Last Stand of Common-Sense

Listen. You're being lied to. Even the politicians who are coming around, at this late date, to speaking soberly about global warming are still framing the situation as if it will affect our grandchildren (it will, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren, and so on, for at least a thousand years, minimum), but not affect us now, severely, over the next few decades. They are not declaring the real score: deserts; droughts; floods; killer storms; unearthly fires; bleached and naked, dying seas -- all this century. Measurable progress slowing the global rate of carbon emission: none.

Here's the shocker: the solutions for these problems have already been found! If implemented today, we could stanch the rise in world average temperature, hold it to a 2 degree C rise with 88% likelihood of success. I don't mean just replacing our grid electricity source with wind and solar power. The technology already exists (and the know-how) to gassify and burn fossil fuels much more efficiently, yield less of the carbon by-products, and even create a pathway toward burning waste organic matter on a large scale.

The reason that we are not putting these power players into the field now to even the score is obscured by economic rhetoric that is masking suicidal stupidity. We are told: these solutions are not yet cost effective. Before you accept that statement hook-line-and-sinker, consider what it really means. We are faced with broad extinction of life on Earth, perhaps even of ourselves, and recasting the planet as inhospitable territory for perhaps a longer period of time than modern humanity has been on the ground (and perhaps even longer than that). Given these consequences, wouldn't it be reasonable to do everything in our power to forestall such an eventuality, even if it meant tanking our man-made economy?

Imagine playing the board-game Monopoly, and discovering that the house you are in is burning. Wouldn't you get up and exit the building immediately, or attempt to extinguish the fire, even if it meant all your property deeds and monopoly money went up in flames? Only an absolutely asinine fool would sit there guarding his hotels and railroads while all hope of escape vanishes, and death creeps ever closer. In fact, the only trouble with this analogy is that, in the real world, there is no escape from the burning house. If we fail to lift our eyes and resolve the consequences of our aggressive fuel policies, we will bar passage out of hell not only for ourselves, but everyone around us, and 50% or more of the species that share Earth with us.

So what is the real problem? “Not cost effective” means that either we can't be bothered to do what needs to be done at any cost, guarantee a certain standard of living to the myriad workers who would be involved in implementing one of the available solutions, or there aren't workers out there who are ready to say: “Yes, I will be part of this. I will not charge by the hour, I will work overtime, I will accept a fixed wage – heck, I'll even do this as a quasi-internship for a stipend –, because this work needs to get done.” This is the kind of attitude that powered the massive upscaling of industry necessary to meet the military demands of World War II, and the men and women, even the children, of that era rose to meet the requirements.

We now face a moment of similar, but greater, necessity. And here's the truth: I believe that there is no shortage of individuals who would gladly work under such conditions and blow up the usual me-first attitude of the laissez faire economy, going to whatever length necessary to halt our march toward annihilation. I suspect that for every person headed to the oil fields or natural gas rigs right now, there are five people who would sign on to extraordinary work conditions if it would save us. The need for it just has to be clearly explained to the people, and the government has to lead us in taking the first step beyond the limited framework of our free market. The government can still lead us in saying, “We will bother to do what the moment requires, regardless of cost, outside of cost, in a new day where co-operation beats the current attitude of milking each other for our last dimes.

Join us in Washington, D.C., Sunday, Feb. 17, on the National Mall, for a massive protest declaring our rejection of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which promises, if completed, to bring ruin to humanity's attempts to limit our greenhouse gas emissions. Urge the Obama administration to do the “common-sense” thing, and block the Tar-sands pipeline. We hope to see you there!

an outreach letter

An example of the outreach efforts of Pacing the Planet, this is a letter we wrote today to a group in Chicago:

Hello [climate change event organizer],
Our names are Gavain U'Prichard and Dana McGuire. We are co-directors of the Pacing the

Planet project. Thank you for speaking at length with David last night about your exciting climate event upcoming in February. We read through the conversation you had, and we would like to clarify what our position is, so that your coalition of groups can decide if they would like to hear more from us in the near future.

Although our presentation is based on the work of several eminent scientists, the conclusions are decidedly not the communication that scientists have offered so far to the popular press, nor to politicians. We anticipate that some or all of the information we have to share will be included in the 2014 IPCC report -- however, it will be too late by then to act on some critical pieces of it.

We therefore consider ourselves emissaries of the politically inexpedient scientific truth of what is really happening currently with the climate, the story that is going unrepresented completely, even by worthy allies and advocates like Bill McKibben.

Here is a list of places in our presentation where we differ starkly with Bill's information offered in the Do The Math tour. We believe that you are not likely to find this material represented elsewhere...at least, we haven't found it entering into the public conversation.

