My idea for fighting climate change

Yesterday I unleashed a broadside at the mainstream environmentalist movement.
Well, I can do more than just criticize.
My ideas might not be right, but maybe they'll cause you to think differently.

The Heart of the Matter

  So if neither the problem or the solution is consumer environmentalism, then what is it? Quite simply, it is the near fanatical religious belief in our economic system.

 Climate change deniers are as committed. Their denial fits perfectly with their support for free market economics, opposition to state intervention and hatred of all those latte-slurping, quinoa-munching liberals, with their arrogant manners and dainty hybrid cars, who presume to tell honest men and women how to live. If they admitted they were wrong on climate change, they might have to admit that they were wrong on everything else and their whole political identity would unravel.

 Like every great lie, the climate change deniers hold a grain of truth: the idea that we can save the planet by being better consumers is ridiculous. We can only do it by changing the economic system.

When you look around the global environment today you will see nearly every animal species, large and small, in trouble. It doesn't matter if they live on land, water, or air.

When you look around the global economy today you will see small, independent businessmen that rely on the Earth's bounty, such as fishermen and farmers, in trouble.

When you look around the environmental movement you will see countless, tiny groups, each one dedicated to a specific niche, such as a region, a species, or a habitat.

What we have is hundreds of millions of people, dozens of occupations, and thousands of mostly non-profit groups, all working independently toward a roughly similar goal. A goal that is absolutely necessary for mankind to achieve.

Yet they are all losing the battle.

The reason why they are losing the battle has nothing to do with their dedication. They are losing the battle because they are operating according to a set of archaic economic rules that works directly against them.

A different way of looking at the economy

    Elinor Ostrom, the only woman to ever win the Nobel Prize for Economics, died in 2012 and we are all poorer because of it. She was a trailblazer in the field of economics, yet her findings have been largely ignored by politicians, policy makers, and the financial media. Few economists have ever even heard of her.

  Why is that? Because her conclusions don't help the cause of large corporations, governments, the wealthy and powerful.

 She was Elinor Ostrom, a professor of political science at Indiana University, who devoted much of her career to combing the world looking for examples where people had developed ways of regulating their use of common resources without resort to either private property rights or government intervention.

 In these days of environmental destruction and economic distress caused by rapacious corporations, we need people like Elinor Ostrom shining a light on alternative economic theories more than ever.

  "After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back."
  - James G. Watt, 1983

Starting with the Sagebrush Rebellion, continuing with Reagan's Interior Secretary, James Watt, and the Wise Use Movement of the late 80's and early 90's, and finally with the rise of the "free market environmentalism" the Republican base keeps coming and coming for undeveloped land, and they will never stop.

The pro-privatization crowd is very open with their reasoning and logic:

Some object to privatization because they believe that our national "crown jewels" (however defined) are sacred natural treasures and that no price tag can or should be attached to them. Well, one is welcome to one's beliefs, but value is subjective. Land is worth only what people will pay for it.

    [...]

If there is more money to be made by turning the Grand Canyon over to the Walt Disney Co. rather than to an eco-sensitive tourism cooperative, it simply means that the public demand for Disney's services at the Grand Canyon is greater than the public's demand for Deep Green Trail Services Inc.

This is a philosophy that sees absolutely no value in anything that can't be turned into a buck. The debate is framed so that the environmental movement is forced to argue from a moral high ground of beauty and legacy, while the opponents argue from an economically "practical" background.

This framing is false for several reasons.

#1.  The National Parks Conservation Assoc. contracted a study in 2006 that measured the economic effect of the national park system. The results disproved the argument that extracted and exploiting the natural resources of the lands was economically "practical".

It generates more than four dollars in value to the public for every tax dollar invested by the Federal Government. In addition to that, National Parks support $13.3 billion of local private-sector economic activity and 267,000 private-sector jobs. National parks attract businesses and individuals to the local area, resulting in economic growth in areas near parks that is an average of one percent per year greater than statewide rates over the past three decades.

I don't know of many private enterprises that can generate four dollars of return on one dollar of investment. So the fact that we are even debating this indicates there is about a larger issue at work.

#2.  The debate here is larger than just the National Parks versus private enterprise. It is about the value of nature itself.

Last year the U.N. conducted a study concerning the economic benefit that nature provides us.

Mangroves in Vietnam, it turns out, save annual expenditures on dike maintenance of more than $7 million. And in another example: it would cost $200 million to replicate the services provided by natural springs in New Zealand.

Researchers found that every hectare of coral reef—a modest area of land equal to just under two and a half acres—is worth more than $1 million annually....But what struck Sukhdev and fellow researchers were the high ratios of return when conservation projects were undertaken. With agriculture alone, addressing problems with soil consistency or water contamination would pay substantial dividends, they found—an average global rate of return of $60 for every $1 invested.

Sixty to One. Let that sink in for a moment. There is simply no comparison to returns like that in the private investment world.

It doesn't stop there. Honeybees, simply by doing what comes naturally, contributes $57 Billion annually to the economy. The dung beetle contributes $380 million annually by getting rid of manure that would otherwise attract parasites.

In fact, if you add it all up, the dollar value of nature's contributions is immense.

For the entire biosphere, the value (most of which is outside the market) is estimated to be in the range of US$16-54 trillion (1012) per year, with an average of US$33 trillion per year. Because of the nature of the uncertainties, this must be considered a minimum estimate. Global gross national product total is around US$18 trillion per year.

