• Chapter I
• Chapter II
• Chapter III
• Chapter IV






Chapter I




The reason why the United States has been able to fuel this global demand for dollars is linked to the need for other countries to own dollars in order to be able to buy oil and other goods. It may seem unbelievable, but practically all countries until a few years ago used US dollars to trade amongst each other, even countries that were anti-American and against US imperialist policies.

This economic arrangement has allowed America to achieve an unparalleled strategic advantage over its geopolitical opponents (initially the USSR, now Russia and China), namely, a practically unlimited dollar spending capacity even as it accumulates an astronomical public debt (over 21 trillion dollars). The destabilizing factor for the global economy has been America's ability to accumulate enormous amounts of public debt without having to worry about the consequences or even of any possible mistrust international markets may have for the dollar. Countries simply needed dollars for trade and bought US treasures to diversify their financial assets.

The global socioeconomic system of capitalism, is forcing us to work harder to surpass previous consumption and population numbers until we have devoured everything that maintains life, ending up with a polluted, lifeless, and a scorched planet.

The question at stake here is whether it is possible to grow the economy and, at the very same time, achieve an absolute reduction in the throughput of energy and materials, that is, to decouple growth from increased material and energy usage. More specifically, in relation to the climate crisis, is it possible to grow the economy and reduce carbon emissions at the same time? Various proponents of degrowth do not deny that it is possible. In the past, It was showed that energy production and world GDP are highly correlated and, since most of the energy is derived from fossil fuels, this involves increased emissions. Unless the connection between growth of production and growth of emissions can be broken, and to a sufficient extent, there can be no reduction of carbon emissions without an end to growth – indeed without contraction.

When Russia sold the USA bonds, the foreign purchase of USA domestic assets diminished a lot and diminished the USA financial account. When China sells its USA assets the effect will create a complete shut down of the USA economy and diminish the 'dollar' as a currency to be used in the world.

During boom times when the economy is doing well, people earn more income and this translates to higher tax revenues for the government, lowering the budget deficit, at least that is what the Republican leadership should be doing instead of giving more tax breaks to rich corporations.

It has been widely noted that American consumers have the largest ecological footprint in the world. While not completely absolving individuals – especially those on the upper stages of the socio-economic ladder – for perpetuating this wasteful system, it can be argued that those large ecological footprints are not entirely their own. The combined effects of aggressive marketing, advertising, and planned product obsolescence mean that the American consumer’s oversized footprint is largely a consequence and reflection of the global power of Transnational Corporations (TNCs). In that sense, it is perhaps more accurate to speak of corporate ecological footprints rather than the footprints of nations or individuals. Globalization has meant the distancing of cause and effect, source and sink, so that the pollution and human exploitation caused in the production and transport of goods has remained invisible and opaque to consumers. The global economy institutionalizes a global ignorance, in which producers and consumers cannot know or care about one another, and in which the histories of all products will be lost. Until now, it seems, corporations’ pollution offshoring was easy enough for Northern policymakers to comfortably ignore. Of course, global warming already showed that simply exporting polluting production to the global South was meaningless as far as the Earth’s atmosphere and climate were concerned. But local air quality was seen as something distinct, so that the smoggy horrors of industrializing China or India were, for places like North America, still at a ‘safe’ distance. No more. Now, in addition to the products that magically appear on Western store shelves absolutely shorn of history and provenance, much of the hitherto distant pollution emitted in their production has also arrived.

The greenhouse effect is the way in which heat is trapped close to the surface of the Earth by “greenhouse gases”, carbon dioxide (CO2) being by far the worst gas ever, but methane and other gases are also continuously and alarmingly added to the mix. Human activities are critically, recklessly, and harmfully adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the air we breath, thus causing the global warming of our planet and, consequently and unquestionably, creating a dangerous change of the climate worldwide. Since WWII, America has been by far the worst polluter of greenhouse gases than any other nations and is continuing relentlessly, unabating and unremitting to be the worst through proxy nations such as China, South Korea, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia and many other nations where businesses from America have set up offices to manufacture products at cheaper costs.

Over the past century, climate-warming has been caused mostly by human activities. Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that the Earth’s climate responds to changes in greenhouse gas levels. Past evidence can also be found in tree rings, ocean sediments, coral reefs, and layers of sedimentary rocks. Global climate is known to continue to change over this century and beyond. The magnitude of climate change beyond the next few decades depends primarily on the amount of heat-trapping gases emitted globally.

Even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, global warming would continue to happen in the future for at least several more decades if not centuries. That’s because it takes a while for the planet to adjust, and also because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. In the absence of major action to reduce emissions, global temperature will rise by an average of 6 °C (10.8 °F). A global disaster is already unfolding at the poles of the planet as we observed and shown that the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer within just a few years. Many devastating forest fires will continue to be of common occurrence and intensified, aggravated, and exacerbated by more heat due to global warming.

More devastating forests fires, including all of those in urban settings, and everywhere in the world mean less Oxygen, more carbon dioxide (CO2), and less trees to fight against the global warming of our planet. Most fires are also a terrible lost to people and all life on Earth.

The problem with climate change is that greenhouse gases sent into the atmosphere today lock in big costs later. Almost 2 million homes worth over $1 trillion are at risk of being underwater by 2100. Add relocation costs for those affected and the loss of tourism dollars in coastal communities, and numbers soar into the trillions for just a fraction of the damage that experts fear global warming will cause. There are many barriers to overcome. People here first must believe that climate change is real. Then they must believe that it's harmful.

Climate change is already affecting life on Earth, despite a global temperature increase of just 1°C. Nearly every ecosystem on the planet is being altered, and plants and animals are being so affected that scientists may soon be forced to intervene. More than 85 percent of ecological systems on Earth, land and sea, have been affected by climate change. Temperature extremes are causing evolutionary adaption in many species, changing them genetically and physically. These responses include changes in tolerances to high temperatures, shifts in sex-ratios, reduced body size, and migration of species. Understanding the extent to which these goods and services have been impacted allows humans to plan and adapt to changing ecosystem conditions. The changes have manifested in some species shifting to higher or lower ground as the planet heats up, while others are becoming smaller, as a higher surface-area-to-body-mass ratio makes it easier to stay cool.

Average global temperatures have risen 1°C since the industrial era. These observations have had broad and worrying impacts on natural systems, with accumulating consequences for people. Minimizing the impacts of climate change on core ecological processes must now be a key policy priority for all nations. It is important that governments to follow through on the promises made in the Paris climate agreement, which aims to keep global warming below a 1.5°C threshold, although an increasing amount of scientists are sounding the alarm that even those pledges may be too little, too late.Time is running out for a globally synchronized response to climate change that integrates adequate protection of biodiversity and ecosystem services. It is no longer sensible to consider this as a concern for the future. If we dont act quickly to curb emissions it is likely that every ecosystem across Earth will fundamentally change in our lifetimes.

Climate breakdown is happening before our eyes at the same time the science on climate change grows stronger and has wider acceptance. Hurricane Harvey, which struck at the center of the petroleum industry – the heart of climate denialism, provided a glimpse of the new normal of climate crisis-induced events. By 2050, one billion people could be displaced by climate crises. Climate disasters demonstrate the immense failure of government at all levels. The world has known about the likely disastrous impacts of climate change for decades. It is not just science that confirms the climate crisis, it is also people’s experience with extreme weather, record breaking temperatures, and deadly heat waves that make it hard to deny climate catastrophe. Climate denialism requires shutting one’s eyes to obvious realities when the truth is the Earth is warmer than it has been in 120,000 years. There is no doubt that storms are made more deadly by climate change.

The United States elected a climate denier, Donald Trump, who describes climate change as a hoax and has appointed officials who are complicit in denying climate change, closely tied to polluting industries and favor policies that result in climate breakdown, and many of whom were part of the misinformation network on climate. Trump has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement, putting the US out of step with the world on the issue. The Trump administration has sought to hide evidence of climate change, but people have been sharing climate documents with other governments and scientific groups before he hid them. Trump has conducted a witch hunt against believers in climate change. These actions have resulted in the unusual step of climate scientists protesting the Trump administration.

Most or all of the rise can be attributed to global warming. There's also the economic impact of losing shorelines. The U.N. estimates that the so-called ocean economy, which includes employment, marine-based ecosystem services and cultural services, is between $3 to $6 trillion per year. Coastal areas within 100 kilometers (62 miles) of the ocean account for more than 60 percent of the world's total gross national production. For the economies of developing nations, these regions are especially crucial. A big part of that coastal production is food. As the sea gobbles up fertile seaside land and river deltas, feeding the rapidly escalating human population is going to get that much more difficult.

The future of tourism is also a major concern, particularly for small island states, where tourism generally accounts for more than a quarter of GDP. For some islands, that amount may soon have to be wiped off the balance sheet. Just last year, five islands in the Solomon Island archipelago disappeared to the rising sea. But economic losses due to extreme weather and climate change are also a major issue for developed nations; according to preliminary estimates, Hurricane Harvey caused up to $200 billion in damage. People may enjoy the coasts, beaches, surf and sand. But by emitting greenhouse gases at an unsustainable rate, we're losing these cherished ecosystems to the rising seas and superstorms. Perhaps we should give the coasts back to nature. By letting key coastal ecosystems return to their natural states, mangrove forests and other vegetated marine and intertidal habitats can act as bulwarks against the sea level rise and hurricanes.

Like forests, these coastal areas are powerful carbon sinks, safely storing around a quarter of the additional carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. Crucially, they also help protect communities and wildlife near shores from floods and storm surges.

Global pushing such as the Paris climate agreement have tried to limit global warming to 2C above pre-industrial levels. However, with latest projections pointing to an increase of 3.2C by 2100, these goals seem to be slipping out of reach. One of the most enormous resulting threats to cities around the world is sea-level rise, caused by the expansion of water at higher temperatures and melting ice sheets on the north and south poles. An estimate 300 million people worldwide live in areas that will eventually be flooded at 3C of global warming. The regional impact of these changes is highly uneven, with four out of five people affected living in Asia. Although sea levels will not rise instantaneously, the calculated increases will be inescapable at a temperature rise of 3C, meaning they will be irreversible even if warming eventually slows down.

But why is this happening? As humans have increased greenhouse gases as well as cut down the world’s forests, the overall temperature has risen about 1.4 degrees since 1880. This rise in temperature has caused the ocean waters to get warmer, which in turn causes them to expand. Expanding waters leads to higher levels. Additionally, the warming waters are causing the ice caps, glaciers, and ice sheets of the world to melt, which is then funneling water into the oceans. As more and more ice melts, the seas will continue to rise. How much are the seas going to continue rising? It’s an inexact science since so many variables are at play, but general estimates can be made. Even if all contributors immediately stopped, it’s likely that the oceans will rise between 1.2-2.6 feet by 2100. If things continue at their current pace, sea levels could rise as much as 6.6 feet. The main factor determining the sea levels will be how quickly the world’s ice continues to melt.National Geographic puts it this way "Oceans will likely continue to rise as well, but predicting the degree to which they will rise is an inexact science.