1) The planet is not on a 2-degree C emissions pathway, nor even close to it. We're on a 6-12 degree pathway within the century. We are off the chart of even the most unrestrained "business as usual" scenario formulated by the IPCC in 1999-2001. Our current trajectory places our very own generations squarely in the path of "beyond dangerous" warming.

2) The window for achieving a leveling off of world temperature increase at 2-degrees C has probably already closed. Peer reviewed work by Professors Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows of the University of Manchester and the Tyndall Centre in 2008 (and updated in 2011 and this year) indicates that under the best circumstances, countries like the U.S. have to significantly turn the corner on CO2 and methane emissions by 2015, and reduce emissions by 6-8% per year thereafter, not 18% by 2020, as the Obama administration has regulated. When continuing deforestation is factored in (as well as data that significant methane clathrate destabilization began in 2007, etc.), the U.S. has no share left in the remaining carbon budget. Leading UK climatologist Kevin Anderson concludes that we simply don't have time to scale up wind and solar power, or nuclear power, in order to meet the timeline for sticking a landing at a 2-degree maximum rise with 50% probability. He calls for a managed economic downturn, stating firmly that it is not reasonable to keep using carbon-dioxide emitting energy sources until such a time that the larger green power grid can be depended upon to fuel our current lifestyle of flagrant consumption. That strategy, currently our default, will be our medium-term undoing. Our death.

3) We agree with Bill McKibben and others, recognizing that political plans that intend to regulate a slow reduction in greenhouse gas emissions through 2050 with the intent of leveling off at a 2-degree C rise in planet temperature (plans that neglect to reference the cumulative carbon budget) are ineffectual and therefore meaningless.

4) We agree with Professors James Hansen, Naomi Oreskes, and Erik Conway that carbon cap-and-trade schemes are inherently unable combating global warming. We understand why they cannot work and why they have historically failed to curtail acid rain to the necessary degree. We call for a carbon fee and dividend, though at a significantly increased rate than is currently proposed in the House of Representatives legislation, and even more than has been called for by Hansen. The newest incoming data from climate researchers requires steeper measures taken.

5) Our presentation discusses the role of methane in greenhouse warming: specifically, while methane is understood to have 25 times the climate forcing power of CO2 on the 100-year timescale, it is known to have 72 times the climate forcing power of CO2 on the 20-year timescale, which is the time-frame in which most climatologists believe we will reach the "point of no return," when the climate system irrevocably moves toward a new stable state, much warmer climate, regular extreme weather events, and the most rapid mass extinction in the history of our planet. Therefore, we advocate for aggressively regulating methane emissions (ie. livestock) as well as fossil fuels emissions. This work is backed up with research by Professor Barry Brooks of University of Adelaide, Australia, among others.

6) Perhaps most importantly, we present information that, due to the approximate thirty year lag time in the response of the climate warming to increased climate forcing (the release of carbon dioxide emissions, in this case), and due to the increasing inauguration of new feedback loops (augmenting the speed as well as the intensity of the warming), the safest estimate for policy purposes is that as the planet continues on a "beyond business-as-usual" pathway for 4 to 8 more years, we will lock ourselves into a 4-degree C rise in planet temperature by 2050-2060, yielding "beyond dustbowl" conditions in much of the interior U.S., raising the threat of catastrophic flooding more than 100-fold, consigning the Amazon rainforest to become savannah and/or desert, and ultimately creating an ice-free planet. Additionally, the current 200-species-a-day extinction rate would escalate to a probable 50% species loss worldwide. (At a 6-12 degree rise in temperature, the extinction level goes up to 95%, historically.)

Last year, the International Energy Agency produced a major report which found that [unless significant room is created in the carbon budget, by 2017] existing fossil fuel infrastructure will certainly carry the planet to a 2-degree rise. (This analysis did not factor in the Keystone XL pipeline.) After that point, any new oil wells dug, coal mines opened, or coal plants brought online would definitively take us past 2 degrees. For these reasons, we advocate that the time is now for a 3-pronged approach of large scale political leverage to support the imposition of a carbon fee, to end fossil fuel subsidies, to prohibit the Keystone Pipeline, and implement a carbon rationing system; secondly, of major civil disobedience to effectively shut down the demand cycle for fossil fuels (sit-ins, refuse to burn carbon days, refuse to go to work days, re-stickering merchandise with "actual cost" price stickers, blocking fuel stations etc.), and, thirdly, clandestine sabotage of fossil fuel industry infrastructure to buy time for legislation and for the development of the alternative energy distributed grid.