So a general estimate is that the dollar value of nature's services is twice the value of everything man produces, combined.

Given these facts, why does the corporate world still insist that natural resources must be privatized? For several reasons, all of which involve greed.

For starters, most of the economic benefits listed above are measured by what it would take for private industry to do the same job. Or to put it another way, many of those economic benefits don't immediately translate into dollars in anyone's pockets, which is the only way that the corporate world measures anything.

Second, and more importantly, the corporate world is already using and abusing the benefits that nature is giving them and there is no cost associated with it. If the world's biggest companies were held accountable for their cost of polluting and other damage to the environment, more than one-third of their profits would vanish.

The study, conducted by London-based consultancy Trucost  and due to be published this summer, found the estimated combined damage was worth US$2.2 trillion (£1.4tn) in 2008 - a figure bigger than the national economies of all but seven countries in the world that year.

"What we're talking about is a completely new paradigm," said Richard Mattison, Trucost's chief operating officer and leader of the report team. "Externalities of this scale and nature pose a major risk to the global economy and markets are not fully aware of these risks, nor do they know how to deal with them."

A new paradigm is exactly what we should all be talking about.

The salmon in the Klamath Basin. The fishermen of the Gulf. Small farmers in Mexico. The various environmental groups defending whales, birds, wetlands, and tropical forests. Global Warming. The Cochabamba protests of 2000.

All of these things and much more have one thing in common that almost never gets discussed anymore. It's a subject that is at least five centuries old, but still relevant today. In fact, addressing this subject is the most pressing issue that the environment movement has to confront.

The subject I am talking about is The Commons.

The Tragedy of the Commons and other false paradigms

They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.

— English folk poem, ca. 1764

In 1968, Garrett Hardin, a Malthusian economist, wrote an extremely interesting but flawed essay called The Tragedy of the Commons. It's been used by pro-privatization groups ever since.

The part of the essay they like to quote is this:

Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. This utility has one negative and one positive component.

The positive component is that the herdsman gets to graze more cattle at almost no cost to himself. The negative component is that the cost of overgrazing the commons is born by the entire community.

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another.... But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit -- in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

In a general way, Hardin's case has a great deal of truth to it.

Hardin rightly goes on to point out that the air and seas also should be considered The Commons because we can't put a fence around them. Thus they are abused for the very reasons he lists above.

The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them. Since this is true for everyone, we are locked into a system of "fouling our own nest," so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free enterprisers.

Furthermore, Hardin points out that trying to guilt and shame people and companies into behaving properly is a doomed effort if economic incentives encourage different behavior (something environmental groups should realize).

All of what Hardin says up to this point is mostly true. He even points out that all reform ideas are shot down because of the irrationally high standard of perfection that opponents to changes in the status quo demand.

Then he makes three mistakes.

#1.  Hardin uses his logic to endorse the "injustice" of the current private property system as opposed to the "total ruin" of The Commons, without defending the assertion.
  From the neolithic period up to the 16th Century, The Commons was the primary mode of economic society. It worked. Hardin uses a Malthusian argument to say that it can no longer work because there are too many people now. He puts his statement out there as if we should just accept it without trying to prove it.

#2.  Hardin defends the infringement on our rights by new enclosures of the commons (aka privatization), without acknowledging the abuse and destruction this has led to in the past.

#3.  Most importantly, Hardin fails to return to the point that air and oceans cannot be anything but The Commons, and thus the solution for the two most important elements of the Earth can not be solved by privatization.

To put it another way, privatization and the free market have no solution to the environmental tragedy occurring in our atmosphere and oceans, and never will.

Private enterprise cannot make a profit on something until there is scarcity. So as long as clean air is available to all, then the free market has no interest in doing anything but polluting it. The reason is because the current free market, capitalist, economic model exists to commodify natural resources and turn it into consumer goods, while externalizing expenses by doing things like trashing the planet.

However, once the atmosphere is polluted to the point that people with money can't breath, then the free market will create a solution - but only for those it can make a profit from. The poor die slowly.

We are already seeing this scenario played out with water.

Even when it comes to land, privatization is no solution. For instance, privatization of wetland areas usually means the owner will drain the wetlands for economic reasons. The community will be denied a thriving habitat for wildlife.

No solutions are actually found by the capitalist system in regards to The Commons. It only creates problems that it can then profit from.

Those problems will be the destruction of the entire ecosystem.

To put it another way, the capitalist free market, as it is practiced today, will inevitably destroy the planet's ecosystem because it cannot privatize the oceans and the atmosphere.

The small fishermen and farmers, every environmentalist group in the world, and everyone who isn't in the top 1% of society needs to recognize the inescapable conclusion that the only way the global ecosystem can be saved is if we reject the current free market, capitalist, economic model for commonly shared natural resources.

This is one of those inconvenient truth moments that, unfortunately, Prius-driving, middle-class America is not ready to accept. While Glen Beck-watching, truck-driving America will actively fight this conclusion.

However, willful denial or giving up will get us nowhere, and eventually we will find ourselves right back at this very spot again.

That's not to say that there aren't more modest intermediate steps that can be taken in the meantime, such as abolishing government subsidies for deep-water fisheries.