The global socioeconomic system of capitalism, is forcing us to work harder to surpass previous consumption and population numbers until we have devoured everything that maintains life, ending up with a polluted, lifeless, and a scorched planet. Civilisation’s present and ultimate mode, capitalism is the system that can only lead us to our annihilation. This isn’t any individual’s, or any group of people’s fault, it’s the economic system that took form first with the energy of slaves to produce the raw materials that were then manufactured with the energy of fossil fuels. The economic success of that was dishonestly attributed to the capitalist system but it came from the benefit of using slave, which was overwhelm by non-renewable fossil fuels that are burned as renewables. The work force was then educated to use fossil fuels in its entire myriad of uses and also to integrated workers in a system of contradicting values by using competition as the regulator in a social setting that must also be cooperative to be social. To maintain a general satisfaction in a social system that’s driven and motivate with competition, endless growth is needed, but in a finite system it must end when resources are exhausted. However, we also have a double whammy, that of pollution that impairs life and the carbon that’s heating the biosphere and acidifying the oceans, they would end life if the system is maintained to its exhaustion. It’s like been inside a spinning treadmill, the faster a few people run the faster each individual needs to run to stay in position. The only ones that can slow and stop that nonsense are the wealthy people, who have successfully blocked any attempts to head off that stampede, so the wealthiest are riding that wave of people and getting the benefits with little effort. To keep up with that momentum, society must take what it can, leaving nothing. Our options within the capitalist system is limited because competition entices and pressures us to keep doing more of everything or suffer the consequences of losing the little power we still have.

The power that controls the economy is with the 1% they have the power to stop and change that exploitive, chaotic violent world economy. The 1%, power comes from finance which’s depended on economic growth, and that can’t be jeopardised just to save a few millions poor people around the planet who are already suffering, which’s the present worry for concerned people. Sadly the 1% dominates and controls the information services; it’s the only power that is able to disseminate the needed information to change our self-destructive way of life to an inclusive positive one. If we can show the 1% that they’re facing a dire situation in a overpopulate world that’s depleted of vital resources, in an unliveable hot and violent climate. They are likely to avoid continuing on that path as wealth can’t have any value in that unendurable social chaotic violence, when the economy goes from sour to putrid and as well the 1% may be an early victim of vengefulness. Without affordable oil we can’t produce the quantity of coal, gas, and pump the vital water that’s also needed to grow our food, it will curtail transporting all that stuff around the world. The difficulty will also be magnified by global warming which will need much more energy to counteract its effects. Global warming alone can kill us all. One must understand that burning that vast store of carbon that nature managed to accumulate in the ground has never happen before, it will also release the carbon from the permafrost and methane hydrates that will produce a colossal positive feedbacks. To sustain life in those extreme conditions would require more energy but there will be less to share, especially with more people. There’s no certainty of how much time we have to turn the world economy from an exploitative one, to one that functions within nature, as a part of nature before it becomes irretrievable. We desperately need to show the 1% how closes they and we are in producing an unliveable world due to the outcome of capitalist economy. The 1% life is at stake like everyone, they must not only cooperate to live within nature’s ability, but promote it on a world scale. They are the only ones with the power to do so, and it may be the only way to survive. All living things have to have a survival instinct to be alive; it will save us all if we use it. However, that instinct will only kick in when those multi billionaires realise that their life is at stake and they can only be saved if they do their best to save everyone. That would mean an unreserved sharing with all people and a qualified one with nature, the sooner we can accomplish that, the easier and satisfying life will be, for the more cooperative our life is the more satisfying and secure it must be. In a cooperative based society there would be no advantage to be deceitful; people will then revert to honest relationships. That correlation in societies and also as a part of nature infers that people would see exploiting nature as destructive for us.The reason we are destroying our habitat thus ourselves is due to the competitiveness of civilisation and its intensification under capitalism, that competition is capitalism lifeblood and now it’s our foe. The more social one is the more cooperative one must be, the less conflict we have, and as well it’s the most efficient way to live, it’s our nature. That means having to share the efforts and the benefits, even of its unfamiliarity for the 1%.

Although the yearning for peace is deep-seated, it has never been achieved during civilisation due to its competitive nature. If we keep capitalism, the ultimate in competitiveness, it will finish us. Peace can’t be attained with military force; one can’t fight for peace or for cooperation, as they’re an outcome of mutual agreements to benefit everyone. Peace is now possible because we have to have it to survive. People have the intellectual and the emotional ability to work out the multitude of changes to enable us to be fully social and survive, if it’s our goal.

Climate change is already affecting life on Earth, despite a global temperature increase of just 1°C. Nearly every ecosystem on the planet is being altered, and plants and animals are being so affected that scientists may soon be forced to intervene to create “human-assisted evolution”. The researchers say 82 percent of “core ecological processes” on land and sea have been affected by climate change in a way that had not been expected “for decades.” Temperature extremes are causing evolutionary adaption in many species, changing them genetically and physically. These responses include changes in tolerances to high temperatures, shifts in sex-ratios, reduced body size, and migration of species. Understanding the extent to which these goods and services have been impacted allows humans to plan and adapt to changing ecosystem conditions. We are simply astonished at the level of change we observed which many of us in the scientific community did not expect to see for decades.

Governments should follow through on the promises made in the Paris climate agreement, which aims to keep global warming below a 1.5°C threshold—although an increasing amount of scientists are sounding the alarm that even those pledges may be too little, too late. Time is running out for a globally synchronized response to climate change that integrates adequate protection of biodiversity and ecosystem services. It is no longer sensible to consider this as a concern for the future, if we don’t act quickly to curb emissions it is likely that every ecosystem across Earth will fundamentally change in our lifetimes.

By 2100, if nations continue to burn fossil fuels at the current rates, three out of four people will be at risk from lethal heat waves. And even if the governments of the world act on promises they made in 2015 and drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, almost one in two could face the risk of sickness and death by intolerable heat. That is because, as the temperatures rise, heat and humidity begin to challenge human physiology. Humans are adapted to body temperatures of around 37°C. If humidity—the levels of water vapour in the air—go up with the thermometer, then people caught in a zone of extreme heat cannot adjust body temperatures by perspiration. And with every 1°C rise in temperatures, the capacity of the air to hold moisture goes up by 7 percent. People with no access to air conditioning or a cool breeze become at high risk. It happened in Europe in 2003, when an estimated 70,000 died. A heat wave in Moscow in 2010 killed around 10,000. And researchers warned years ago that under global warming predictions, more such extremes of heat would become inevitable by 2020.

For heat waves, our options are now between bad or terrible. Many people around the world are already paying the ultimate price of heat waves, and while models suggest that this is likely to continue, it could be much worse if emissions are not considerably reduced. The human body can only function within a narrow range of core body temperatures around 37°C. Heat waves pose a considerable risk to human life because hot weather, aggravated with high humidity, can raise body temperature, leading to life-threatening conditions. By 2019 climate would change inexorably in at least some regions of the globe. More recently he and colleagues calculated that the relentless increase in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could limit the growing season and pose a threat to world food security. History has yet to deliver a verdict on either prediction.

But the warning about heat waves starts from facts already available. The humidity and temperature hazards and predicted that at least one climate zone, the Gulf between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, could become murderously hot by the century’s end. Heat waves over recent decades in India has established a link between extremes of heat, climate change and mass death.

There is a common threshold at which temperatures and humidities become lethal: that is, as relative humidity climbed, even lower temperatures could kill. Right now, one human in three lives in a climate zone in which death by extreme heat is or could be possible. The area in which such conditions are liable to happen on at least 20 days a year is predicted to grow.

By 2100 New York could have around 50 days in which conditions could be potentially lethal. In Sydney, Australia the number of such deadly days could be 20, for Los Angeles 30. For Orlando, Florida, and Houston, Texas, the entire summer could exceed the thresholds at which people have been known to die. Notoriously, President Trump has announced that he will withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement of 2015 to contain average global warming to well below 2°C by the century’s end. Unless we reduce fossil fuel emissions, an estimated 48 percent of the human population could be at risk of summer extremes. And if they do not, this hazard rises to 74 percent. Climate change has put humanity on a path that will become increasingly dangerous and difficult to reverse if greenhouse gas emissions are not taken much more seriously. Action like the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement is a step in the wrong direction that will inevitably delay fixing a problem for which there is simply no time to waste.

When you’re in a hole, it’s usually best to stop digging. But when President Trump told supporters at his 100th day rally in Pennsylvania that “we are putting our coal miners back to work,” he just burrowed deeper into the bed of administration lies on energy. The truth of the matter is that climate regulations aren’t a “war on coal,” and no amount of presidential photo-ops will bring mining jobs back. A recent report from the Center for Global Energy clearly shows why. The demand for U.S. coal has collapsed in the past six years, it explains, following big improvements in energy efficiency (like better lighting and appliances), cheaper gas and renewables, and a decline in coal exports as other countries look to cleaner sources of energy. Three of the four largest coal mining companies have filed for bankruptcy, while Bob Murray — CEO of the largest remaining one — recently warned Trump that coal jobs are unlikely to return. The CEO should know, as Murray Energy’s formula for avoiding bankruptcy has largely involved slashing jobs, compromising safety, and worsening labor conditions. Trump used tax payer money to restart the coal industry in America was totally wrong.

What sorts of problems will exist in times ahead? What can we do to deal with them? A suggestion ... At present, numerous environmental researchers are warning of future resource shortages. The list of them is large and includes water, oil, a variety of minerals and metals, as well as other materials. Yet, most people carry on as if they do not hear the message at all. They refuse to cut back in their dreams of continuing economic growth. In relation, part of the problem with them is perhaps an inability to make connections. For the most part, they seem to have little or no idea about the collective consequences of their individual behaviors.

For example, they can't walk into a super-sized Wal Mart or a mall and see the environmental destruction and energy use behind each type of product on the shelves, nor that the whole gargantuan conglomeration of products could cause a problem. They can't look at cotton goods or food and imagine the huge oceanic dead zones and the annihilation of many diverse organisms caused by farm runoff. They can't go to the paper isle and picture that, aside from all of the multitudes of items derived from timber, U.S. toilet paper use alone destroys thirteen million acres of forests per year, along with all life dependent on those forests. Particularly the loggers, the paper mill operators, the truckers hauling raw materials and final products, and the store clerks don't want to visualize such images. They don't want to see their own roles in the process any more than do the people who, while complaining about the impacts of overpopulation on crowded highways, chose to have many children, which, of course, will lead to many more toilet paper purchases in times to come. In fact, they, like the individuals who wring their hands over mountaintop blowups for coal and the slaughter of indigenous forest dwellers by oil company hired thugs, don't want to be told of cut-backs of any types at all, let alone just bathroom paper.