7.) We present on means of carbon mitigation and sequestration that have not received as much attention as stratospheric geoengineering, but may be as effective or more effective, such as the large scale production of biochar as an endstage process in the agricultural cycle. We offer data that suggest biochar formation from corn stalks and soy remains in the U.S. alone could yield a 10-20% reduction in atmospheric carbon concentration. We draw from the work of Dr. Albert Bates, author of The Biochar Solution: Carbon Farming and Climate Change (2010).

8) Because our audiences have always consistently wanted to know more about us and our project www.pacingtheplanet.org, we usually also spend at least a few minutes telling our story...for some people, this is the most compelling inspiration which we can offer.

This has been our attempt at a summary of the content of a presentation we would offer currently, which we gather would help inform the goals and strategy of your organizing efforts.
It is our understanding that, at best, we are at the very fulcrum point of a planetary event that will play out for 100-400 thousand years (and perhaps as much as a million years) according to Professor Curt Stager. Therefore, we feel it is imperative that we share this information as widely as possible, so that our society can rise to meet the challenge of the climate emergency, or have as much time as possible to prepare, if we fail to avoid the "point of no return." If your coalition feels that input from Pacing the Planet would be helpful in forming the parameters of your event, or even presenting at your event, please let us know. At this time, our headquarters resides in rural northeast Missouri (6 hours from Chicago), but we stand by, ready to plan train or vegetable-oil-fueled transport to your area with some degree of advance notice. Our primary purpose in existing is to communicate this information to all who are ready to assimilate it.


Sincerely,
Gavain U'Prichard and Dana McGuire

The New Conversation We Must Have

Something has changed. Can you tell? It seems – perhaps – that the U.S. is at last ready to have a sober and thorough conversation about the different planetary conditions we've ushered in. It is as if someone smacked the American public upside the head, and shouted in our ears: climate change is real. Well, of course, something did thrash us, or at least, the east coast, by far the most populous part of the country. As has been well-publicized by now, Superstorm Sandy, which flooded lower Manhattan, killed dozens of people, flattened houses, and left millions without power, has been publicly tied to global warming. Meteorologists are still issuing caveats that no single storm can be definitively tied to climate change (James Hansen's new mathematical approach to analyzing this problem, aside), but – without a doubt – people are recognizing that the current rise in sea level makes storm surges all the more hazardous. Sandy had the largest combined tide and storm-surge in the recorded history of New York City. In addition, several meteorologists have suggested that the atmospheric blocking pattern which steered Sandy back toward land, rather than out to sea, as is traditional for hurricanes on Sandy's early path, seemed to result from the extreme polar sea-ice melt this summer.

Regardless, if Sandy is a harbinger of our near-future world, picture this: New York, the illuminated bastion of high-profile, climate-controlled, ultra-wealthy style, culture, and class was laid low. What could be more iconic of our predicament than people stuck in high-rises with no electricity, no water, no food?

Although, as a single event, Sandy hasn't yet rivaled 9/11/2001 in monetary cost to the city, it is becoming clear that looking at ourselves in the climate mirror is going to be a more expensive taking-stock than the War on Terror has been, thus far—and even more so if we don't act now. The International Energy Agency has calculated that every dollar we delay in spending now on alternative fuel technology and other climate change mitigation will cost $4.30 if we wait until 2020. By then, conditions will almost certainly already be such that everyone will recognize we must throw our economy at this problem, it is no longer a choice to ignore it. (I can tell you that, here in northeast Missouri, we are experiencing our third “Indian Summer,” and the odd weather patterns just continue as they have for most of this past year. We will experience another severe drought in the next few years, I am sure.)

Sandy is helping break the ice (no pun intended) for politicians to once again address global warming. This time, however, the conversation is different: fiscal conservatives like NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg are coming on the record saying the jig is up, climate change is underway, it is having severe consequences, and we must act now. This is putting strain on the Republican party, which still harbors veritable lunatics like Sen. Jim Inhofe, who still bellow that global warming is a fraud. (One wonders whether Inhofe actually understands that the wildfires which ravaged his state of Oklahoma this summer are expected to increase in frequency and intensity, as global temperatures rise.) Global accounting agency Price Waterhouse Cooper advised their business clients last week to prepare for a 6º C change in global average temperature by the end of the century.

We who know that the planet is on the brink (or perhaps just past it) of a major tipping point in the climate system have a critical moment to ignite the conversation in a new, a-political way, one that presents the undiluted truth. According to Kevin Anderson, what we must say is this: there is not time to roll out efficiency improvements, solar- and wind-powered electrical grids, shut down coal, and convert the world's fleet of vehicles to run on some other fuel than petroleum. There isn't time to develop carbon capture and sequestration.

