What will it take for governments to take real action on climate? When will they declare an emergency and do what needs to be done? How much concerted, peaceful public action will be required to disrupt the current economic and political system that is driving humanity to the brink of extinction?
There is no greater failure than the failure to respond to this ecological crisis. We need a wartime-speed mobilization and a just transition to race to zero greenhouse gas emission and to take carbon out of the atmosphere in order to restore a safe climate. We are called to heroism in this hour of grave consequences. We still have an opportunity to fight for all humanity and all life on Earth to avert the worst of the disaster as it is still technically and economically possible.
Have you heard the expression ‘climate change’? That lovely expression that suggests a holiday in a place with a more pleasant climate?
Unfortunately, only the rarest individual has the capacity to see through the elite-promulgated delusion that generated this benign expression and its twin notions that 1.5 degrees Celsius (above the preindustrial level) is an acceptable upper limit for an increase in global temperature and that the time-frame for extinction-threatening outcomes of this ‘climate change’ is the ‘end of the century’.
If children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school, then imagine what we can all do together if we really wanted to.
— Greta Thunberg at COP24, December 2018
On Thursday, 13 December 2018, Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old climate activist from Sweden, addressed the U.N. Plenary Session at Katowice, Poland, to condemn global inaction in the face of the climate change crisis. Her address of under 4 minutes was a diamond of unadorned clarity, a challenge to all adults worldwide.
Dear Caesar
Keep Burning, raping, killing
But please, please
Spare us your obscene poetry
And ugly music
— From Seneca’s last letter to Nero
In a recent media alert, we presented a few rules that journalists must follow if they are to be regarded as a safe pair of hands by editors and corporate media owners. One of these rules is that ‘we’ in the West are assumed to be ‘the good guys’. This seriously damaging narrative, flying in the face of historical evidence and endlessly crushing state policies, ensures that the public is kept ignorant and pacified.
If the constant hurricanes and wildfires didn’t get your attention, the scientific bombshell should have. In October the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report, Global Warming of 1.5 °C. The panel is a UN body of thousands of scientists that analyses all the latest scientific papers to draw conclusions. They found that in order to have a decent chance of avoiding the runaway climate change found above 1.5 degrees Celsius of warmi
Harken! Good news (maybe) “encouraging news” is a better description, as Negative Emissions Technology (“NET”) starts coming into focus. Conceptually, carbon removal or direct air capture removes CO2 from the atmosphere, which would be great for suppressing climate change.
In that regard, Elizabeth Kolbert recently interviewed (Yale Environment 360) Stephen Pacala (Princeton professor) chairman of the US scientific panel studying carbon removal under the auspices of the National Academies. Which means the project has top-notch clearances, in fact, blue chip.