Especially if they are fond of vacation travel or have seen their home energy use spike due to lots of appliances running at once, they don't want to picture that they possibly could be implicated in anything having to do with the downside of their lifestyles. They don't want to link their habits to the fact that over seventy percent of electricity in the U.S. comes from fossil fuels. They don't want to think that maybe their rising demand for oil at the pump or penchant for air travel is somehow indirectly related to the types of damage seen in the Amazon forests, the Appalachians, the Niger Delta or the Gulf of Mexico.

Above all, they do not want to be told that the economic growth is not coming back. They don't want to picture that life will dramatically change as the oil runs out while the price for it and everything dependent on it will continuously rise. They don't want to question about whether the capitalist system of economics will cause further ecological ruin and social inequality as it plays itself out. Further, they don't want to consider that maybe they will be forced to change some of their life's major goals and the ways that they live in times to come due to a combination of factors, such as the coming energy power-down, climate change variables, diminishing resource bases and overpopulation. No, they, instead, want to rise up the socio-economic chain so as to be able to consume even more goods and, if they're particularly adept at obtaining riches, maybe even be able to purchase a vacation home, a yacht, an RV or some other coveted treasure.

Moreover, they don't want to imagine that maybe two groups will make out okay in times ahead and one of them probably won't be the (ever shrinking) middle class. They don't want to note that the successful ones just could be the very wealthy people, who can afford to buy anything regardless of its costliness and scarcity, and the people at the other end of the spectrum, who have simply walked away from the status quo to form self-sufficient farming communities, transition towns and egalitarian co-ops able to provide for the majority of their members' needs. Instead, they simply want to envision that everything will get better overall in life after a spell. Yet, here we are all together stuck in a situation in which there exist seven billion humans all needing food, water, shelter and other things while increasing in number at a rate unprecedented in human history. All together, we're digging up and plowing every parcel of land on which we can manage to lay our hands. We're trawling and dredging every ocean and sea onto which we can stake our claims. We're damming every waterway that can be controlled. We're pumping and polluting the world's fresh water supply faster than it can be replenished, using up other resources in entirety, turning the Earth's oceans into acid, fouling the atmosphere, scarring the land with deep mining holes, blowing up mountains to extract their coal and, in exchange, creating mountains of trash. Simultaneously, we're methodically ripping apart the planet's forests at the rate of about one acre per second, destroying multitudinous species one after another, creating climate change on a scale that staggers the imagination, and generating explosions of radiation to blow into every outdoors nook and cranny in existence. (Recent news headlines include Radiation Readings in Fukushima Reactor Rise to Highest Since Crisis Began. Imagine the hubris of a species that refuses to learn from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, such that even now the desire exists to build even more nuclear plants and A-bombs!)

At the same time, we're warring with each other over resources between and within nations, and always insisting upon more things to own. In relation, the proliferation of wants and needs is limitless. So, we're demanding more food, more water, more construction for our ever burgeoning masses, more jobs and, especially, more spaces into which to fan out as we add 219,000 more humans every single day (eighty million people each year) while simultaneously displacing other types of life whose environments we take over in the process. Meanwhile, billions are sunk in poverty largely due to having already exceeded their regions' carrying capacity and, as they did so, they often took the last trees with them, just as had happened on Easter Island.

At some point, something has to give. The pattern, the rapacious ravage, cannot persist indefinitely. Indeed, it won't do so because the resource base, itself, is largely disappearing across the globe. The ocean fisheries are depleting and expected to run out by mid-century. Climate change has brought pine and spruce beetles in such high numbers that they are eating millions upon millions of acres of trees and spreading out everywhere that they can, much like their human counterparts. Concurrently, methane is releasing from underwater beds and permafrost to join the carbon releases from humanity's use of fossil fuel from rich underground deposits that took millions of years to form, and that will be gone in the blink of a century's time. In relation, the looming climate change effects will be horrendous and will curtail many areas of human activities.

Yet, the main reason that the whole mess will be curbed is a simple one: Infinite growth, whether economic growth or population growth, cannot continue indefinitely. Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. Accordingly, one can envision that a crash is coming, one far worse than the current recession. In large measure, it's because environmental tipping points are on the way and, for those people in the worst locations for the collapse, the desperation, conflicts and chaos will likely be horrific in scale and ferocity.

How could they not be when our governments and the status quo do not encourage our transitioning to a steady state economy, business based on regionalized commerce and a cooperative inclusive economic arrangement rather than out of control global competition? How can further troubles not come into being when a vicious globalized capitalist system is in existence for which maximal profits, not people and their needs, is always the overriding goal? Despite its desirably from many standpoints, how can an alternative scheme be put in place when it bumps up against the prevailing paradigm and the corporatists, the powerful über-elites that control the gargantuan transnational companies and our fawning government toadies?

It has been widely noted that American consumers have the largest ecological footprint in the world. While not completely absolving individuals – especially those on the upper stages of the socio-economic ladder – for perpetuating this wasteful system, it can be argued that those large ecological footprints are not entirely their own. The combined effects of aggressive marketing, advertising, and planned product obsolescence mean that the American consumer’s oversized footprint is largely a consequence and reflection of the global power of Transnational Corporations (TNCs). In that sense, it is perhaps more accurate to speak of corporate ecological footprints rather than the footprints of nations or individuals. Globalization has meant the distancing of cause and effect, source and sink, so that the pollution and human exploitation caused in the production and transport of goods has remained invisible and opaque to consumers. The global economy institutionalizes a global ignorance, in which producers and consumers cannot know or care about one another, and in which the histories of all products will be lost. Until now, it seems, corporations’ pollution offshoring was easy enough for Northern policymakers to comfortably ignore. Of course, global warming already showed that simply exporting polluting production to the global South was meaningless as far as the Earth’s atmosphere and climate were concerned. But local air quality was seen as something distinct, so that the smoggy horrors of industrializing China or India were, for places like North America, still at a ‘safe’ distance. No more. Now, in addition to the products that magically appear on Western store shelves absolutely shorn of history and provenance, much of the hitherto distant pollution emitted in their production has also arrived.

The greenhouse effect is the way in which heat is trapped close to the surface of the Earth by “greenhouse gases”, carbon dioxide (CO2) being by far the worst gas ever, but methane and other gases are also continuously and alarmingly added to the mix. Human activities are critically, recklessly, and harmfully adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the air we breath, thus causing the global warming of our planet and, consequently and unquestionably, creating a dangerous change of the climate worldwide. Since WWII, America has been by far the worst polluter of greenhouse gases than any other nations and is continuing relentlessly, unabating and unremitting to be the worst through proxy nations such as China, South Korea, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia and many other nations where businesses from America have set up offices to manufacture products at cheaper costs.

Over the past century, climate-warming has been caused mostly by human activities. Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that the Earth’s climate responds to changes in greenhouse gas levels. Past evidence can also be found in tree rings, ocean sediments, coral reefs, and layers of sedimentary rocks. Global climate is known to continue to change over this century and beyond. The magnitude of climate change beyond the next few decades depends primarily on the amount of heat-trapping gases emitted globally. Even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, global warming would continue to happen in the future for at least several more decades if not centuries. That’s because it takes a while for the planet to adjust, and also because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. In the absence of major action to reduce emissions, global temperature will rise by an average of 6 °C (10.8 °F). A global disaster is already unfolding at the poles of the planet as we observed and shown that the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer within just a few years. Many devastating forest fires will continue to be of common occurrence and intensified, aggravated, and exacerbated by more heat due to global warming.

More devastating forests fires, including all of those in urban settings, and everywhere in the world mean less Oxygen, more carbon dioxide (CO2), and less trees to fight against the global warming of our planet. Most fires are also a terrible lost to people and all life on Earth. The problem with climate change is that greenhouse gases sent into the atmosphere today lock in big costs later. Almost 2 million homes worth over $1 trillion are at risk of being underwater by 2100. Add relocation costs for those affected and the loss of tourism dollars in coastal communities, and numbers soar into the trillions for just a fraction of the damage that experts fear global warming will cause. There are many barriers to overcome. People here first must believe that climate change is real. Then they must believe that it's harmful.

Climate change is already affecting life on Earth, despite a global temperature increase of just 1°C. Nearly every ecosystem on the planet is being altered, and plants and animals are being so affected that scientists may soon be forced to intervene. More than 85 percent of ecological systems on Earth, land and sea, have been affected by climate change. Temperature extremes are causing evolutionary adaption in many species, changing them genetically and physically. These responses include changes in tolerances to high temperatures, shifts in sex-ratios, reduced body size, and migration of species. Understanding the extent to which these goods and services have been impacted allows humans to plan and adapt to changing ecosystem conditions. The changes have manifested in some species shifting to higher or lower ground as the planet heats up, while others are becoming smaller, as a higher surface-area-to-body-mass ratio makes it easier to stay cool.

Average global temperatures have risen 1°C since the industrial era. These observations have had broad and worrying impacts on natural systems, with accumulating consequences for people. Minimizing the impacts of climate change on core ecological processes must now be a key policy priority for all nations. It is important that governments to follow through on the promises made in the Paris climate agreement, which aims to keep global warming below a 1.5°C threshold, although an increasing amount of scientists are sounding the alarm that even those pledges may be too little, too late.Time is running out for a globally synchronized response to climate change that integrates adequate protection of biodiversity and ecosystem services. It is no longer sensible to consider this as a concern for the future. If we dont act quickly to curb emissions it is likely that every ecosystem across Earth will fundamentally change in our lifetimes.

Climate breakdown is happening before our eyes at the same time the science on climate change grows stronger and has wider acceptance. Hurricane Harvey, which struck at the center of the petroleum industry – the heart of climate denialism, provided a glimpse of the new normal of climate crisis-induced events. By 2050, one billion people could be displaced by climate crises. Climate disasters demonstrate the immense failure of government at all levels. The world has known about the likely disastrous impacts of climate change for decades. It is not just science that confirms the climate crisis, it is also people’s experience with extreme weather, record breaking temperatures, and deadly heat waves that make it hard to deny climate catastrophe. Climate denialism requires shutting one’s eyes to obvious realities when the truth is the Earth is warmer than it has been in 120,000 years. There is no doubt that storms are made more deadly by climate change.

The United States elected a climate denier, Donald Trump, who describes climate change as a hoax and has appointed officials who are complicit in denying climate change, closely tied to polluting industries and favor policies that result in climate breakdown, and many of whom were part of the misinformation network on climate. Trump has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement, putting the US out of step with the world on the issue. The Trump administration has sought to hide evidence of climate change, but people have been sharing climate documents with other governments and scientific groups before he hid them. Trump has conducted a witch hunt against believers in climate change. These actions have resulted in the unusual step of climate scientists protesting the Trump administration.