On Nov. 6, Anderson gave a speech to the Cabot Institute in Bristol, England, and he presented the stark truth more clearly than he ever has before. Every industrialized country is pledged, morally and legally, not to allow average global temperature to rise more than 2º C above the pre-industrial average. Given that accomplishing this task of limiting the temperature rise in this way means reducing our CO₂ emissions by 8% per year, industrialized countries like the U.S. have no moral or legal choice except to foment a managed economic downturn. You heard me. We have to accept significant austerity measures, rationing, cease unnecessary flying. No more unnecessary, on-demand, 24/7 electric availability. We can live with two hours of electricity a day.

Sure, we still need to leverage the fossil fuel industry to abandon its genocidal business model, we must replace coal, oil, and natural gas with wind, solar, wave, and maybe nuclear power. We need governments to enact a carbon tax (thank goodness the U.S. is talking about it again). Moreover, that tax needs to be heftier than the modest, politically anodyne proposals put forward so far. But, Anderson argues, if we can't transform or limit supply in the miniscule time-frame left (the brave, post-fossil-fuel world would need to be well off the ground by 2015 at the very latest), then we must cut the throat of demand.

If you think this is a lot to accept, now you understand why we need real, rigorous debate; particularly, we need climate activists who don't blanch and yield when the other side dismisses reality as “politically unfeasible,” or “unrealistic.” With that in mind, I'd like to describe two recent events that we at Pacing the Planet have witnessed, which illustrate well the kind of pitfalls that any of us can trip into, if we don't hold firm the context of the emergency at hand.

A few weeks ago, we brought Pacing the Planet to the University of Missouri campus in Columbia. We walked with our carts around the sprawling grounds of the school, and we met with members of the student group Coal Free Mizzou, who are working to end the burning of coal in the university's self-owned power and heating plant. The students told us that they had been in long negotiations with the university, haggling over the time-line and funding of the power plant's transition to burning solid biofuel. As it stands, the university is unwilling to pledge to a specific date when it will stop burning coal, even though Bill McKibben himself called up the president of the school, while a live audience watched, and cajoled him to come to the bargaining table with calendar in hand.

Coal Free Mizzou has been wisely pressing for 2015 as the year when the university will no longer burn coal, but the student members have been sucked into a vortex of negotiation with a university administration that has not willingly handed over crucial pieces of data that they have collected, related to the would-be transition away from coal. The administrators are not replying to certain letters of inquiry, and consequently the students have filed a Freedom of Information Act request. The school is arguing that the plan to navigate the Mizzou away from coal needs to be balanced with the other financial expenses of the university – and, to a large extent, it seems that Coal Free Mizzou has capitulated on this point.

I understand that they have made progress (they believe) with the administration, but I think letting officials dictate the context of the negotiation is a mistake. The rational position to take with the university is actually simple: if you can't run the school without burning coal, then you must stop running the school. There is no meaningful future for all of these students graduating into their various fields of expertise and employment if the world temperature rises by 6º C. Hunting for car-keys under the light because you can see there, even when you know the keys were lost in the dark, will not yield you the keys. Pretending that there is some more economically salubrious approach to saving what's left of the climate will not tack hard enough against the current that's carrying us off the cliff into desolation. It's time to play hardball. And, when the university (or whoever it is) responds: “You're not ready to have a real conversation about this, a balanced and mature conversation about this,” we reply: “No. You're not ready to face the truth. We are no longer in partnership with you.” And, we withdraw. We disenroll. We divest ourselves and our future from madness. We quit our jobs. We take care of each other, and we cut demand off at the tap.

The second event we witnessed, on Nov. 5, was a debate between Bill McKibben and Alex Epstein, president of the Center for Industrial Progress, at Duke University. McKibben presented a litany of the troubling data coming from around the world, as the planet's ecosystems come under stress from increased temperatures and the rest of climate change. Epstein offered one chart that appeared to show the rate of fatalities due to climate is decreasing, even as temperatures increase by a “small amount.” He suggested that technology is more than equipped to deal with any minor environmental change coming our way, and declared that, in calling for a moratorium on fossil fuels, McKibben is morally, if not legally, culpable for murder. McKibben's agenda, Epstein claimed, is going to starve people all over the planet.

