DISCUSSIONS ON CLIMATE CRISIS -- FINAL POST ON THE PROBLEM
Previous posts:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1017628074
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100214775507
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100214783130
(RE the bolded problems list: any bolded problems without sources/info are left to the reader to initiate discussion; the problems are so vast that I can only try to wrap my head around those that might help solve the others. )
3. Our Human inertia
— human ignorance
For all the ignorance we see result in politics, and from the designs of Austrian austerity neoliberal scarcity economics policies -- easily shown by
a. the defunding and starvation rations of public education for future generations,
b. media for-profit tabloid “news”,
c. paywalls, etc. ...
One future and unnecessary contributor of ignorance to keep in mind is the latest form of imiseration capitalism — unregulated, non-existent broadband access.
While reports vary, anywhere from 21 million to 162 million Americans don't even have broadband access,
so they don't know about the issues many Americans and the world are aware of -- like the latest bird and insect die-offs in the West, or ground and water pollutions that affect their food quality and health access, or their jobs, or the lack of.
Corporate scarcity marketing through news and social media only adds to humans' general inertia.
That it's broadband's for-profit fault, not humans'.
— to maintain ignorance, the manufacture of consent based on misplaced doubt, denial, conspiracy & misplaced dissent,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial#Lobbying
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/morning-agriculture/2019/09/20/democrats-highlight-usdas-buried-climate-studies-750784
No matter the media — publishing, Internet, TV or radio — drama, conflict-driven stories of prurient interest are more profitable than substantive information or data;
finger pointing to the closest visible “culprits” is easier than actually seeing the “invisible hand” whose owners are findable.
— which in turn invites cognitive errors in discourse, and
— the maintaining of ideology;
— Public Inertia and Mobilization
Social inertia is a given.
Any climate lawmaking and policies have to assume that the 71 million who drag on society in all things personal and social, and handicap the collective will, no matter what has to happen to them to snap them out of their stupidity — all lawmaking, funding and projects MUST just proceed as if they understand and approve. Were future suffering generations to come back in time, they’d kill this population and the rest of us for allowing them any place at the climate table, where, in the name of “freedom” or “budgets,” or ideologies, they press the rest of us to eat media and street drama, press us into confused derails that lead to the unmitigatable extinctions of everyone at the whole table.
Human inertia comes from austerity capitalism's “invisible hand,” a networked reality of agents that climate mitigators must penetrate and change.
4. Our Value, Money & Wealth
— tax havens, central banks, money, investor networks;
The world GDP is $100 TRILLION per year.
Half of that GWP
is so-called consumer spending by the prosperous, meaning non-essential buying of things that degrade the biosphere.
Even the productive half of GWP, food, health and housing are overheating the world.
Who enacts the world’s economy?
Who are the ones who make it go, who theorize, implement, administer and defend it?
Those who make laws.
Lawmakers (when not fundraising, politicking at their publics) get their ideas from others, mostly
— think tanks, academics, MBA professors, economics depts, and their students;
— WTO, stock markets,
— all the laws and bureaucrats administering the laws,
— police and military enforcing them;
— the CEO’s of all companies;
— shareholder associations, pension funds, individual shareholders, hedge funds, financial firms, banks, insurance, re-insurance companies.
Central banks are the biggest central problem.
https://www.bloombergquint.com/global-economics/charting-the-global-economy-contraction-becomes-common-theme
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/stocks/news/morgan-stanley-goldman-declare-global-recession-is-under-way/articleshow/74679639.cms?from=mdr
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/forex/surging-us-dollar-is-next-big-headache-for-world-economy/articleshow/74698208.cms?from=mdr
https://www.simplifiedshiksha.com/imf-confirms-global-recession-2020/
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/forex/surging-us-dollar-is-next-big-headache-for-world-economy/articleshow/74698208.cms?from=mdr
The Bank of International Settlements will do whatever the central banks decide to do re climate change investment. BIS appears to be the final word, but it’s a rubber stamp on what the Big Twelve of the centrals
decide to do.