Some success has been made from Individual Fishing Quotas. However, this does nothing to solve the problem of pollution.

Who is ruining the commons?

  Author Raj Patel, in his book The Value of Nothing also has a few choice words for Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons theory.

 Scratch the surface, though, and Hardin's arguments blame the victim...
   The reason people go hungry today has nothing at all to do with a gap between the amount of food in the world and the number of people who are hungry...The reason people go hungry is because of the way we distribute food through the market, as private property, and the people who starve are simply too poor to be able to afford it. If there were fewer people in the world but the way we distributed food remained the same, the poor would still go hungry.

 Patel then goes on to describe the condition of the fisheries on the coast of Pakistan. After centuries of successfully being fished, the fisheries are in collapse.
   Is it because local fishermen have suddenly depleted the fisheries? No. It's because Pakistan's military government, eager to expand its exports, opened up its coastline to foreign-owned industrial trawlers that scoop up everything in their paths.

  The lesson here is clear: the people that Hardin describe who rape the commons and ruin it for everyone do exist, but they are called corporations.
  Corporations are only interested in short-term profits. They have no interest in the community or even mankind's future. Corporations, if clinically diagnosed, would be considered psychopaths. So as long as we allow corporations to privatize the commons, things will get worse for the environment.

The Solution

So if we reject the current free market, capitalist economic model for natural resources, what does that leave us? Communism?

No.

What it leaves us is a concept that dates back to England's Magna Carta and the Roman Emperor Justinian - Public Trust Doctrine.

“By the law of nature these things are common to all mankind, the air, running water, the sea and consequently the shores of the sea.”
  - Codex Justinianus, 529 A.D.

The idea is that natural resources are held by the state in trust for the benefit of everyone.

To a limited extent, the Public Trust Doctrine is already part of American law, through our English Common Law roots. It is most widely used in regards to navigable waters, but it has also been cited in court rulings in regards to protection of natural wildlife. More recently it was cited in the 1983 Mono Lake case—Audubon Society v. the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. It exists now in some state Constitutions, such as Pennsylvania's.

What is required is that the Public Trust Doctrine expands to fulfill its original purpose and meaning in international law.

The Public Trust Doctrine has not yet been recognized for its full potential to regulate and protect our natural resources.

If, for instance, the IMF and WTO enforced this Doctrine with the same enthusiasm that they enforce trade and private property laws, we could stop the global environmental destruction in no time. The reason being is that the IMF and WTO could coerce the various debtor nations into respecting international standards for pollution and resource exploitation.

Of course getting the WTO and IMF on board would require a complete tear down and reconstruction of their mandates and composition.

Taking the Public Trust Doctrine to its logical conclusion would also mean the rejection of patenting the DNA of plants, animals, and people.

Hardin's Tragedy is actually the laissez-faire marketplace in an open access regime, much like what we have today, rather than the community protected and regulated Commons that we would see under the Doctrine.

What is required for the ecology of this planet and our species to survive, is to respect our Commons - the oceans, the air, and the land we all share. It's an entirely different attitude from the rape and pillage of the shared resources of the Earth that has marked human history since the time of Henry VIII.

Basically what is required is that humans must evolve, for our own sake. We must grow up, and this is the place where it starts. The first baby-step of man's transition from short-sighted greed and selfishness to a responsible, mature species must begin with a rejection of the 16th Century aristocratic doctrine of Enclosure to the Public Trust Doctrine of enlightened civilization.

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Shockwave's picture

Could well informed consumers make a difference?

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The political revolution continues

Cassiodorus's picture

The problem of course is that consumers are there merely to realize value as produced by the existing, climate-change-death-promoting production system, in the same sense as Marx viewed sales (in Capital) as the process of the realization of surplus value.

But a union of free producers might do a ton of good. Think of the immeasurable benefits of a society in which everyone was doing something useful, instead of where the most privileged among us have to do some sort of nonsense designed to extract money from people. A great quantity of energy could be conserved by eliminating useless professions. In a piece in Capitalism Nature Socialism in the December 1997 issue ("Ecological Socialism and Human Needs"), Victor Wallis suggests that this set of professions could go away if society were a union of free producers:

* The advertising industry, together with private insurance, banking, and associated communications, acounting, and legal services;
* The construction, resource-use, and services arising from the automobile/ shopping mall/ suburban sprawl complex;
* Excess energy use arising from the global integration of production processes and from over-reliance on long-distance trade;
* The development of a highly specialized fuel-intensive agriculture with heavy reliance on chemical fertilizers and pesticides;
* Certain fuel-intensive, typically macho recreational activities giving their users an artificial sense of power (car-racing, snowmobiles, jet-skis, speedboats, etc.);
* A growing sector of purely status-related luxuries, defined as such by (a) their frivolity — including pandering to sexist or racist norms (e.g. cosmetic surgery to disguise age or ethnicity) — and (b) their highly restrictive prices;
* The police, private protection, penal, and military services built up in response to the threat and/or the reality of challenges — whether individual (delinquent) or collective (revolutionary) — to concentrated private wealth;
* Whatever proportion of general production (and construction) or ancillary services — including health care — is accounted for by demands placed upon the system, or upon individuals, by the abovementioned practices. (49)

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

Shockwave's picture

...what I call community sustainability (towns, cities, schools, etc.) but there is a possible consumer sustainability;

Global retail analysis shows increased sales for brands with sustainability claims on packaging or active marketing of corporate social responsibility efforts

NEW YORK – June 17, 2014 – Fifty-five percent of global online consumers across 60 countries say they are willing to pay more for products and services provided by companies that are committed to positive social and environmental impact, according to a new study by Nielsen. The propensity to buy socially responsible brands is strongest in Asia-Pacific (64%), Latin America (63%) and Middle East/Africa (63%). The numbers for North America and Europe are 42 and 40 percent, respectively.