I'll leave it to you to find the flaws in Epstein's arguments (and there are many). People: these are not the debates we should still be having. I would have been happier if McKibben, once he discovered that Epstein was going to dredge up this debunked drivel, fail to address McKibben's statistics in detail, and generally build an ad hominem attack against McKibben through repeating this one, scary message that McKibben was out to deprive poor people of food (this is such a terribly ironic and malicious projection of consequences from the fossil-fuel industry's own practices in poorer countries of the world, where they have plundered resources while decimating the environment, depriving locals of traditional food sources).... well, I wish McKibben had just walked off the stage, saying, “Let me know when you want to have a real debate.” Yes, I understand that McKibben got his two minutes here and there to present the terrible present reality of advancing climate change to those who would listen, but his ongoing participation in the “debate” lent credibility to the whole event, as if this really was a powerful, substantive combat of ideas. For shame. We climate activists need to keep our eye on the ball, and not get faked out by curveballs and change-ups that slow-pitch the true nature of this climate crisis. Good eye, good eye.

The Magic Earth

I remember the crinkled skeletons of fall leaves, the eerie wonder of their sudden dryness, the whole ground skittering toward some unknown vanishing point when an October wind gusted out of a sky that seemed darker blue, stranger, more remote. I was a young boy. The flux of time was measured in magical events, the color and the quality of the light coming through a tall window, the way an old, brick-worn depot stood sentry in the dark night as we passed by on a train. My family believed in ghosts, gardens, history, and an implacable capacity of objects (often overlooked as mundane), certain events, works of art, to telegraph a critical signal from the mystery of the Universe, an alien familiarity with the starry ocean above that resides in each of us. My family also believed in the power of science to reveal the threads of that mystery.

I was born in 1978. It was the time when President Jimmy Carter was telling the American people that life as it had been known was over. We could not become cramped giants of consumption, endlessly plowing our home, what Adam Smith called the "natural value" of our world, into the exponential curve of increasing wealth. The malaise, the sense that something was wrong with this picture, was trying to tell us something. However, in 1978, though I didn't know it, there were still lots of fish. There was still a huge amount of ice at the north pole. There were seasons that made sense. The Amazon rain-forest was thousands of square miles bigger than it is now. There wasn't a raft of plastic debris twice the size of Texas in the center of the Pacific. Most major rivers of the world still reached the sea.

In 2012, I am 33 years old. This is the second autumn my 16-month-old daughter has experienced, the first that she will, perhaps, remember in some dream-like form when she is older. She is with me and not with me, giving me a knowing look and a fierce smile now and then, just when a piece of particularly devastating news about the condition of the world crosses my desk, yet still well under the veil of Dreamtime that will render all these early visions into a haunting terrain of compelling imagery,  the sustenance at the heart of her favorite metaphors, enduring the rest of her life, if she is like me. She is delighted by the brown and gold and red-dragon leaves that are falling around her.

She is, I think, attempting to follow those same paths where the magic of the reality, undiluted by scarcity and want and need and overwhelm, illuminates the coordinated mystery of the origin of things. But those paths, at least here on Earth, are diminishing, dying, gone. The world that I let my daughter wander into is not the world I received. I have nothing so fine to give. I show her a planet in shambles, in departure. She is in the last generation that will draw on the ancient metaphor of autumn as we know it, though her Octobers are distorting already, warping at the seams. Hot gusts of unsettled air kick through these empty canyons of weeks at the end of the year. They don't seem to know where to go. There is colossal amount of heat stored in the oceans, now, and it is beginning to work its way into the secret topologies of our personal lives.

In the end, climate change will divide us from each other, too, if left unchecked. My daughter may well find herself at 40 not knowing what I meant when I wrote here about the magical unity of all things, or it might mean something different: a bitter reference to the total collected ruin: the hot, crazy seas, the dead forests, the missing species, the echo of a world she knew in childhood, tantalizing her from beyond the edge of active recall. Then, again, she gives me a knowing look -- not deliberately from herself, it seems, but from the primordial consciousness that lurks behind her existence and brought her forth. That entity reminds me that we all are forged in the crucible of alchemical change, where existence frets and parries non-existence, and they bleed into one another. Change is where we belong.

It is the people’s attempt to stall change that has broken the world. Keeping the same temperature day and night, in and out of seasons, in our houses, driving our hermetically-sealed cars through a landscape that only transmits its change in terrain to us in the way we depress the accelerator a little more to go uphill, or ease off on a curve. It is in the desire to have everything “on demand,” proffered to us in plastic clam-shells, bright shiny new, the moment we think we need it or want it. It is in the way we light up the night so it hangs there like an under-exposed day, because we want to be safe, we want the day to go on, we want the entertainment to go on, we want to know that when we come to surf eBay at 3 a.m. in our underwear, eBay will be there.