Most or all of the rise can be attributed to global warming. There's also the economic impact of losing shorelines. The U.N. estimates that the so-called ocean economy, which includes employment, marine-based ecosystem services and cultural services, is between $3 to $6 trillion per year. Coastal areas within 100 kilometers (62 miles) of the ocean account for more than 60 percent of the world's total gross national production. For the economies of developing nations, these regions are especially crucial. A big part of that coastal production is food. As the sea gobbles up fertile seaside land and river deltas, feeding the rapidly escalating human population is going to get that much more difficult.

The future of tourism is also a major concern, particularly for small island states, where tourism generally accounts for more than a quarter of GDP. For some islands, that amount may soon have to be wiped off the balance sheet. Just last year, five islands in the Solomon Island archipelago disappeared to the rising sea. But economic losses due to extreme weather and climate change are also a major issue for developed nations; according to preliminary estimates, Hurricane Harvey caused up to $200 billion in damage. People may enjoy the coasts, beaches, surf and sand. But by emitting greenhouse gases at an unsustainable rate, we're losing these cherished ecosystems to the rising seas and superstorms. Perhaps we should give the coasts back to nature. By letting key coastal ecosystems return to their natural states, mangrove forests and other vegetated marine and intertidal habitats can act as bulwarks against the sea level rise and hurricanes.

Like forests, these coastal areas are powerful carbon sinks, safely storing around a quarter of the additional carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. Crucially, they also help protect communities and wildlife near shores from floods and storm surges.

Global pushing such as the Paris climate agreement have tried to limit global warming to 2C above pre-industrial levels. However, with latest projections pointing to an increase of 3.2C by 2100, these goals seem to be slipping out of reach. One of the most enormous resulting threats to cities around the world is sea-level rise, caused by the expansion of water at higher temperatures and melting ice sheets on the north and south poles. An estimate 300 million people worldwide live in areas that will eventually be flooded at 3C of global warming. The regional impact of these changes is highly uneven, with four out of five people affected living in Asia. Although sea levels will not rise instantaneously, the calculated increases will be inescapable at a temperature rise of 3C, meaning they will be irreversible even if warming eventually slows down.

But why is this happening? As humans have increased greenhouse gases as well as cut down the world’s forests, the overall temperature has risen about 1.4 degrees since 1880. This rise in temperature has caused the ocean waters to get warmer, which in turn causes them to expand. Expanding waters leads to higher levels. Additionally, the warming waters are causing the ice caps, glaciers, and ice sheets of the world to melt, which is then funneling water into the oceans. As more and more ice melts, the seas will continue to rise. How much are the seas going to continue rising? It’s an inexact science since so many variables are at play, but general estimates can be made. Even if all contributors immediately stopped, it’s likely that the oceans will rise between 1.2-2.6 feet by 2100. If things continue at their current pace, sea levels could rise as much as 6.6 feet. The main factor determining the sea levels will be how quickly the world’s ice continues to melt.National Geographic puts it this way "Oceans will likely continue to rise as well, but predicting the degree to which they will rise is an inexact science.

The global socioeconomic system of capitalism, is forcing us to work harder to surpass previous consumption and population numbers until we have devoured everything that maintains life, ending up with a polluted, lifeless, and a scorched planet. Civilisation’s present and ultimate mode, capitalism is the system that can only lead us to our annihilation. This isn’t any individual’s, or any group of people’s fault, it’s the economic system that took form first with the energy of slaves to produce the raw materials that were then manufactured with the energy of fossil fuels. The economic success of that was dishonestly attributed to the capitalist system but it came from the benefit of using slave, which was overwhelm by non-renewable fossil fuels that are burned as renewables. The work force was then educated to use fossil fuels in its entire myriad of uses and also to integrated workers in a system of contradicting values by using competition as the regulator in a social setting that must also be cooperative to be social. To maintain a general satisfaction in a social system that’s driven and motivate with competition, endless growth is needed, but in a finite system it must end when resources are exhausted. However, we also have a double whammy, that of pollution that impairs life and the carbon that’s heating the biosphere and acidifying the oceans, they would end life if the system is maintained to its exhaustion. It’s like been inside a spinning treadmill, the faster a few people run the faster each individual needs to run to stay in position. The only ones that can slow and stop that nonsense are the wealthy people, who have successfully blocked any attempts to head off that stampede, so the wealthiest are riding that wave of people and getting the benefits with little effort. To keep up with that momentum, society must take what it can, leaving nothing. Our options within the capitalist system is limited because competition entices and pressures us to keep doing more of everything or suffer the consequences of losing the little power we still have.

The power that controls the economy is with the 1% they have the power to stop and change that exploitive, chaotic violent world economy. The 1%, power comes from finance which’s depended on economic growth, and that can’t be jeopardised just to save a few millions poor people around the planet who are already suffering, which’s the present worry for concerned people. Sadly the 1% dominates and controls the information services; it’s the only power that is able to disseminate the needed information to change our self-destructive way of life to an inclusive positive one. If we can show the 1% that they’re facing a dire situation in a overpopulate world that’s depleted of vital resources, in an unliveable hot and violent climate. They are likely to avoid continuing on that path as wealth can’t have any value in that unendurable social chaotic violence, when the economy goes from sour to putrid and as well the 1% may be an early victim of vengefulness. Without affordable oil we can’t produce the quantity of coal, gas, and pump the vital water that’s also needed to grow our food, it will curtail transporting all that stuff around the world. The difficulty will also be magnified by global warming which will need much more energy to counteract its effects. Global warming alone can kill us all. One must understand that burning that vast store of carbon that nature managed to accumulate in the ground has never happen before, it will also release the carbon from the permafrost and methane hydrates that will produce a colossal positive feedbacks. To sustain life in those extreme conditions would require more energy but there will be less to share, especially with more people. There’s no certainty of how much time we have to turn the world economy from an exploitative one, to one that functions within nature, as a part of nature before it becomes irretrievable. We desperately need to show the 1% how closes they and we are in producing an unliveable world due to the outcome of capitalist economy. The 1% life is at stake like everyone, they must not only cooperate to live within nature’s ability, but promote it on a world scale. They are the only ones with the power to do so, and it may be the only way to survive. All living things have to have a survival instinct to be alive; it will save us all if we use it. However, that instinct will only kick in when those multi billionaires realise that their life is at stake and they can only be saved if they do their best to save everyone. That would mean an unreserved sharing with all people and a qualified one with nature, the sooner we can accomplish that, the easier and satisfying life will be, for the more cooperative our life is the more satisfying and secure it must be. In a cooperative based society there would be no advantage to be deceitful; people will then revert to honest relationships. That correlation in societies and also as a part of nature infers that people would see exploiting nature as destructive for us.The reason we are destroying our habitat thus ourselves is due to the competitiveness of civilisation and its intensification under capitalism, that competition is capitalism lifeblood and now it’s our foe. The more social one is the more cooperative one must be, the less conflict we have, and as well it’s the most efficient way to live, it’s our nature. That means having to share the efforts and the benefits, even of its unfamiliarity for the 1%.

Although the yearning for peace is deep-seated, it has never been achieved during civilisation due to its competitive nature. If we keep capitalism, the ultimate in competitiveness, it will finish us. Peace can’t be attained with military force; one can’t fight for peace or for cooperation, as they’re an outcome of mutual agreements to benefit everyone. Peace is now possible because we have to have it to survive. People have the intellectual and the emotional ability to work out the multitude of changes to enable us to be fully social and survive, if it’s our goal.

Climate change is already affecting life on Earth, despite a global temperature increase of just 1°C. Nearly every ecosystem on the planet is being altered, and plants and animals are being so affected that scientists may soon be forced to intervene to create “human-assisted evolution”. The researchers say 82 percent of “core ecological processes” on land and sea have been affected by climate change in a way that had not been expected “for decades.” Temperature extremes are causing evolutionary adaption in many species, changing them genetically and physically. These responses include changes in tolerances to high temperatures, shifts in sex-ratios, reduced body size, and migration of species. Understanding the extent to which these goods and services have been impacted allows humans to plan and adapt to changing ecosystem conditions. We are simply astonished at the level of change we observed which many of us in the scientific community did not expect to see for decades.

Governments should follow through on the promises made in the Paris climate agreement, which aims to keep global warming below a 1.5°C threshold—although an increasing amount of scientists are sounding the alarm that even those pledges may be too little, too late. Time is running out for a globally synchronized response to climate change that integrates adequate protection of biodiversity and ecosystem services. It is no longer sensible to consider this as a concern for the future, if we don’t act quickly to curb emissions it is likely that every ecosystem across Earth will fundamentally change in our lifetimes.

By 2100, if nations continue to burn fossil fuels at the current rates, three out of four people will be at risk from lethal heat waves. And even if the governments of the world act on promises they made in 2015 and drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, almost one in two could face the risk of sickness and death by intolerable heat. That is because, as the temperatures rise, heat and humidity begin to challenge human physiology. Humans are adapted to body temperatures of around 37°C. If humidity—the levels of water vapour in the air—go up with the thermometer, then people caught in a zone of extreme heat cannot adjust body temperatures by perspiration. And with every 1°C rise in temperatures, the capacity of the air to hold moisture goes up by 7 percent. People with no access to air conditioning or a cool breeze become at high risk. It happened in Europe in 2003, when an estimated 70,000 died. A heat wave in Moscow in 2010 killed around 10,000. And researchers warned years ago that under global warming predictions, more such extremes of heat would become inevitable by 2020.

For heat waves, our options are now between bad or terrible. Many people around the world are already paying the ultimate price of heat waves, and while models suggest that this is likely to continue, it could be much worse if emissions are not considerably reduced. The human body can only function within a narrow range of core body temperatures around 37°C. Heat waves pose a considerable risk to human life because hot weather, aggravated with high humidity, can raise body temperature, leading to life-threatening conditions. By 2019 climate would change inexorably in at least some regions of the globe. More recently he and colleagues calculated that the relentless increase in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could limit the growing season and pose a threat to world food security. History has yet to deliver a verdict on either prediction.

But the warning about heat waves starts from facts already available. The humidity and temperature hazards and predicted that at least one climate zone, the Gulf between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, could become murderously hot by the century’s end. Heat waves over recent decades in India has established a link between extremes of heat, climate change and mass death.

There is a common threshold at which temperatures and humidities become lethal: that is, as relative humidity climbed, even lower temperatures could kill. Right now, one human in three lives in a climate zone in which death by extreme heat is or could be possible. The area in which such conditions are liable to happen on at least 20 days a year is predicted to grow.

By 2100 New York could have around 50 days in which conditions could be potentially lethal. In Sydney, Australia the number of such deadly days could be 20, for Los Angeles 30. For Orlando, Florida, and Houston, Texas, the entire summer could exceed the thresholds at which people have been known to die. Notoriously, President Trump has announced that he will withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement of 2015 to contain average global warming to well below 2°C by the century’s end. Unless we reduce fossil fuel emissions, an estimated 48 percent of the human population could be at risk of summer extremes. And if they do not, this hazard rises to 74 percent. Climate change has put humanity on a path that will become increasingly dangerous and difficult to reverse if greenhouse gas emissions are not taken much more seriously. Action like the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement is a step in the wrong direction that will inevitably delay fixing a problem for which there is simply no time to waste.

