World Bank: A critical primer. Pluto Press. 2006. p 183

[4] Mike Davis. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino famines and the making of the third world. Verso. 2002. p. 280- 83

[5] Stan Cox. Any Way You Slice It: The past, present, and future of rationing. The New Press. 2013. p 71-75. Also David Cromwell and Mark Levene, p 29

[6] Ian Angus and Simon Butler. Too Many People? Population, immigration and the environmental crisis. Haymarket 2012. p 166-69.

[7] Loka Ashwood. For-Profit Democracy. Yale University Press. 2018.

[8] Mike Gonzalez and Houman Barekat. Arms and the People: Popular movements and the military from the Paris Commune to the Arab Spring. Pluto Press. 2013.

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It is truly a great shame that things haven gotten this bad, where merely the measures required to prevent total planetary collapse are so harsh, and will themselves result in great suffering, especially if those measures are not introduced as fairly and as equally as possible. It is especially a great shame since the problems could have been - and almost were - corrected decades ago:

Losing Earth: A Recent History - by Nathaniel Rich

Introduction: The Reckoning

Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979. It was, if anything, better understood. Today, almost nine out of ten Americans do not know that scientists agree, well beyond the threshold of consensus, that human beings have altered the global climate through the indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels. But by 1979 the main points were already settled beyond debate, and attention turned from basic principles to a refinement of the predicted consequences. Unlike string theory and genetic engineering, the "greenhouse effect" a metaphor dating to the early twentieth century was ancient history, described in any intro-to-biology textbook. The basic science was not especially complicated. It could be reduced to a simple axiom: the more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the warmer the planet. And every year, by burning coal, oil, and gas, human beings belched increasingly obﾭscene quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The world has warmed more than 1 degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The Paris climate agreement the nonbinding, unenforceable, and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day 2016 hoped to restrict warming to 2 degrees Celsius. A recent study puts the odds of pulling this off at one in twenty. If by some miracle we succeed, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world's tropical reefs, a sea level rise of several meters, and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has called a 2-degree warming "a prescription for longﾭterm disaster." Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. A 3-degree warming, on the other hand, is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests sprouting in the Arctic, the abandonment of most coastal cities, mass starvation. Robert Watson, a former chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that a 3-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India, and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle. The prospect of a 5-degree warming prompts some of the world's preeminent climate scientists, not an especially excitable type, to warn of the fall of human civilization. The proximate cause will be not the warming itself we won't burst in flame and crumble all to ashes but its secondary effects. The Red Cross estimates that already more refugees flee environmental crises than violent conflict. Starvation, drought, the inundation of the coasts, and the smothering expansion of deserts will force hundreds of millions of people to run for their lives. The mass migrations will stagger delicate regional truces, hasﾭtening battles over natural resources, acts of terrorism, and declarations of war. Beyond a certain point, the two great existential threats to our civilization, global warming and nuclear weapons, will loose their chains and join to rebel against their creators.

If an eventual 5- or 6-degree warming scenario seems outlandish, it is only because we assume that we'll respond in time. We'll have decades to eliminate carbon emissions, after all, before we are locked into 6 degrees. But we've already had decades - decades increasingly punctuated by climate-related disaster and we've done nearly everything possible to make the problem worse. It no longer seems rational to assume that humanity, encountering an existential threat, will behave rationally.

There can be no understanding of our current and future predicament without an understanding of why we failed to solve this problem when we had the chance. For in the decade that ran between 1979 and 1989, we had an excellent chance. The world's major powers came within several signatures of endorsing a binding framework to reduce carbon emissions far closer than we've come since. During that decade the obstacles we blame for our current inaction had yet to emerge. The conditions for success were so favorable that they have the quality of a fable, especially at a time when so many of the veteran members of the climate class the scientists, policy negotiators, and activists who for decades have been fighting ignorance, apathy, and corporate bribery openly despair about the possibility of achieving even mitigatory success. As Ken Caldeira, a leading climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, recently put it, "We're increasingly shifting from a mode of predicting what's going to happen to a mode of trying to explain what happened."

So what happened? The common explanation today concerns the depredations of the fossil fuel industry, which in recent decades has committed to playing the role of villain with comic-book bravado. Between 2000 and 2016, the industry spent more than $2 billion, or ten times as much as was spent by environmental groups, to defeat climate change legislation. A robust subfield of climate literature has chronicled the machinations of industry lobbyists, the corruption of pliant scientists, and the influence campaigns that even now continue to debase the political debate, long after the largest oil and gas companies have abandoned the dumb show of denialism. But the industry's assault did not begin in force until the end of the eighties. During the preceding deﾭcade, some of the largest oil and gas companies, including Exxon and Shell, made serious efforts to understand the scope of the crisis and grapple with possible solutions.

We despair today at the politicization of the climate issue, which is a polite way of describing the Republican Party's stubborn commitment to denialism. In 2018, only 42 percent of registered Republicans knew that "most scientists believe global warming is occurring," and that percentage has fallen. Skepticism about the scientific consensus on global warmingﾭ and with it, skepticism about the integrity of the experimental method and the pursuit of objective truth has become a fundamental party creed. But during the 1980s, many prominent Republican members of Congress, cabinet officials, and strategists shared with Democrats the conviction that the climate problem was the rare political winner: nonpartisan and of the highest possible stakes. Among those who called for urgent, immediate, and far-reaching climate policy: Senators John Chafee, Robert Stafford, and David Durenberger; Environmental Protection Agency administrator William K. Reilly; and, during his campaign for president, George H. W. Bush. As Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, the acting chairman of Ronald Reagan's Council for Environmental Quality, told industry executives in 1981, "There can be no more important or conservative concern than the protection of the globe itself." The issue was unimpeachable, like support for the military and freedom of speech. Except the atmosphere had an even broader constituency, composed of every human being on Earth.