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The political revolution continues

Cassiodorus's picture

So if a bunch of corporations put out nice environmental PR, they'll capture that segment of the total consumer base made up of 1) people with money to spare and 2) that portion of the total population with money to spare who are sold on nice environmental PR.

None of this activity, of course, has anything necessarily to do with the physical environment, which is plundered daily to keep capitalism going. The imaginary environment, perhaps, looks cuter and greener as a result, though.

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

Products developed with sustainability and social conscience in mind should be cheaper than those without such considerations, whether their costs of production are higher or not.

But generally speaking, "good" products should be cheaper, with more utilitarian, recyclable packaging and the costs of sustaining (ie replanting etc.) lower than moving the means of production to increasingly expensive new locations for extraction and development. This would be even more true if corporations were charged for their pollution and lack of sustainability.

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k9disc's picture

raising the idea of American Citizens as Producers.

We make the products. We provide the services. We pay the taxes. American Citizens are producers.

The reduction of citizen to the status of consumer is very sad, IMO, and also quite dangerous. It puts us right where we are at -- looking into the barrel of a gun with a demand of your money and your life. Really kind of scary in a futuristic dystopia kind of way. This was the stuff of science fiction.

The idea of citizens producing, I think, is very interesting. I had not thought so much about the actual, tangible environmental or economic aspects, I was really just looking at the dominant market based cultural hegemony, and how the idea of citizens as producers and generators of wealth could be leveraged to combat the current cultural hegemony and give us a fair shot in battling them for sane and humane economic and ecological policy.

Reading LaFeminista's piece I was struck by the idea that we need to be talking about "tipping points" in all political discussions.

It's a systemic frame. It's got direct cause and effect. It supports and buttresses a bunch of key socio-political problems. It's something that human beings can understand, but rapacious corporations cannot.

I think it's a powerful frame for sustainability, shared sacrifice, and personal and shared responsibility. I think I could probably tease out a few more progressive values out of it.

And I know that I'm mixing metaphors and topics, but the idea is the same. Citizen as producer, in addition to the excerpted practical results above, is a great rhetorical frame for moving our political dialogue to more human-friendly venue.

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“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu

consumers can't help, but citizens can.

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elenacarlena's picture

implement this public trust doctrine?

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Please check out Pet Vet Help, consider joining us to help pets, and follow me @ElenaCarlena on Twitter! Thank you.

They are taking the value of our commons from us, and forcing us to pay for the damage, to boot.

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Lookout's picture

was on how to manage the commons...giving value to the air and oceans and forests...and all natural systems.
http://www.gaiatheory.org/overview/

Thanks so much for your discussion and excellent essay. Focusing on the environment is so important.

I am far more socialist than Hardin and his elitist lifeboat hypothesis
http://web.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/phil%20115/Hardin-on-lifeboat.htm

I am hopeful that solar power will be a new driver - as was coal from the late 1800's on.

Fig3-SolarGrowthFallingPrices-Q3_0.png

There is hope...I hope.

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

LED lighting gunna help to keep electricity demand flat lined for several more years.

And while electric cars are pull more from the grid, their is a big push for most of the power bought to be produced with solar panels. Tesla is working big time to keep carbon neutral, not to mention is invested heavily in solar panels, and power storage technology related to solar panels.

And vehicle manufacturers are starting to figure out that lower fuel costs doesn't just mean the customer saves money, rather the customer is willing to allow some of the difference in fuel costs to be packed into the price of the vehicle.

Every $100 dollars in fuel savings per month an electric vehicle provides allows the car to be $6,000 dollars more expensive and still have an equal TCO over a 5 year period, and savings their after.

That is to say, the old reason for big oil and big auto to be in the same bed, is dead. The cost of gas prevents the Auto makers from having a higher price point on mid tier vehicles and thus costs them money.

In 20 years, only commercial vehicles, planes, and the military will use oil. And even then great efficiency gains will have been made, Semi trucks weirdly have not followed the trend of hybrid propulsion systems, I suspect that is going to end before to long here(Musk has hinted at entering that market in the next 5 years).

Oil and Coal can not fight the economic reality of their situations very long, Coal particularly, its already well passed the point, its a low margin industry that more resembles a rent situation for places that haven't moved to other sources(mostly CNG granted). Coal is absurdly subsidized, and even so, the price per ton floating around $45.66 delivered, or 7-14cents per kWh. unsubsidized solar is around 12.2cents per kWh. The solar numbers actually work out better then you would think as they produce the most power during peak usage hours where the power company could be charging 20cents+ per kWh(grid balancing requires power plants that can be turned on and off at will, and you cant do that with coal so generally end up being gas or cng plants that cost more due to intermittent usage).

One other big thing coming is super conducting power lines, YUGE savings to be had from them.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/182278-the-worlds-first-superconduct...