Which leads me to my indictment. My cry from the ramparts. Where is my generation? Where are those of us who were able to experience that magical enrichment of natural change, the magical reference to the moving Universe in all things? Why are you silent when our world is threatened? Why do you dance and attend potlucks and shop and work and share cute turn-of-phrase from your children’s mouths while Rome is burning? Why have you become complacent, lured by money, stability, seeking fun, and now watch from the sidelines, disempowered, as the very last moments to recover our world tick away? Why are you championing routine when it is the last, last, last thing the doctor ordered at this time?

I will do my best to help my daughter adjust. I grew up to be an agent of creative change, for I had a chance to be familiar with a mostly-intact Earth, a dynamo of creation. What we enter now is an era of destruction, destruction on the scale of Earth’s immensity. I will try to show my daughter the hidden path to joy. The creature behind her eyes tells me she just might find it. 

A House Divided

ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson tells us that we will adapt to the climate change that results from the combustion of his product. We'll relocate the farms. We'll abandon the ocean shores. We will “manage” the consequences of burning oil, coal, and natural gas. But there's one thing we won't do, if ExxonMobil can help it. And that is stop burning oil, coal, and natural gas. Indeed, the convenience, power, and cheap plenty of fossil fuels has a terrible grip on our daily operation. As one commentator put it, burning the Big Three is like “holding a wolf by its ears: you don't like it, but you don't dare let go.”

Except, the commentator in this case was Thomas Jefferson, and the powerhouse he was referring to was human slavery. We must remember that, in the 19^th century, Americans were addicted to this other destructive form of energy – the labor of an imprisoned people – and without that dynamo their way of life seemed impossible, especially in the south.

We're not hearing talk yet of oily Texas planning to secede, nor Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, and the coal states. But, Republicans are upping the tension, insisting that people who want to save the environment are making “War on Coal.” If that's the case mark this well: 75% of people in the U.S.A. are sincerely concerned about the moral issues implicit in burning away our children's future on the back of the fossil fuel industry. That's greater than the percentage of Americans who were bothered by the immorality of slavery at the start of the Civil War.

We all know that we are in a depraved situation. We have begun to realize that we have invited colossal death as surely as if we lassoed a comet and hauled it toward Earth. When industry suggests that humanity will just “adapt” to droughts four times as severe as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, or floods which sweep our houses away, or adjust to the extinction of half our compatriot species on this globe, we understand that this is the last Faustian bargain we'll ever get a chance to make.

At the same time, Abraham Lincoln's words hold true now as they did in 1863. The only way we will solve this emergency, is in our collective power to uphold our Government of the People as the fittest vehicle to express the ultimate truth: we are equally made in the Creator's image. In this late day, we can at last begin to understand that this congruence with divinity is not limited to us. In its infinite intricacy, the Earth is an implicit whole. The very feedback loops that will do us in illustrate with deadly elegance the attention of the planet to balance. There is no waste space on the land, in the sea, or in the sky, where we can unload the bitter by-products of our self-absorbed lives. What a myth, the idea that we could pursue greed and consumption under the banner of liberty, enslave the Earth to our artificial quality of life, and expect that sensitive Creation wouldn't respond with an exclamation of catastrophe. Climate change will find you in the fortress of your little home, and turn you out under a strange sky, on the shore of a terrible sea, on land shoved into ruin.

We can consecrate this relationship between all things on Earth, before it is too late. We can “hallow this ground,” our home for which there is no substitution. But, it can't happen just through words. A powerful sector of society is seceding from decency, from reason, and ultimately, from life. They are dividing our house, and the roof is falling on our heads. There is a time to fight for our government, our home, our Creation. It may be the last, best way we can consecrate this Earth, before ExxonMobil signs for the devil in blood. Our Gettysburg is coming soon.

Kali Speaks

Buddhists await the coming of the Kali Yuga, the last age in the cycle of the Dharma, when all knowledge of the brilliant Way, the way of morals and truth, integrity, compassion and wisdom, is lost to Earth entirely, and conscious life descends into a hell of suffering. Think of God's wrath in the apocalypse, except without the savior. At least, for a very long time. Eventually, Maitreya, the Future Buddha, comes and restores the Dharma -- the truth about reality; and so begins another epic cycle.

2500 years ago, the Dharma was reinforced by Gautama Buddha, and the Kali Yuga seemed far away. Not so now. Lying seems de rigeur (one can even "win" a presidential debate based upon it), and style is triumphing over substance every day. The kind of arguments we see today pit morality against expediency with terrible ease. Individuals grandstand with outrage over slight insults to their self-image, while whistleblowers are villified when they highlight the alarming nature of our times.
Truth is a vegetable on life-support, and that it should recover to again be a living, breathing thing is the hope of the sentimental. So goes the Kali Yuga.