When you’re in a hole, it’s usually best to stop digging. But when President Trump told supporters at his 100th day rally in Pennsylvania that “we are putting our coal miners back to work,” he just burrowed deeper into the bed of administration lies on energy. The truth of the matter is that climate regulations aren’t a “war on coal,” and no amount of presidential photo-ops will bring mining jobs back. A recent report from the Center for Global Energy clearly shows why. The demand for U.S. coal has collapsed in the past six years, it explains, following big improvements in energy efficiency (like better lighting and appliances), cheaper gas and renewables, and a decline in coal exports as other countries look to cleaner sources of energy. Three of the four largest coal mining companies have filed for bankruptcy, while Bob Murray — CEO of the largest remaining one — recently warned Trump that coal jobs are unlikely to return. The CEO should know, as Murray Energy’s formula for avoiding bankruptcy has largely involved slashing jobs, compromising safety, and worsening labor conditions. Trump used tax payer money to restart the coal industry in America was totally wrong.

What sorts of problems will exist in times ahead? What can we do to deal with them? A suggestion ... At present, numerous environmental researchers are warning of future resource shortages. The list of them is large and includes water, oil, a variety of minerals and metals, as well as other materials. Yet, most people carry on as if they do not hear the message at all. They refuse to cut back in their dreams of continuing economic growth. In relation, part of the problem with them is perhaps an inability to make connections. For the most part, they seem to have little or no idea about the collective consequences of their individual behaviors.

For example, they can't walk into a super-sized Wal Mart or a mall and see the environmental destruction and energy use behind each type of product on the shelves, nor that the whole gargantuan conglomeration of products could cause a problem. They can't look at cotton goods or food and imagine the huge oceanic dead zones and the annihilation of many diverse organisms caused by farm runoff. They can't go to the paper isle and picture that, aside from all of the multitudes of items derived from timber, U.S. toilet paper use alone destroys thirteen million acres of forests per year, along with all life dependent on those forests. Particularly the loggers, the paper mill operators, the truckers hauling raw materials and final products, and the store clerks don't want to visualize such images. They don't want to see their own roles in the process any more than do the people who, while complaining about the impacts of overpopulation on crowded highways, chose to have many children, which, of course, will lead to many more toilet paper purchases in times to come. In fact, they, like the individuals who wring their hands over mountaintop blowups for coal and the slaughter of indigenous forest dwellers by oil company hired thugs, don't want to be told of cut-backs of any types at all, let alone just bathroom paper.

Especially if they are fond of vacation travel or have seen their home energy use spike due to lots of appliances running at once, they don't want to picture that they possibly could be implicated in anything having to do with the downside of their lifestyles. They don't want to link their habits to the fact that over seventy percent of electricity in the U.S. comes from fossil fuels. They don't want to think that maybe their rising demand for oil at the pump or penchant for air travel is somehow indirectly related to the types of damage seen in the Amazon forests, the Appalachians, the Niger Delta or the Gulf of Mexico.

Above all, they do not want to be told that the economic growth is not coming back. They don't want to picture that life will dramatically change as the oil runs out while the price for it and everything dependent on it will continuously rise. They don't want to question about whether the capitalist system of economics will cause further ecological ruin and social inequality as it plays itself out. Further, they don't want to consider that maybe they will be forced to change some of their life's major goals and the ways that they live in times to come due to a combination of factors, such as the coming energy power-down, climate change variables, diminishing resource bases and overpopulation. No, they, instead, want to rise up the socio-economic chain so as to be able to consume even more goods and, if they're particularly adept at obtaining riches, maybe even be able to purchase a vacation home, a yacht, an RV or some other coveted treasure.

Moreover, they don't want to imagine that maybe two groups will make out okay in times ahead and one of them probably won't be the (ever shrinking) middle class. They don't want to note that the successful ones just could be the very wealthy people, who can afford to buy anything regardless of its costliness and scarcity, and the people at the other end of the spectrum, who have simply walked away from the status quo to form self-sufficient farming communities, transition towns and egalitarian co-ops able to provide for the majority of their members' needs. Instead, they simply want to envision that everything will get better overall in life after a spell. Yet, here we are all together stuck in a situation in which there exist seven billion humans all needing food, water, shelter and other things while increasing in number at a rate unprecedented in human history. All together, we're digging up and plowing every parcel of land on which we can manage to lay our hands. We're trawling and dredging every ocean and sea onto which we can stake our claims. We're damming every waterway that can be controlled. We're pumping and polluting the world's fresh water supply faster than it can be replenished, using up other resources in entirety, turning the Earth's oceans into acid, fouling the atmosphere, scarring the land with deep mining holes, blowing up mountains to extract their coal and, in exchange, creating mountains of trash. Simultaneously, we're methodically ripping apart the planet's forests at the rate of about one acre per second, destroying multitudinous species one after another, creating climate change on a scale that staggers the imagination, and generating explosions of radiation to blow into every outdoors nook and cranny in existence. (Recent news headlines include Radiation Readings in Fukushima Reactor Rise to Highest Since Crisis Began. Imagine the hubris of a species that refuses to learn from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, such that even now the desire exists to build even more nuclear plants and A-bombs!)

At the same time, we're warring with each other over resources between and within nations, and always insisting upon more things to own. In relation, the proliferation of wants and needs is limitless. So, we're demanding more food, more water, more construction for our ever burgeoning masses, more jobs and, especially, more spaces into which to fan out as we add 219,000 more humans every single day (eighty million people each year) while simultaneously displacing other types of life whose environments we take over in the process. Meanwhile, billions are sunk in poverty largely due to having already exceeded their regions' carrying capacity and, as they did so, they often took the last trees with them, just as had happened on Easter Island.

At some point, something has to give. The pattern, the rapacious ravage, cannot persist indefinitely. Indeed, it won't do so because the resource base, itself, is largely disappearing across the globe. The ocean fisheries are depleting and expected to run out by mid-century. Climate change has brought pine and spruce beetles in such high numbers that they are eating millions upon millions of acres of trees and spreading out everywhere that they can, much like their human counterparts. Concurrently, methane is releasing from underwater beds and permafrost to join the carbon releases from humanity's use of fossil fuel from rich underground deposits that took millions of years to form, and that will be gone in the blink of a century's time. In relation, the looming climate change effects will be horrendous and will curtail many areas of human activities.

Yet, the main reason that the whole mess will be curbed is a simple one: Infinite growth, whether economic growth or population growth, cannot continue indefinitely. Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. Accordingly, one can envision that a crash is coming, one far worse than the current recession. In large measure, it's because environmental tipping points are on the way and, for those people in the worst locations for the collapse, the desperation, conflicts and chaos will likely be horrific in scale and ferocity.

How could they not be when our governments and the status quo do not encourage our transitioning to a steady state economy, business based on regionalized commerce and a cooperative inclusive economic arrangement rather than out of control global competition? How can further troubles not come into being when a vicious globalized capitalist system is in existence for which maximal profits, not people and their needs, is always the overriding goal? Despite its desirably from many standpoints, how can an alternative scheme be put in place when it bumps up against the prevailing paradigm and the corporatists, the powerful über-elites that control the gargantuan transnational companies and our fawning government toadies?

Although developing economies such as China and India that have now become major emitters of greenhouse gases must do their best to limit their emissions, the fact remains that the developed economies must do what is necessary to prevent the looming environmental tipping point. The critical question is this: why haven’t policies sufficient to reduce and reverse the trend of environmental degradation, especially the critical emission of carbon dioxide, already been adopted by the developed economies? The answer is that many politicians, business leaders and voters believe their political power, their profits or their incomes would be negatively affected by more robust environmental policies. Their shortsightedness is preventing the adoption of the policies that are necessary to prevent the coming of the tipping point within the next few decades.

For those of us who are very concerned about the future of our environment, the Paris Agreement is another triumph in the ongoing political skirmishes. We must first change the existing capitalist system, because that is the only way to put an end to ineffective pro-investment policies and to reinvigorate our economies by increasing investments to meet societal needs. And the most important societal need of all is to increase investments to avert further degradation of the environment.

People’s greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution goes into the one common atmosphere and one common ocean of all countries on earth. Each year the world adds 66 billion tonnes CO2-equivalent to its inescapable Carbon Debt that in dollar terms is increasing at $13.2 trillion per year. America that withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement has 4.4% of the world’s population but contributes a disproportionate $2.7 trillion or 20% of the world’s annual Carbon Debt increase.

Revised annual per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution for all countries (tonnes CO2-e per person per year) has been determined taking methanogenic livestock and land use into account. The world average is 63.80 billion tonnes CO2-e / 7.137 billion people in 2013 = 8.9 tonnes CO2-e per person per year, this term including all greenhouse gases (GHGs) except water, notably carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrogen oxides (NO2 and N2O), and expressed as CO2 equivalents.

If we assume that these annual per capita GHG pollution values are the same in 2016 as in 2013, then we can take 2016 population data to estimate the amount of GHG pollution for the major players in 2016. If the world still has an average “annual per capita GHG pollution” of 8.9 tonnes CO2-equivalent per person per year (as calculated for 2013) then with a 2016 population of 7,432.7 million it has an annual GHG pollution in 2016 of 63.80 billion tonnes CO2-e x 7,433 million/ 7,137 million = 66.4 billion tonnes CO2-equivalent.

Numerous climate scientists , biologists and science-informed activists demand that for a safe planet for all peoples and all species the atmospheric CO2 – presently about 430 parts per million and increasing at 3 ppm CO2 per year – be urgently returned to the pre-Industrial Revolution level of about 300 ppm CO2. Until the late 20th century the atmospheric CO2 had not exceeded 280 ppm CO2 for about 800,000 years. The present annual increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution of 66.4 billion tonnes CO2-equivalent can be seen as an increase in the world’s Carbon Debt. This Carbon Debt can also be expressed in dollar terms. Thus Dr Chris Hope of 90-Nobel-Laureate Cambridge University has estimated a damage-related Carbon Price of US$200 per tonne of CO2-equivalent. The annual Carbon Debt increase (at a damage-related Carbon Price of $200 per tonne CO2-equivalent) = 66.4 billion tonnes CO2-equivalent x $200 per tonne CO2-equivalent = $13, 280 billion = $13.28 trillion. You can examine this data and ascertain how your country contributes to greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution in an absolute and comparative sense. Thus, for the US the annual Carbon Debt of $8,200 per person x 324.1 million persons = a $2,657.6. billion. per year annual Carbon Debt increase i.e. a disproportionate 20.0% of the world’s annual total Carbon Debt increase ($13, 280 billion) due to a country with only 4.4% of the world’s’ population.