Note that the articles quotes the Germany figures for power loses, which is 6%, In the united states its much higher, somewhere between 8% and 15%, Most sites will only quote the transmission loss, but transformer loses push the figures higher.

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Cassiodorus's picture

as Bonneuil and Fressoz tell us in their book "The Shock of the Anthropocene":

The bad news is that, if history teaches us one thing, it is that there never has been an energy transition. There was not a movement from wood to coal, then from coal to oil, then from oil to nuclear. The history of energy is not one of transitions, but rather of successive additions of new sources of primary energy. (101)

In short: just because more solar panels are being produced does not mean that coal, oil, etc. are going to go away. And as for being "carbon neutral," no industry is really "carbon neutral." We might start by recognizing that it will take quite a bit of carbon-burning to produce the solar panels necessary to initiate a new era of energy consumption -- and such an era will also require the forcible suppression of fossil-fuel extraction industries.

https://cassiodorusblog.wordpress.com/2016/04/01/will-alternative-energy...

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

Lookout's picture

Pretty telling set of photos which shows how quickly these sorts of transitions can happen...

All horse and buggy...
NYC 1900.jpg

and now all autos...
NYC 1913.png

How about the speed of adoption of computers and cell phones and their lithium batteries?

Of course I understand the horses didn't have a huge lobbying effort like the fossil fuel industry.

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Cassiodorus's picture

We still use biopower for transportation -- with the aid of bicycles. Remember, the subject at hand was energy transition?

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

Granted the absolutely massive public health problem that horse shit caused in New York was as much of a reason to change. Horse shit is also what caused New York to create the Nations first department of public health and sanitation.

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Cassiodorus's picture

We use grain now to produce alcohol fuel, which has a 1.3 energy return on investment; extremely low, in other words, but we still do it.

The point is that a vehicle transition is not a fuel transition.

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

Lily O Lady's picture

left over from after the grain is harvested and the grain is threshed.

Anyway, remember how excited Bush was about switchgrass? Same energy source.

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"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"

Pre coal we where literally burning entire forests, Pre oil we where burning enough coal to blacken the skies(note NOT an exaggeration). The number of coal plants in this Nation has been steadily shrinking, this trend WILL continue.

The great difference from any fuel transition before is because of the economies of scale. Coal is only practical while it is being bought by the literal train load, It absolutely and uniquely requires massive economies of scale. In order to maintain the economies of scale, coal has been plummeting in price, the alternatives WILL continue to get cheaper, Coal simply can't keep this up.

One of the reasons the ruubs fight passenger rail so hard is coal. With the huge number of domestic passengers if rail became an option again, rail companies would raise prices on transport of coal to maintain separate rail lines for them because the ultra heavy rail cars cause large amounts of damage to the rails. You simply cant run high speed trains on the same rails used by coal trains. If passenger trains got popular again some railroads might just decline having coal trains in favor of more profitable options.

Regardless, the moment that a cheaper process, or a better perfected process for multi-junction solar cells is made, is the day coal dies. And this isn't far off.

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Cassiodorus's picture

if we are to believe the theorists of "energy transition." And all you have for your claim of "utter nonsense" is speculation.

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

PriceRip's picture

          You use this:

          Coal should have died off a long time ago if we are to believe the theorists of "energy transition."

as though it was a meaningful repartie. What seems to be missing is that from a technical, and thermodynamic point of view the coal industry's demise is long overdue. If not for the stupidity of corporate greedheads this wasteful industry would have long ago been supplanted by more environmentally friendly sources of energy.

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Cassiodorus's picture

is this notion that the capitalist system is somehow magically going to abandon coal all by itself. It's not. It wasn't the "stupidity of corporate greedheads" that got the Chinese capitalists building all those coal-fired power plants that made, and makes, the air around Beijing and Shanghai unbreathable. The coal was there, it was this stinky medium-grade stuff, and the market for the power was there. What were they supposed to do? Go back to their farms and wait for solar power to develop China?

The capitalist looks at resources, sees value, and looks for a way to develop that value so it can be exchanged for the nice stuff everyone wants. THAT'S WHAT THEY DO. So what about this "green" stuff, all this nice stuff you read in Green Business Practices for Dummies? That's just stuff they do to facilitate the process described above. The capitalists don't care if their energy is dirty or clean unless they started out with some sort of dirty or clean energy VALUE which allowed them to get in the game in the first place.

So do you want to solve the climate change problem? You've got to get to those fossil power reserves and you've got to use government power to exclude them from the realm of value. You've got to develop the power to tell ExxonMobil that its fossil reserves have a market value of zero. You don't seriously think market forces are going to solve this problem for you, do you?

So are you saying you agree, or disagree, with this approach?

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

PriceRip's picture

          So do you want to solve the climate change problem? You've got to get to those fossil power reserves and you've got to use government power to exclude them from the realm of value. You've got to develop the power to tell ExxonMobil that its fossil reserves have a market value of zero.

          "You don't seriously think market forces are going to solve this problem for you, do you?" Of course not, my "the stupidity of corporate greedheads" is pointing to the fact that coal is still a thing because we have the stupidity of the "free market" in which corporate greedheads can continue to do stupid stuff. The lack of regulation allows stupid to run us into this wall. Free Market forces are killing us and we need to kill that monster if we are to get anywhere. Coal should have died off a long time ago. And it would have if stupid people would have listened to us a long time ago and stopped thinking of us as idealists with our heads in the clouds out of touch with reality. I am really disgusted by those that like to use "theorists" as a pejorative. All science is grounded in theory.