The name derives from the ancient Indian goddess Kali, the Black Lady, death and undoing incarnate. Invoked with reverence, Kali brings to an end our cardhouses of illusion, the intricate web of lies that we communally reinforce in order to rationalize our perceptions of what matters and what doesn't. Kali dances on our dead bodies and on the corpse of our arrogance. Ultimately, Kali is a defender of the natural beauty of life and death, and the enemy of falsehood. We have invited her here into the studio today, to give her impression of the cultural forces that have led to the climate disaster which is even now shuffling onto stage, impatient from waiting in the wings for the last 40 years.

Kali says: "You people are addicted to the sound of your own voices. If you spent more time being quiet, the distress of the Earth would be completely audible to you. I am screaming into your ear the blackest words I can find for your folly, but you insist upon bringing about your own, unnatural destruction.

"You bombard your brains with advertisements calling those agencies and instruments you have to regulate your own pollution of your only living home "economic traitors" and "heavy-handed dictators". Yet, it is they who produce the ads who employ the police at $30 an hour to restrain (and arrest, if necessary) the journalists who come to discover the facts about what is really transpiring on the ground at the very sites of industry where the future of the 21st century will be determined.

"Well, guess what, America. I'm not an 'energy voter.' I'm Kali! I am at home in the darkest despair you can imagine, and I am coming to visit your irrational dreams of endless exponential growth and make them square with the rules of physics and decency. You will swallow the obscenity of your impossible vision until it chokes you. God (and here I mean your Jesus) help you, because your children and your grandchildren are mine.

"Now let me say this: you may not acknowledge it anymore, but just because you have a job and you can pay your bills, it doesn't mean you're doing well. Just because you have a car and can take yourself to the grocery store to buy your shrink-wrapped meat and your packaged foods, it doesn't mean you are a self-made success. Some of you take offense at the president suggesting that "you didn't build" this or that proud accomplishment single-handedly. You think he impugns your hard work. Well I say: silence your egotistical minds! Don't you dare forget that not a single breath do you take without the complete existence and support of your world. In isolation, you are nothing. Not one of you is doing well. Your time to see that is rapidly drawing to a close."

We've turned off Kali's microphone for now because, you know, a little goes a long way. We can, though, put some of her comments in a useful context.

Recently, I was watching archive footage of a debate in 1980 between then-President Jimmy Carter and Republican candidate Ronald Reagan. (If you're wondering why, let me just say: it was late at night, it was one of those internet moments where A leads to B leads to C leads to...now how the heck did I end up here?  In this case, the reason was that I had read media portrayals of Romney's first debate performance as being Reagan-esque in its mastery, and I knew that Republican operatives have been trying to tar Obama as "worse than Carter." I wanted to revisit the actual debate between those two figures of the 70s and 80s, and understand how fair the comparison is.)

What Carter did in that debate -- and, in fact, what he had been doing even since a 1977 primetime TV address where he began, "I want to talk to you tonight about something unpleasant..." -- is to soberly and cogently discuss a point that no national candidate or office holder has attempted to make since. Carter informed the public that the American way of life, a standard of living based on consumption, material wealth, and convenience, had to come to an end. The same rate of growth could not be sustained into the future, if for no other reason than that the U.S. simply could not provide the amount of energy needed to power such a lifestyle at that scale, not without becoming hugely dependent on foreign fuel and/or decimating our environment.

If America had heeded Carter at the time, we would be well underway into a different future, based in equitability, environmental stewardship, thorough use of an extensive public transportation system; in short, we would more closely resemble some European countries today (Germany, Norway).

However, Carter's message was unpalatable for the public then, like it is now. It was not the vision of the country that soldiers in World War II had fought for, and returned home to, and they viewed it somehow as tied to failure to achieve objectives through detente with Russia and the Middle East, rather than being a positive, creative direction for our country to grow in. Reagan, his Republican challenger, certainly painted it that way. He took the "malaise" that Carter acknowledged existed in the U.S. at the time, and leveraged it into a referendum on Carter's record as president, rather than a moment of reckoning for the Western World's superpower.

Reagan promised the U.S. rampant growth, deregulation, a "morning in America" where a corporate comfort standard of living would trickle down to the rest of the population, and create a wealthy middle class that could indulge in the good life. These are the same promises that Mitt Romney is making now. Seen through a narrow lens, the strategy worked. However, social programs suffered tremendously under Reagan, a national debt was created that has never been paid down, and perhaps most importantly the environment was trashed.