It was widely accepted that action would have to come immediately. At the beginning of the 1980s, scientists within the federal government predicted that conclusive evidence of warming would appear on the global temperature record by the end of the decade, at which point it would be too late to avoid disaster. The United States was, at the time, the world's dominant producer of greenhouse gases; more than 30 percent of the human population lacked access to electricity altogether. Billions of people would not need to attain the "American way of life" in order to increase global carbon emissions catastrophically; a light bulb in every other village would do it. A 1980 report prepared at the request of the White House by the National Academy of Sciences proposed that "the carbon dioxide issue should appear on the international agenda in a context that will maximize cooperation and consensus-building and minimize political manipulation, controversy and division." If the United States had endorsed the proposal broadly supported at the end of the eighties a freezing of carbon emissions, with a reduction of 20 percent by 2005 warming could have been held to less than 1.5 degrees.

A broad international consensus had agreed on a mechanism to achieve this: a binding global treaty. The idea began to coalesce as early as February 1979, at the first World Climate Conference in Geneva, when scientists from fifty nations agreed unanimously that it was "urgently necessary" to act. Four months later, at the Group of Seven meeting in Tokyo, the leaders of the world's wealthiest nations signed a statement resolving to reduce carbon emissions. A decade later, the first major diplomatic meeting to approve a frameﾭwork for a treaty was called in the Netherlands. Delegates from more than sixty nations attended. Among scientists and world leaders, the sentiment was unanimous: action had to be taken, and the United States would need to lead. It didn't.

The inaugural chapter of the climate change saga is over. In that chapter call it Apprehension we identified td the threat and its consequences. We debated the measures required to keep the planet within the realm of human habitability: a transition from fossil fuel combustion to renewable and nuclear energy, wiser agricultural practices, reforestation, carbon taxes. We spoke, with increasing urgency and self-delusion, of the prospect of triumphing against long odds.

We did not, however, seriously consider the prospect of failure. We understood what failure would mean for coastlines, agricultural yield, mean temperatures, immigration patterns, and the world economy. But we did not allow ourselves to comprehend what failure might mean for us. How will it change the way we see ourselves, how we remember the past, how we imagine the future? How have our failures to this point changed us already? Why did we do this to ourselves? These questions will be the subject of climate change's second chapter. Call it the Reckoning.

That we came so close, as a civilization, to breaking our suicide pact with fossil fuels can be credited to the efforts of a handful of people scientists from more than a dozen disciplines, political appointees, members of Congress, economists, philosophers, and anonymous bureaucrats. They were led by a hyperkinetic lobbyist and a guileless atmospheric physicist who, at severe personal cost, tried to warn humanity of what was coming. They risked their careers in a painful, escalating campaign to solve the problem, first in scientific reports, later through conventional avenues of political persuasion, and finally with a strategy of public shaming. Their efforts were shrewd, passionate, robust. And they failed. What follows is their story, and ours.

It is flattering to assume that, given the opportunity to begin again, we would act differently - or act at all. You would think that reasonable minds negotiating in good faith, after a thorough consideration of the science, and a candid appraisal of the social, economic, ecological, and moral ramifications of planetary asphyxiation, might agree on a course of action. You would think, in other words, that if we had a blank slate - if we could magically subtract the political toxicity and corporate agitprop - you'd think we'd be able to solve this.

Yet we did have something close to a blank slate in the spring of 1979. President Jimmy Carter, who had installed solar panels on the roof of the White House and had an approval rating of 46 percent, hosted the signing of the Israel- Egypt peace treaty. "We have won, at last, the first step of peace," he said. "A first step on a long and difficult road." The number one film in America was The China Syndrome, the number one song was the Bee Gees' "Tragedy." Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, a history of the calamities that befell medieval Europe after a major climatic change, had been near the top of the bestseller list all year. An oil well off Mexico's Gulf Coast exploded and would gush for nine months, staining beaches as far away as Galveston, Texas. In Londonderry Township, Pennsylvania, at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, a water filter was beginning to fail. And in the Washington, D.C., headquarters of Friends of the Earth, a thirty-year-old activist, a self-styled "lobbyist for the environment," was struggling through a dense government report, when his life changed.

[Several excellent chapters follow, a history that shows what it is that we learn from history... Excerpts reproduced here without permission as a public service: this text is transmitted under the "Fair Use" rulings regarding the 1976 Copyright Act for NON-profit academic, research, and general information purposes. ]

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Wisdom shouts in the street,
She lifts her voice in the square;
At the head of the noisy streets she cries out;
At the entrance of the gates in the city she utters her sayings:
"How long, O naive ones, will you love being simple-minded?
And scoffers delight themselves in scoffing
And fools hate knowledge?
Turn to my reproof,
Behold, I will pour out my spirit on you;
I will make my words known to you.
Because I called and you refused,
I stretched out my hand and no one paid attention;
And you neglected all my counsel
And did not want my reproof;
I will also laugh at your calamity;
I will mock when your dread comes,
When your dread comes like a storm
And your calamity comes like a whirlwind,
When distress and anguish come upon you.
Then they will call on me, but I will not answer;
They will seek me diligently but they will not find me,
Because they hated knowledge."

-proverbs 1:20-29

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