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Pluto's Republic's picture

And expand upon it. You think everybody can see this, and many can. But it'a a unique lens that people have to learn how to use. When you point it out to them, they'll catch on.

I think this is the way out. This perspective offers an entirely different set of promising solutions, from a different starting point.

We don't need to think harder or think more. We need to think different.

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato

Everyone thought the industry would collapse when coal dropped below $80 dollars per ton, It currently sits at around $45 dollars per ton, $30 per ton for the coal itself, and $12-$17 per ton for delivery. Its amazing what government subsidy can do to save an industry. Most coal pensions/health care costs have been dropped on the tax payer now, either through bankruptcies and default onto the Federal Pension guaranty corporation, or by legislation, or simply they have been cut into oblivion. This is a good chunk of what has allowed this price drop sense the 1980's.

In the last 10 years mountain top removal is a good chunk of what has allowed the price to drop further, but the untold story on this, is that its a limited thing, they can maybe run this method of extraction for another 10 years before they run out of places to extract from cheaply. That is to say the number of places with a 100-150 foot thick coal seam that is only 30 feet underground is a limited resource, every foot of rock and soil above the seam greatly increases the cost of extraction more so if it is primary hard rock and not soft soil/dirt.

Just like oil, now the industry is moving to stupider and stupider places to extract new resources, The cheaper method of extraction is at best a reprieve for them, the very moment coal starts to move back up in price again, and it will, is the moment that the whole scheme will start tumbling down, assuming new solar tech doesn't do it first.

If any of the subsidies for Coal dry up, that could kill the industry as well. All the money poured into railroads, tax subsidies, and allowing the continued externalization of environmental and health care costs onto the tax payer. If any of that money goes away, Coal will die.

You watch, if Trump manages to create the environment that gives Coal a temporary boost, the Execs will be using that time to divest. The whole coal industry is looking for one last scam to boost prices long enough to leave poorly managed pension/401K funds, and the tax payer holding the bag.

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Cassiodorus's picture

Economists start out with a model of human beings that's basically untrue -- that we're all "maximizers of utility" or something like that -- and then assumes the model as axiomatic, in other words not to be questioned, so the beneficiaries of the universal, coercive imposition of the model can claim to be like everyone else.

There is nothing sacred about "value" as worshiped by the capitalists, nor is there anything sacred about capitalism. The system itself isn't going to last forever. Defeatists are those who've given up on post-capitalism. That wouldn't be me.

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

and encompasses less now then it did pre-WW2. Economics today, except for radical economists, is a defense of the global capitalist order and it's certainly not a study of the political economy.

The bogus "Nobel Prize" for economics, which is given by the state bank of Sweden(began in 1969) went to two men who endorsed the huge compensation given to CEO's and other high ranking corporate officials. Their work is abject apologetics.

Capitalism is unsustainable and is on the way out. We need to ease the system out so that it doesn't take us with it.

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"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"

Any model of economics that depends on axiom's, isn't worth being recognized as a theory, or a field of study. That is nonsense invented by the mentally unsound, and is the font of thinking made by the likes of hayek and the racist ludwig von mises, and made for the sole purpose of being opposed to the thinking of John Maynard Keynes.

What economic theories don't account for is political desires to maintain the status quo by those invested in the status quo. For all economic problems are easy to solve given the right application of government, no matter how extreme those problems are given the continued will to solve those economic problems via the application of government.

So what needs to be argued over isn't some axiom nonsense, its the sustainability of all the things required to prop up coal to maintain the status quo. And the costs are getting most extreme, to the point of threatening the status quo in other area's of the economy.

We are at the end point of being able to maintain coal via the side door, even with large tax subsidies, tax payer assisted railroads, unlimited externalization of environmental and health costs, and blaint shifting of pension costs onto the tax payer. Coal is still at deaths door. The game now requires a large push to massively increase electrical demand, directly making competing sources of energy illegal, subsidies on a whole grand new scale, or perhaps nationalization of the coal industry. And the problem for the likely solutions, is that any future government can kick the support out from under them, and kill the whole thing.

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The oil industry going out of business because it can't compete on the marketplace with solar, causing ruin for the oil oligarchs. Oil is doomed anyway because of either humans becoming smart, dwindling supply or no planet for people to drive cars on.

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Beware the bullshit factories.

I appreciate your mind gjohnsit.

Keep up the good work. Signed in just to rec you.

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Even if positive feedback loops in the Arctic don't doom us all, they're going to magnify human stupidity very inconveniently in decades to come. Natural resources are going to become far more valuable than they are today, through scarcity value if nothing else.

A sustainable future will have too look very Different from the present. Some ideas for change:

1. A high, almost punitive carbon tax, dedicated to mitigating the natural effects of climate change.
2. A full tear down of globalization, with a new focus on decentralization and local economies. Transportation of goods must become expensive again, so only the highest value resources get shipped around the world.
3. It must cost people money to have children. Children are the greatest externality we must price into the system, in a world of over 7 billion people.
4. Corporations should be made, if not illegal, at least primarily responsible for improving our trajectory toward destruction. Tax policy can help with this, but a legal redefinition recognizing that pursuit of shareholder value above all else is the growth philosophy of the cancer cell will also be needed.
5. Young people must be educated, and scared witless about their futures. If we are to have generational strife, let it be about this. Greedy stupid people can't be allowed to run the world any longer. We can't afford it. The young must wage this crusade.