Finance and its international legal enablers are actor networks that add up to about 8 million people.
But the actors with agency can make the rest choose to do things differently.
That will be brought up in the “Work” segment of this series.
Who matters most in the 8 million actor network?
The top twelve central banks
and government legislators who make the law,
and make those laws on value and wealth stick — no ifs or buts — permanently,
such that climate change costs get paid by the 8 million who abandon responsibility to the Biosphere in favor of wealth building.
When government legislators enforce new, pro-biosphere finance law, the 8 million and actors with agency can no longer hide in extrajudicial bubbles, nor will capitalists be allowed to cast off their 'collateral damage' for the rest of humanity and the Biosphere to mop up.
— international cooperation and coordination;
5. Earth Dynamics & Ecosystems Within
— heat waves,
— 4-season intensification,
— drought, desertification,
— deforestation,
— air, fresh water, land depletion,
— Antarctic/Greenland snow and ice melt,
It’s not that people can’t move, they can and would. It’s the stress of the permanence of that change on humans for hundreds to thousands to millions of years, that will
a) stress smaller land base use for humans on Earth, and
b) make lowering the average global temperature harder because of
c) an intense drive to force more fossil burning.
Say sea level goes up one centimeter from Antarctic/Greenland glacial melt.
That’s equal to 3,600 cubic kilometers (miles) of water; 600 times as much as all the oil pumped every year.
Antarctic glacial basins, mainly Victoria and Totten (part of 70 out of 100 in Antarctica) hold ice that’s sliding downhill faster, through moulins (melt rivers way bigger than the Amazon's flow) and will soon deposit many thousands of cubic kilometers (miles) of melted ice to raise sea levels 2 meters to 6 meters, flooding all coastal cities including New York, London, Singapore, LA, Honolulu, Seattle, Boston, Bangkok, all of Bangladesh. Oceanic rise will displace 10% of the world’s population and disrupt 20% of the world’s food supply.
It’s time for lawmakers and central banks to decide to organize and pay for what geoengineers know has to be done since yesterday.
— fresh water source depletion,
— ocean acidification,
— soil death,
— ecosystem death,
— Anthropocene 6th Extinction,
Recent extinctions include the
Saudi gazelle,the Japanese sea lion, the melomys,
the vaquita porpoise, the Alagoas foliage-gleaner, the cryptic treehunter,
Spix’s macaw, the po’ouli, the northern white rhino,
the mountain tapir, the Haitian solenodon, the giant otter,
Attwater’s prairie chicken, the Spanish lynx, the Persian fallow deer,
the Japanese crested ibis, the Arabian oryx, the snub-nosed monkey,
the Ceylon elephant, the indris, Zanzibar’s red colobus,
the mountain gorilla, the white-throated wallaby, the walia ibex,
the aye-aye, the ficuna, the giant panda, the monkey-eating eagle, and
an estimated two hundred more species of mammals,
seven hundred species of birds,
four hundred species of reptiles,
six hundred species of amphibians, and
four thousand species of plants.
99% of all meat alive is humans plus domesticated beasts — cattle, pigs, sheep, goats.
Wild creatures are 1% of the meat alive.
20% of the fish now in oceans are wild fish.
The current rate of extinctions compared to geological norms is now several thousandfold faster.
It’s called the 6th Great Extinction.
Thus we humans are the start of the Anthropocene — the most obvious examples of things done by humans that cannot be undone, which are ocean acidification and deoxygenation so profound that the first will massively accelerate the second.
What humans cannot undo are the Anthropocene's clearest demarcation,
which means the damage will be in the fossil record for as long as Earth lasts.
Evolution and speciation will be restored in less than 20 million years.
— human death …
Final thoughts on The Problem.
Climate crises, much more than covid-19, will render current ideologies and politics irrelevant to future generations.
Which is a good thing.
The sooner we put all ideologies and politics in service of the Future, the more assured of a livable future our descendants will have.
Earth first.
Our only doom is to give up.
On to The Work this Thursday…