Most of the global warming that has caused us to suffer the already catastrophic flooding and drought, resulting in 300,000 deaths a year (according to former U.N. Secretary Kofi Annan), and most of the warming that will increase in severity in the next 10 years, is due to carbon pollution from the 1980s onward. Yet, Congress and the Reagan administration were well aware of the risk from increasing greenhouse gases. It's just that the model of growth for our civilization that they heralded has no room to admit the fundamental limitations on that growth. The free market cannot put the brakes on the free market.

No presidential candidate (not even Al Gore) since then has ever suggested that the wealth of nations has reached its maximum in terms of exploiting natural resources, and that improvement in the quality of life from now on will have to come through intangible means, through valuable relationships, through cooperation, through appreciating our existence in wonder. This is the legacy of the Reagan years, when -- as far as the Earth is concerned -- human civilization turned decidedly in the exploitative direction, and began to flirt with mass extinction on Earth.

At this point, we have moved well past flirting into heavy petting. We are in a physically abusive relationship with the Earth. We use in one year what it takes the Earth one-and-half years to regrow (at a minimum). That, as the politicians are saying, is math. None of us, neither perpetrator nor abused, is doing well. We have to admit that our civilization has made a mistake when it elevated exponential growth as the paramount marker of success. To acknowledge this mistake is not to make a "war on coal," although it may well come to that, if the industry barons continue to plow ahead in their agenda to make coal integral to our energy stream, despite the opposition of a significant (and growing) part of the population. Acknowledging the mistake is to declare that we lost perspective -- it is the only rational, humble explanation for how we could be facing a 4 degree C rise in global temperature by 2050 and still persisting in the same behavior.

We must, as Kali says, be still, be quiet, let our maniacal obsession with growth die before we do ourselves, before everything we know is a memory.

(P.S. For those of you economy-minded folks, who really are concerned about debt and jobs, the highly respected (and impartial) International Energy Agency has published a report this year stating that investment in the alternative energy grid and power sources in these next ten years at the level needed to leave open the possibility that global average temperatures don't exceed a 2 degree C rise will generate USD 150 trillion savings over spending on fossil fuels by 2050, and would take us out of debt -- not just deficit, but debt -- by 2025.)
 

Most Successful Presentation Yet

Yesterday, we arrived at twilight at the Possibility Alliance, a small intentional community located in Amish country about 20 miles from our house, and dedicated to changing the world through living in radical simplicity (they don't use electricity at the PA, nor fossil fuels), service (their primary "work" is hosting free workshops about various aspects of social and ecological change, as well as going out into the larger community to provide help and companionship wherever it is needed). The PA is also dedicted to activism in pursuit of mindfulness and gratitude, whether that be on the scale of genuine, heartfelt person-to-person connection, or promoting the wise course of prioritizing joy and generosity over acquisition and defensiveness on a large scale, through non-violent demonstration and civil disobedience. They are our friends and neighbors.
We had come to the Possibility Alliance to deliver our presentation to the permaculture certification class that is currently holding its course out in the woodland "back 80" acres of the PA. As the sun set, we walked along the footpaths through the pastures, into the edge of the forest, and found the outdoor kitchen, classroom, and camp area for the permaculture group.
As it turned out, most of the course participants didn't return for the dinner and presentation until dark, so our presentation -- which was already going to be different in format due to the absence of the slideshow, on account of having no electricity -- was now going to feature no visual aids at all, not even the whiteboard we had brought so I could draw some charts by hand. In the end, this emphasized the narrative form of the presentation over the evidentiary, and the result was that we were able to deliver the information with heart, with emotion, and with more human context. The audience participants (about 20) were very engaged, despite that we were sitting in the dark, save for a couple flashlights, on a cold, autumn night.
They asked detailed questions about several important points of information, and were eager to know what they can do both as individuals and as instigators of the social movement to halt climate disaster. They were also genuinely moved, and shared, in a group setting, a kind of collective process which migrated from despair at our planetary situation, to flinty resolve, and left with a sincerely activated sense of urgency and determination to make measureable progress on spreading the news of our peril and our hope.
Whereas when we started the presentation, I asked the group how many of those sitting there were convinced that global warming is the most critical issue facing humanity right now, and about half the audience raised their hands, I do believe that, by the end, almost everyone in attendance was persuaded.
I plan to pattern our future presentations on this new format, starting with our next event: a presentation at Pacing the Planet Headquarters in Edina this coming Saturday, Oct. 13, at 4 p.m. Everyone and anyone is invited to attend our talk-and-discussion, which we call, "Climate Change: the Present Emergency."
Please contact either Dana or myself (Gavain) if you are interested in attending Saturday, and we can provide directions. We look forward to seeing you!