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solublefish's picture

But not this:

It must cost people money to have children

So only Trumps and Soros's of the world are allowed to breed? Fuck that.

And by all means let us come down WAY harder on corporations. They need to be completely subordinate to the public will, as they indeed once were in this country. Corporations that provide necessary services should all be owned and run by the public and run for public purposes only, not for profit. Private corporations have been the scourge of the world since Cortes and his gang of adventurers entered Tenochtitlan.

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Bisbonian's picture

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"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X

TheOtherMaven's picture

One child - tax rebate
Second child - no rebate
Third+ child - additional taxes

That way everybody can afford one child, most people can afford two, but excessive breeding is discouraged.

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

solublefish's picture

But, ALL taxes of any kind ought to be strongly progressive, so as to prevent concentration of power and privileges among the wealthy few - and to redistribute that wealth (and power and privilege) as much as possible.

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But if we don't get the human population of this planet down drastically ourselves, nature will do it for us. If we had one or two billion people, climate change would be a lot easier to tackle. More people means more resource utilization, and a world that's rapidly warming will not support as many people as we have today, let alone three or four billion more. How do we reduce our population voluntarily if economic pressures are not brought to bear? Children could cost a fraction of assets or income, climbing as said assets rise.

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riverlover's picture

And have no grandchildren, both offspring are around 30 Y/O. I will bet that they do less than replacement at that age. Difficult to discuss with them. Like, not my business?

A pandemic would solve much. Unfortunately. And any now would have to be airborne.

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Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

solublefish's picture

It is the really excessive consumption habits of the vast MINORITY of the planet's population that is and has been historically the greatest contributor to global warming. Africa contributes very little for example. China, the US and Europe are the largest contributors - and it's not all of China, really: the poor rural regions contribute very little; it is the industrialized regions making goods for consumer culture -- OUR culture (though increasingly globalized) that harm the planet.

In short, it is not people who cause global climate change, it is the culture of consumption.

The culture of capitalism is killing the planet.

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PriceRip's picture

          The flaw in your comfortable scenario is the reality of what Geographers call "The Expectation Explosion. I helped Mahabir Pun introduce computer technology into Nangi and surrounding villages of Nepal.

          I provided him a "web" portal to facilitate his dream of building first a k-12 school system in Nangi Village as a foundation for his more ambitious projects. While my contribution was tiny, his drive is unstoppable. Rural transformation will happen in-spite of threats of violence and other more mundane obstacles as long as people like Mahabir exist.

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PriceRip's picture

         A link to his induction to the Internet Hall of Fame is in the above comment.

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The most developed countries, like Japan and European countries are experiencing a population decline last I heard. I would guess education levels also have a lot to do with it, as well as good social safety nets.

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Beware the bullshit factories.

melvin's picture

And it is not doe eyed romanticism to look to indigenous societies for what worked and sometimes still does in a noncapitalist mode.

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Hawkfish's picture

I have been in a funk over the impending violent collapse of civilisation as described by Walter Scheidel in his upcoming book. The one bright spot I have been able to see is that many of the more successful attempts to solve this problem that have been tried all came from the North American continent. On the public policy front, we have trust busting, the progressive income tax and the New Deal, all of which has some success at slowing economic inequality.

But because I live here in the Pacific Northwest, it occurred to me the other day that the local First Nations may have had a system for dealing with this problem: the potlach.

I don't know how this could be used to prevent the oncoming orgy of violence, but it is another idea for the mix at least. And unlike some other approaches that one might consider, this one has been implemented in a stable society for many generations.

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We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg

Oceania. As explained by Cultural Materialist anthropology, it takes a certain set of ecological conditions for this system of organization to exist
* There needs to be space for people to take their families and leave
* There can't be enough surplus value for the headman to hire a police force to compel compliance.

Basically, the headman, or competing headmen, throw big parties and give gifts to persuade members of the group to support him and work and fight for him if and when the situation calls for it. If the headman gets too nasty, the sparsely populated region allows for a family, or small groups, to pick up and leave.

In Beowulf, the headman was known as a ring giver for the gifts he gave and for the feasts he put on. The bleak countryside did not have a big population and was not particularly productive so people could pack up and leave unless persuaded to stay.

The key is that persuasion is all the head man had and he had to be generous. It's too crowded in almost all of the world today for this to occur.

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"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"

Hawkfish's picture

Thanks for the explanation.

I think Scheidel is overly optimistic when he says that nothing will happen. Chaos will happen. No idea if it will be effective, but I rather suspect that his wisdom will be lost in the fires and humanity will at best go through this again.

At this point I'm starting to think inequality is the Great Filter from the Drake equation...

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We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg

and the cultural materialist school integrates ecologic factors along with close observation and doesn't engage in asking people why they do what they do. CM also makes predictions about what kind of society and behaviors will emerge given certain circumstances and is usually correct.

Cheers

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"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"

solublefish's picture

The institution of "private property" is deeply embedded in our culture. AFAIK it does not exist in potlatch cultures.