For Australia, the annual Carbon Debt of $10,580 per person x 24.3 million persons = $257.1 billion. per year annual Carbon Debt increase i.e. a disproportionate 1.9% of the world’s total due to a country with only 0.3% of the world’s’ population. However climate criminal Australia is a world leader in coal, Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) and iron ore exports. Australia’s Domestic plus Exported GHG per capita is 116.0 tonnes CO2-equivalent per person per year, this corresponding to an annual Carbon Debt increase of $23,200 per person and hence a national annual Carbon Debt increase of $23,200 per year per person x 24.3 million persons = $563.8 billion per year i.e. 4.2% of the world’s total due to a country with only 0.3% of the world’s’ population.

By way of comparison, China with 18.6% of the world’s population produces 15.4% of the world’s annual GHG pollution, and India with 17.8% of the world’s population produces only 4.2% of the world’s annual GHG pollution.

Ideally, all countries should have to pay a damage-related Carbon Tax to enable action to mitigate global damage due to climate change. Indeed, the environmental and human cost of pollution should be “fully borne” by the polluters. The principle of the maximization of profits, frequently isolated from other considerations, reflects a misunderstanding of the very concept of the economy. As long as production is increased, little concern is given to whether it is at the cost of future resources or the health of the environment; as long as the clearing of a forest increases production, no one calculates the losses entailed in the desertification of the land, the harm done to biodiversity, or the increased pollution. In a word, businesses profit by calculating and paying only a fraction of the costs involved. ‘Yet only when the economic and social costs of using up shared environmental resources are recognized with transparency and fully borne by those who incur them, not by other peoples or future generations,’ can those actions be considered ethical. An instrumental way of reasoning, which provides a purely static analysis of realities in the service of present needs, is at work whether resources are allocated by the market or by state central planning.

However, can one realistically see the US (annual GDP $18 trillion) paying an annual Carbon Tax of $8,200 per head or $2.7 trillion annually to meet the cost of the damage caused by profligate US pollution of the one common atmosphere and one common ocean of all nations? Various ways could be considered to make the polluters pay that for the US would range between $2.7 trillion per year (the “fully borne” cost) and $0 (the exceptionalist position of America polluting as much as it likes and damn everybody else). However one reasonable suggestion between these 2 extremes would be to make nations pay for their pollution above the world average of 8.9 tonnes CO2-equivalent per person per year (Excess Carbon Debt), with nations polluting less than the world average on a per capita basis receiving a compensatory payment (Excess Carbon Credit) that would help them mitigate the damage due to man-made climate change.

Americans have vowed to withdraw from the Paris Climate Change Agreement that aimed for less than a 2C temperature rise and an ideal target of no more than plus 1.5C. The Paris Agreement was agreed to by 195 countries (Syria and Nicaragua declined agreement). The US withdrew from the Paris Climate Change Agreement. A 1.5C temperature rise will be exceeded in 4-10 years and it is now to late to avoid a catastrophic plus 2C temperature rise. Already 7 million people die each year from air pollution. An estimate of a present 0.4 million annual deaths from climate change may well be a considerable under-estimate because presently 17 million people die avoidably from deprivation in Developing Countries (minus China) that are already impacted by man-made climate change. It is estimated that 10 billion people may die from climate change this century, an average of 100 million such deaths each year this century, if man-made climate change is not requisitely addressed. Nevertheless we are all obliged to do everything we can to make the future “less bad” for future generations. Decent people must act in concert by (a) informing everyone they can, (b) insisting that the cost of pollution is “fully borne” by the polluters via a damage-related Carbon Price, (c) resolutely promising that those political and corporate leaders disproportionately complicit in the worsening Climate Genocide will inescapably face dispossession and dire custodial punishment, and (d) by urging application of Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), Green Tariffs , International Court of Justice (ICJ) litigations and International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutions against the worst polluting countries.

The scientific literature on climate change indicates that the lives of the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed will be the first to be turned upside down by the effects of global warming. The socially and economically disadvantaged and the marginalized are disproportionately affected by the impacts of climate change and extreme events. Vulnerability is often high among indigenous peoples, women, children, the elderly, and disabled people who experience multiple deprivations that inhibit them from managing daily risks and shocks.” It should go without saying that these are also the people least responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming in the first place (something no less true of the countries most of them live in).In this context, consider the moral consequences of inaction on climate change. Once it seemed that the process of global warming would occur slowly enough to allow societies to adapt to higher temperatures without excessive disruption, and that the entire human family would somehow make this transition more or less simultaneously. That now looks more and more like a fairy tale. Climate change is occurring far too swiftly for all human societies to adapt to it successfully. Only the richest are likely to succeed in even the most tenuous way. Unless colossal efforts are undertaken now to halt the emission of greenhouse gases, those living inless affluent societies can expect to suffer from extremes of flooding, drought, starvation, disease, and death in potentially staggering numbers. And you don’t need a Ph.D. in climatology to arrive at this conclusion either. The overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists agree that any increase in average world temperatures that exceeds 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial era, some opt for a rise of no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, will alter the global climate system drastically. In such a situation, a number of societies will simply disintegrate in the fashion of South Sudan today, producing staggering chaos and misery. So far, the world has heated up by at least one of those two degrees, and unless we stop burning fossil fuels in quantity soon, the 1.5 degree level will probably be reached in the not-too-distant future.

Worse yet, on our present trajectory, it seems highly unlikely that the warming process will stop at 2 or even 3 degrees Celsius, meaning that later in this century many of the worst-case climate-change scenarios, the inundation of coastal cities, the desertification of vast interior regions, and the collapse of rain-fed agriculture in many areas, will become everyday reality. In other words, think of the developments in those three African lands and Yemen as previews of what far larger parts of our world could look like in another quarter-century or so: a world in which hundreds of millions of people are at risk of annihilation from disease or starvation, or are on the march or at sea, crossing borders, heading for the shantytowns of major cities, looking for refugee camps or other places where survival appears even minimally possible. If the world’s response to the current famine catastrophe and the escalating fears of refugees in wealthy countries are any indication, people will die in vast numbers without hope of help. In other words, failing to halt the advance of climate change, to the extent that halting it, at this point, remains within our power, means complicity with mass human annihilation. We know, or at this point should know, that such scenarios are already on the horizon. We still retain the power, if not to stop them, then to radically ameliorate what they will look like, so our failure to do all we can means that we become complicitin what is clearly going to be a process of climate genocide. How can those of us in countries responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions escape such a verdict? Unfortunately, Americans are living not only in a time of climate crisis, but in the era of President Trump, which means the federal government and its partners in the fossil fuel industry will be wielding their immense powers to obstruct all imaginable progress on limiting global warming. They will be the true perpetrators ofclimate genocide. As a result, the rest of us bear a moral responsibility not just to do what we can at the local level to slow the pace of climate change, but also to engage in political struggle to counteract or neutralize the acts of Trump and company. Only dramatic and concerted action on multiple fronts can prevent the human disasters now unfolding in Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen from becoming the global norm.

The global socioeconomic system of capitalism, is forcing us to work harder to surpass previous consumption and population numbers until we have devoured everything that maintains life, ending up with a polluted, lifeless, and a scorched planet.

Global Civilisation’s present and ultimate mode, capitalism is the system that can only lead us to our annihilation. This isn’t any individual’s, or any group of people’s fault, it’s the economic system that took form first with the energy of slaves to produce the raw materials that were then manufactured with the energy of fossil fuels. The economic success of that was dishonestly attributed to the capitalist system but it came from the benefit of using slave, which was overwhelm by non-renewable fossil fuels that are burned as renewables. The work force was then educated to use fossil fuels in its entire myriad of uses and also to integrated workers in a system of contradicting values by using competition as the regulator in a social setting that must also be cooperative to be social. To maintain a general satisfaction in a social system that’s driven and motivate with competition, endless growth is needed, but in a finite system it must end when resources are exhausted. However, we also have a double whammy, that of pollution that impairs life and the carbon that’s heating the biosphere and acidifying the oceans, they would end life if the system is maintained to its exhaustion. It’s like been inside a spinning treadmill, the faster a few people run the faster each individual needs to run to stay in position. The only ones that can slow and stop that nonsense are the wealthy people, who have successfully blocked any attempts to head off that stampede, so the wealthiest are riding that wave of people and getting the benefits with little effort. To keep up with that momentum, society must take what it can, leaving nothing. Our options within the capitalist system is limited because competition entices and pressures us to keep doing more of everything or suffer the consequences of losing the little power we still have.

The power that controls the economy is with the 1% they have the power to stop and change that exploitive, chaotic violent world economy. The 1%, power comes from finance which’s depended on economic growth, and that can’t be jeopardised just to save a few millions poor people around the planet who are already suffering, which’s the present worry for concerned people. Sadly the 1% dominates and controls the information services; it’s the only power that is able to disseminate the needed information to change our self-destructive way of life to an inclusive positive one. If we can show the 1% that they’re facing a dire situation in a overpopulate world that’s depleted of vital resources, in an unliveable hot and violent climate. They are likely to avoid continuing on that path as wealth can’t have any value in that unendurable social chaotic violence, when the economy goes from sour to putrid and as well the 1% may be an early victim of vengefulness. Without affordable oil we can’t produce the quantity of coal, gas, and pump the vital water that’s also needed to grow our food, it will curtail transporting all that stuff around the world. The difficulty will also be magnified by global warming which will need much more energy to counteract its effects. Global warming alone can kill us all. One must understand that burning that vast store of carbon that nature managed to accumulate in the ground has never happen before, it will also release the carbon from the permafrost and methane hydrates that will produce a colossal positive feedbacks. To sustain life in those extreme conditions would require more energy but there will be less to share, especially with more people. There’s no certainty of how much time we have to turn the world economy from an exploitative one, to one that functions within nature, as a part of nature before it becomes irretrievable. We desperately need to show the 1% how closes they and we are in producing an unliveable world due to the outcome of capitalist economy. The 1% life is at stake like everyone, they must not only cooperate to live within nature’s ability, but promote it on a world scale. They are the only ones with the power to do so, and it may be the only way to survive. All living things have to have a survival instinct to be alive; it will save us all if we use it. However, that instinct will only kick in when those multi billionaires realise that their life is at stake and they can only be saved if they do their best to save everyone. That would mean an unreserved sharing with all people and a qualified one with nature, the sooner we can accomplish that, the easier and satisfying life will be, for the more cooperative our life is the more satisfying and secure it must be. In a cooperative based society there would be no advantage to be deceitful; people will then revert to honest relationships. That correlation in societies and also as a part of nature infers that people would see exploiting nature as destructive for us.The reason we are destroying our habitat thus ourselves is due to the competitiveness of civilisation and its intensification under capitalism, that competition is capitalism lifeblood and now it’s our foe. The more social one is the more cooperative one must be, the less conflict we have, and as well it’s the most efficient way to live, it’s our nature. That means having to share the efforts and the benefits, even of its unfamiliarity for the 1%.

Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that we will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about.

Inequality is getting worse every year. Six individuals have the same wealth as the world's bottom half. The very richest individuals, especially the top thousand or so, continue to add billions of dollars to their massive fortunes. Inequality is extreme and pathological and getting worse every year. The poorest of the world population own just $410 billion of the $256 trillion in global wealth. The status of the bottom 50 percent has never improved and has in fact worsened every year as both global debt and global inequality have increased. The world's six richest men have $343 billion.They are Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Amancio Ortega, Mark Zuckerberg, Carlos Slim Helu (with Larry Ellison jockeying for position). The wealth of these six men increased by $69 billion in just one year. In just one year the richest 10 percent drained nearly $4 trillion away from the rest of civilization.

The poorest of the world population own just 1.86 percent of the $256 trillion in global wealth or $4.76 trillion. That's more than two-thirds of all the people on Earth. That means five billion people have, on average and after debt is figured in, about a thousand dollars each in home and property and savings. In the U.S., the Forbes 400 own as much as 3/5 of the american people. The bottom 60 percent of Americans own three percent of the nation's $85 trillion in total wealth or $2.55 trillion. The Forbes 400 owned $2.4 trillion in October 2016 and that's been steadily increasing. Just as capitalism made it possible for Gates, Zuckerberg and the others to reach the highest rung on the economic ladder, it is making it possible for billions of men and women to climb up from the lowest stage. Poverty as we know it is not disappearing but getting worse. Those climbing out of poverty are due to rapid economic growth in China. And yes, many Americans have negative wealth because of debt. A human being doesn't have to live in a third-world slum to be impoverished. Yet as inequality ravages the American and world economies, denial grows right along with it. The rich people suggest that even if inequality was growing as fast as observed, it would not necessarily be a problem. The deniers try to explain away reality.

With the dollar as world money states must either sell more than they buy to accumulate dollar surpluses. Or they have to borrow dollars to buy. Then maintain a volatile global financial system forcing countries to hold US dollars as a significant component of their national reserves to battle back speculative attacks on their currencies. Finally, leave buying US Treasury IOUs and dollar assets the only “sure” game in town for the dollar savings of countries like China and Japan you buy most of your goods from. This makes their positive net international investment position a mirror image of your negative one. Hence, with the dollar as world money the US gains an automatic borrowing mechanism giving it global policy autonomy denied other states. Given a current account deficit financed by savings of the world, US government spending on global militarization and other priorities can expand without “crowding out” private sector borrowing. Notwithstanding a low savings rate, domestic borrowing exercises little pressure on interest rates which hover around zero. In the end, the US spends well in excess of its domestic savings plus government tax revenues while no longer engendering price inflation. To become great again, the US parlayed the world’s largest national debt, its trade deficit, budget deficit, capital account deficit and savings rate deficit, into a position in the global driver seat through the dollar remaining global hub currency.

Chinese production and exports are dominated by US and other foreign corporations, and, like the pollution drifting across the globe, – are not really ‘Chinese’ at all. So who is driving China’s export-oriented boom? It is not Chinese state enterprises, or even Chinese private enterprises, that are driving China’s exports to the US. Rather it is foreign multinationals, many of which are headquartered in the US, including Apple, Dell, and Walmart”. By 2013, foreign-owned TNCs were responsible for 47% of all Chinese exports (and over 80% of high-tech exports) compared to a mere 11% by Chinese state-owned enterprises. US-based TNCs dominate this control and ownership of exports made in China. The division of profits from Chinese manufactures is also heavily skewed in favor of foreign corporations. For telecommunications equipment, China produced 38% of world exports in 2013, but their share of the profits generated by the sale of those products was just 6%, while US firms captured 59%. Similar imbalances obtain in the case of textiles, where US firms commandeered 46% of the profit share.

From the production, sale and transport of globally-traded commodities, to the shipping of the resulting waste back to China, and now to the profitable ‘adaptation’ to the ghastly air pollution, TNCs are the main drivers and beneficiaries of this system. In other words, Chinese production and exports are dominated by US and other foreign corporations, and – like the pollution drifting across the globe – are not really ‘Chinese’ at all. This ‘Asian pollution’ may have an even deeper connection to the American west over which it is now drifting. The world’s largest surface mines are the Black Thunder mines, in the Powder River Basin straddling the Wyoming/Montana border. The mine’s owner and operator, Arch Coal, exports sizable amounts of this government-owned coal to places like China, where it is burned to power the factories that produce American consumer goods.

A system of international capitalism has restructured and replaced a healthy, sustainable indigenous agriculture across the world with a globalised system of food production and agriculture controlled by companies that have a history of releasing health-damaging, environmentally polluting products onto the market and engaging in activities considered as constituting crimes against humanity.

There has been an adverse trend in the food and agriculture sector in recent times with the control of seeds and chemical inputs being consolidated through various proposed mergers. If these mergers go through, it would mean that three companies would dominate the commercial agricultural seeds and chemicals sector. Over the past couple of decades, there has already been a restriction of choice with the squeezing out of competitors, resulting in higher costs for farmers, who are increasingly reliant on corporate seeds (and their chemical inputs). Big agribusiness players like Monsanto rely on massive taxpayer handouts to keep their business models on track; highly profitable models that have immense social, health and environmental costs to be paid for by the public. Across the globe healthy, sustainable agriculture has been uprooted and transformed to suit the profit margins of transnational agribusiness concerns. The major players in the global agribusiness sector fuel a geo-politicised, globalised system of food production that result in numerous negative outcomes for both farmers and consumers alike.

America’s new corporate tax cut scam was designed to allow the ultra-rich .01% and the world’s corporate/financial structure to re-locate within the borders of the United States to stick their heads in the pig trough along with all the other greedy ones to partake in the financial feeding frenzy that will ensue.

It doesn’t take a mystic to look into a crystal ball to realize that America’s new draconian corporate tax cut scam now is not only the greatest financial heist and political con to be committed in recent modern history, that will make the 2008 so-called “bail-out’ of the banks, Wall Street and theft of the US Treasury look like paltry child’s play by comparison. One doesn’t also have to be a clairvoyant either to see how this scam will begin to shape the way humans of the future look, think and feel about themselves, one another and the kind of career paths they will ultimately choose for themselves, their wives, husbands and families. As all the corks of the champagne bottles continue to pop for the prospects of what the new year holds for the ultra-rich .01% and the rest of us, what no doubt now will follow will be a rush amongst the world’s corporate/financial structure to either implement similar corporate tax cuts within their own countries or inspire a new “offshore rush” of the world’s corporate infrastructure to re-locate within the borders of the United States to stick their heads in the pig trough along with all the other greedy ones to partake in the financial feeding frenzy that will ensue.

The young and future generations have a daunting task of achieving a required draw-down of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) back to the pre-Industrial Revolution level of 300 parts per million (300 ppm CO2) from the present damaging and dangerous record level of 430 ppm CO2 that is increasing at a record level of 3 ppm CO2 per year. The inescapable obligation that has been imposed on future generations can be described as an inescapable Carbon Debt – while conventional debt can be evaded by default, bankruptcy or printing money , Carbon Debt is inescapable because, for example, sea walls will have to be built or coastal cites will flood and highly productive deltaic lands will be flooded and salinized. There is evidence of ice melt, sea level rise to +5–9 m [metres], and extreme storms in the prior interglacial period that was less than 1 °C warmer than today. The total Carbon Debt of the world from 1751-2016 is about 1,850 billion tonnes CO2 and, assuming a damage-related Carbon Price of $200 per tonne CO2-equivalent, this corresponds to a Carbon Debt of $370 trillion, similar to the total wealth of the world and 4.5 times the world’s total annual GDP. The world’s GHG pollution is increasing at a recently re-calculated 64 billion tonnes CO2-equivalent per year i.e. the Carbon Debt in increasing at $12.8 trillion each year or at about one-sixth of world GDP annually. The environmental and human cost of deadly greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution be “fully borne” by the polluters (i.e. by a Carbon Price or Carbon Tax that are desperately resisted by the presently dominant neoliberal climate criminal governments). If we burn all reserves of oil, gas, and coal, there is a substantial chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale, then it is a dead certainty – yet pro-fossil fuels neoliberal, climate change denier, climate criminal and war criminal leader of the Western world has already signed an executive order allowing the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline to carry tar sands oil from Canada to Texas (which means game over for the climate). Free University Education is the least we can offer as we bequeath the young a dying planet that will very likely be doomed within their generation time span.

Democracy requires informed voters but why should young have to pay to join?Western democracies have been perverted into Kleptocracies, Plutocracies, Lobbyocracies, Corporatocracies and Dollarocracies in which Big money purchases people, parties, policies, public perception of reality, more political power and more private profit. Only an informed and resolute public can resist this corporate perversion of democracy. If anything, democratic societies interested in the survival of genuine democracy should be paying the young to educate themselves rather than dishonestly imposing a huge financial penalty on education.

Social humanism demands dignity and opportunity for all but why charge the young for their birthright? The world is presently dominated by a greed-driven neoliberal ideology that demands maximal freedom for the smart and advantaged to exploit the natural and human resources of the world for private profit. This perverse ideology already kills 17 million people annually and, unrestrained, is set to destroy most of Humanity and the Biosphere. A humane alternative to the neoliberal perversion is social humanism (socialism, democratic socialism, ecosocialism, the welfare state, Green-Left sustainability) which aims to sustainably maximize the happiness, opportunity and dignity of everyone by evolving interpersonal, intra-national and international social contracts. Sustainably maximized happiness, opportunity and dignity surely constitute a birthright of all young people which is achieved by education and hard work. This birthright should not be constrained or removed by discouraging or exclusionary financial penalties.

By far, the nation that started, and still is pursuing the largest production of greenhouse gases ever since WWII is America. And America is responsible for the global warming of the planet and, therefore the increase in the Earth’s surface temperature, the rising of sea level, climate change and worldwide disasters. America is to be largely blamed for the climate crisis, and should pay. Clearly, we all (except the poorest of the poor) have to cut back on lots. We have to cut back on fossil fuels, resource use and economic development. If we don’t, our world will be in a shambles way worse than it is now. We humans have to smarten up. We need to start transition town movements now! Yet how many people can we convince to follow this model at this stage of disintegration of the environments around us? (Most are still in la-la land in terms of a need and desire to change their ways.) The terms transition town, transition initiative and transition model refer to grassroot community projects that aim to increase self-sufficiency to reduce the potential effects of peak oil, climate destruction, and economic instability.



As is easy to guess, the petrodollar strongly influenced the composition of the SDR basket, making the dollar the world reserve currency, spelling grave implications for the global economy due to Nixon's decision to eliminate the dollar’s convertibility into gold. The reason why the United States has been able to fuel this global demand for dollars is linked to the need for other countries to own dollars in order to be able to buy oil and other goods. It may seem unbelievable, but practically all countries until a few years ago used US dollars to trade amongst each other, even countries that were anti-American and against US imperialist policies.