All organized societies have some means of "sharing the wealth" that is produced by the labor of the community. When those means break down - and that is what we are faced with now, around the world - you are entering a period of major crisis. That is where we appear to be now, here in the US and around the world. The last such major crisis was a century ago, extending in its most violent and convulsive phase from the onset of WWI through the end of WWII. It is too easy to mistake it for a mere bump in the road, now, since it is not alive in our memories and few of us can comprehend it all at once; but that crisis was so destructive it threatened to destroy western civilization - hence the name given to WWI in its aftermath, "the war to end all wars". Nearly 40M died in WWI, another 60M in WWII; countless more millions perished in the Depression; and fascism was born: an ideology that glories in destruction and death.

It is an open question whether our current crisis is a separate one or just a continuation of the last. I am of the opinion that it is a continuation, the brief prosperity of the interim afforded largely by the die-off that preceded it (and the attendant destruction of infrastructure). The basic problem we face now is that same we faced and failed to solve last time around: the problem of capitalism, or "liberalism" as it was once (then) called, - by either name, a system which concentrates power and privilege in the hands of a smug and self-satisfied few, ignorance and desperation in the hearts of the many.

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Song of the lark's picture

Enact a corporate death penalty.

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Anyone realize how much petroleum based fertilizer is used to fuel our "liberal" agricultural system? How bad agriculture is for the planet? Do the research. You've been feed a lie.

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"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." - Groucho

solublefish's picture

As the 1970s book of that title explained at the time. It is worse today.

As Robert Newman put it in his brilliant stage show, History of Oil, the 'green revolution' is killing us all. In the US in 1944, average American farm produced 2,300 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil fuel energy that went into the field. In 1974, that ratio was 1:1. This a result of the inaptly named 'green revolution' of the 50s and 60s: nitrogen fertilizers, oil-based pesticides, refrigeration, etc. Newman: "Why isn't the lead headline in every paper asking how we are going to feed ourselves when the oil runs out?"

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by "parasites" . Parasites/bacteria have been breaking down dung for billions of years. We've lost our way when dung and the bacteria that breaks it down is viewed as a problem. Dung is natures way of recycling energy. Where is the recycling in modern agriculture? Answer: there is none.

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"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." - Groucho

riverlover's picture

and farm "sludge" is still applied to many fields that are momentarily fallow. No large feedlots, no one large feedlot but too small for big ag. And it's 20 miles away.

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Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

All species expand into their ecological niche as far as they can. If that becomes disruptive to the environment then that species fails and suffers population collapse.

We, H. sapiens, have an unlimited capacity to expand into every square inch of the surface of our planet. This is natural and it feels right. Since you can't really get rich just on your own labor it requires either exploitation of natural resources of the planet or exploitation of your fellow human. The concept that you can exploit the common for your own gain is deeply ingrained in the idea of ownership of the same. Private ownership of the common is fundamental to our species operating in the uncontrolled expansion mode.

If you look at the bigger picture and ask the right question, how can we as intelligent species ensure a stable, sustainable biosphere, then we must begin to talk about a minimum footprint on the surface of the planet, as this is the ultimate resource required by all species. Then we can begin to design an civilization that is not only ultimately respectful of life on the planet, but fearful of destroying our incredible heritage.

This will never happen because it runs counter to our drive for unlimited exploitation of the common. We are not smart enough and our evolution as a species has come through the wrong path. We are plunderers. Plunder works, at least until global collapse. The planet will have to wait for the evolution of a non-aggressive species to produce intelligence. Meanwhile, the planet is more than willing to spend the next million years recovering from H. sapiens.

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Capitalism has always been the rule of the people by the oligarchs. You only have two choices, eliminate them or restrict their power.

solublefish's picture

Private ownership of the common is fundamental to our species

No, it is not an innate characteristic. Private [productive] property does not exist as such in 'primitive' communities. It appears to emerge only with the practice of systematic agriculture, something even Rousseau was able to recognize in the mid-18th century, and which modern anthropologists confirm. Nor does the existence of private property in itself necessarily lead to destruction and "plundering", though resource scarcity does.

We do not possess a "drive" for unlimited exploitation of anything, pace Hobbes. We do possess poorly designed social systems that fail to regulate and channel behavior into creative rather than destructive ends. Here is Rousseau:

The philosophers, who have inquired into the foundations of society, have all felt the necessity of going back to a state of nature; but not one of them has got there.… Every one of them, in short, constantly dwelling on wants, avidity, oppression, desires and pride, has transferred to the state of nature ideas which were acquired in society; so that, in speaking of the savage, they described the social man…

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gulfgal98's picture

I know this is from your archives, but this essay is timeless and a true master work!

Our economic system has and is continuing to plunder the earth to line the pockets of a few at the expense of the many. Not only has it led to what is now the beginning of the greatest environmental catastrophe that humans may ever witness, if any of humanity is to survive, but it is also the cause of most wars and strife worldwide. And the greatest purveyor of plunder and war is our own country.

Your essay not only pinpoints the main cause of the armageddon we are facing, but outlines the right solutions to saving humanity from its own destruction. Great essay.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

shaharazade's picture

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hester's picture

Stupendous. Ty

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Don't believe everything you think.

For those that are interested in this idea, Nature's Trust by Mary Wood is required reading.
She was interviewed by Moyers a while back and her idea of Atmospheric Trust Litigation is going forward.

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