The reason why the United States has been able to fuel this global demand for dollars is linked to the need for other countries to own dollars in order to be able to buy oil and other goods. For example, if a Bolivian company exports bananas to Norway, the payment method requires the use of dollars. Norway must therefore own US currency to pay and receive the goods purchased. Similarly, the dollars Bolivia receives will be used to buy other necessities like oil from Venezuela. It may seem unbelievable, but practically all countries until a few years ago used US dollars to trade amongst each other, even countries that were anti-American and against US imperialist policies. This continued use of the dollar has had some devastating effects on the globe. First of all, the intense use of the American currency, coupled with Nixon’s decisions, created an economic standard based on the dollar that soon replaced precious metals like gold, which had been the standard for the global economy for years. This has led to major instability and to economic systems that have in the proceeding years created disastrous financial policies, as seen in 2000 and 2008, for example. The main source of economic reliability transferred from gold to dollars, specifically to US treasury bills. This major shift allowed the Federal Reserve to print dollars practically without limit (as seen in recent years with interests rates for borrowing money from the FED at around 0%), well aware that the demand for dollars would never cease, this also keeping alive huge sectors of private and public enterprises (such as the fracking industry). This set a course for a global economic system based on financial instruments like derivatives and other securities instead of real, tangible goods like gold. In doing this for its own benefit, the US has created the conditions for a new financial bubble that could even bring down the entire world economy when it bursts. The United States found itself in the enviable position of being able to print pieces of paper (simply IOU’s) without any gold backing and then exchange them for real goods.

This economic arrangement has allowed America to achieve an unparalleled strategic advantage over its geopolitical opponents (initially the USSR, now Russia and China), namely, a practically unlimited dollar spending capacity even as it accumulates an astronomical public debt (over 21 trillion dollars). The destabilizing factor for the global economy has been America's ability to accumulate enormous amounts of public debt without having to worry about the consequences or even of any possible mistrust international markets may have for the dollar. Countries simply needed dollars for trade and bought US treasures to diversify their financial assets.

The continued use of the dollar as a means of payment for almost everything, coupled with the nearly infinite capacity of the of FED to print money and the Treasury to issue bonds, has led the dollar to become the primary safe refuge for organizations, countries and individuals, legitimizing this perverse financial system that has affected global peace for decades. The problems for the United States began in the late 1990s, at a time of expansion for the US empire following the demise of the Soviet Union. The stated geopolitical goal was the achievement of global hegemony. With unlimited spending capacity and an ideology based on American exceptionalism, this attempt seemed to be within reach for the policymakers at the Pentagon and Wall Street. A key element for achieving global hegemony consisted of stopping China, Russia and Iran from creating a Eurasian area of integration. For many years, and for various reasons, these three countries continued to conduct large-scale trade in US dollars, bowing to the economic dictates of a fraudulent financial system created for the benefit of the United States. China needed to continue in its role of becoming the world's factory, always having accepted dollar payments and buying hundreds of billions of US treasury bills. With Putin, Russia began almost immediately to de-dollarize, repaying foreign debts in dollars, trying to offload this economic pressure. Russia is today one of the countries in the world with the least amount of public and private debt denominated in dollars, and the recent prohibition on the use of US dollars in Russian seaports is the latest example. For Iran, the problem has always been represented by sanctions, creating great incentives to bypass the dollar and find alternative means of payment.

Color revolutions, hybrid warfare, economic terrorism, and proxy attempts to destabilize these countries have had devastating effects on America's military credibility and effectiveness. The United States finds itself being considered by many countries to be a massive war apparatus that struggles to get what it wants, struggles to achieve coherent common goals, and even lacks the capability to control countries like Iraq and Afghanistan in spite of its overwhelming military superiority.

Until a few decades ago, any idea of straying away from the petrodollar was seen as a direct threat to American global hegemony, requiring of a military response. In 2017, given the decline in US credibility as a result of triggering wars against smaller countries (leaving aside countries like Russia, China, and Iran that have military capabilities the likes of which the US has not faced for more than seventy years), a general recession from the dollar-based system is taking place in many countries.

Economists are eager to protect their ideas about “value” as money -based and make them normative. Commoners and others, by contrast, want to broaden the meaning of the term to apply to all of human experience. The conventional economic definition of “value” has a significant rhetorical advantage over other notions of values. It can be encapsulated in numbers, manipulated mathematically and ascribed to individuals, giving it a tidy precision. Value defined as price also has an operational simplicity even though it flattens the messy realities of actual human life and ecosystems. This point is illustrated by open value accounting systems and by organizational experiments in finance, ownership and governance. Cities need to begin making preparations for the incoming tides, and many coastal towns, both in the U.S. and around the world. To protect coasts against tidal flooding, the city plans to reinforce beaches, build bulkheads, and protect sand dunes that act as natural barriers. The city may also enact rock breakwaters offshore to attenuate waves associated with storms, and erect storm walls and levees in areas that are particularly vulnerable to storm surge. The city’s plan contains a rigorous geological analysis of the landscape and makes recommendations specific to boroughs and neighborhoods based on what types of mitigation strategies the rock and soil in each locale can support. The only question is: will it be enough? The oceans are rising. The statistics bear it out and people can also see it with their own eyes. Over time, our coastlands are going to move further inland and low-lying areas will find themselves submerged. If cities are not prepared, the effects will be devastating. However, with proper preparation, the worst may be avoided. The science of Climate Change has come to be well established. Predictive models indicate its dangers to the existence and survival of the future generations. While future technologies can arrest the dangers and reduce the pace of increase of atmospheric CO2, it has already crossed the alarm level of 430 PPM much above the acceptable limit of 350 PPM. Yet it is not raising the needed alarm bells to eradicate the challenge. The world has come together time and again to address the global challenge. From Rio summit, to Paris agreement to Kyoto protocol has attempted at finding solution to this global challenge. From fixing of responsibility to addressing climate change on developed countries to agreement on development and transfer of green technologies has been part of the agreement. However, the conferences have hardly been able to show signs of arrest the emerging danger. While agreements have been arrived to reduce CO2 emissions, there are also parties which have broken away from the same.

The modern life is full of contradictions. While the dangers are agreed upon, there is reluctance for change. The change does not necessarily mean to go back to pre-industrial ages with lack of technologies and benefits of modern civilization, but to innovate and make a shift towards greener technologies and more sustainable lifestyles. These technologies need to be produced at a scale and made available that it arrests the pace of acceleration of CO2 levels. It does not necessarily mean giving up Cars, but definitely an increase in usage of Mass transportation. It does not mean stopping usage of thermal power generation but to gradually replace it with power generation through renewable energy sources, more particularly solar energy. It does not mean giving up Air condition (AC) completely, but to substantially reduce it. It does not mean negating modernity, but to accept modernity including the flaws and to give it a direction that ensures shift to more sustainable lifestyles. Modernity through industrial revolution did bring in changes which benefitted human civilization. The modern medicines did bring improvement in health and reduced mortality. The educational system did build in a new human being and vocations for meeting the needs of modern society. Transportation technologies reduced the time and spatial dimensions. Technologies reduced drudgery both at home and in economic activities. While these need to be welcomed and built upon, the dangers posed by modernity also need to be agreed upon. Modernity also under the garb of the new economic system also brought in new cultural values. The values related to achieving accelerated growth, industrialisation, increase in gross domestic product, consumption lifestyles, and increased usage of energy for higher level of comforts. It did create a necessary societal shift from pre-industrial to an industrial age. The modern values did break the trend of supremacy of religion over men, separated religion from politics, questioned inequalities – particularly political, and brought in the concept of liberty equality and fraternity. It did have its benefits at the societal level. At the same time it also established the concept of supremacy of men over nature. This also meant that human civilization took it for granted that resources of earth can be utilised in a manner to achieve maximal benefits. The limited capacities of resources of Earth to support were not realised. It was only when dangers became imminent that it was realised that there is a limit to which resources of Earth can be extracted. And it was agreed that there are ‘limits to growth’. Modernity and the modern economic system has resulted in benefits such as increase in production of food availability, increased availability of health care and medicines, increased availability of modern technologies which can substantially reduce human drudgery. Yet it also true that education, health care and modern technologies are increasingly becoming unaffordable as it is closely linked to an economic system driven by profit motive. The modern systems did bring substantial improvements in lifespan, health and education. But its increased connection with profit driven economy is making access to these basic services unaffordable.

Energy independence over corporate profits.

America extracts natural gas from the ground, using an unconventional process called hydrofracturing, to acquire enough natural gas. America is there, with over 100 years of natural gas reserves. Moreover, if the country was to also invest in energy conservation and renewables, the nation could have 200 years of reserves today. So what happened to that promise of ‘Homeland Security’ and ‘Energy Independence’? It was a lie. Not one corporate CEO or their friends in elected office ever intended to keep energy resources stockpiled for America’s future. The evidence of this can be seen every day as the oil and gas industry pushes hard, stomps on people, intimidates and threatens landowners, steals the land and destroy our environment to build the pipelines, compressor stations and export terminals. These pipelines crisscross our nation through old-growth forests, indigenous sacred lands and through rural communities that provide food for American families. The export terminals jeopardize Americans shorelines and marine life all just so they can sell gas overseas and make profits for a few. Farmers, ranchers and rural families were lied to, and in some cases called traitors or terrorists when they fought against this destructive industry. Communities and innocent families were told if they did not sell the rights to their land, the government will take it through eminent domain. ‘Our country’s national security is a public benefit which allows us to use eminent domain,’ they said. All of this was corporate and government propaganda. What Big Oil and Gas Really Want Today, the price of natural gas has dropped over 42 percent because of our new energy stockpile. That translates into more affordable energy for American households, but also fewer profits for the large corporations. So what oil and gas industries want now is to build pipelines and terminals to export as much of this energy as they possibly can, to once again make huge profits. Asia has already contracted to purchase gas from the new export terminal in Cove Point, Maryland.

While industry is building export infrastructure to start selling natural gas overseas, in the U.S., families who sacrificed their land, drinking water, health and the ability to make a living off their farms and ranches are in crisis. People can set the water from their kitchen faucets on fire because it’s polluted underground. Asthma and other childhood diseases are increasing. It’s like the nineteenth century; mothers must go outdoors with buckets to get clean water, then heat it on the stove to bathe their young children, make dinner, or brush their teeth. This is not progress. Energy Independence? Homeland Security? I don’t think so. It is the oil and gas industry and their allies in government who are the true terrorists. Their children or grandchildren will likely never fight a war over oil, but who knows what’s in store for the rest of us. It is time for America to stop this madness. The first step is to stop the pipelines, compressor stations and export terminals. Stand up against greedy corporations and take a risk. It’s a war on the home front against average Americans which we didn’t start, but we can win. It is our patriotic duty to stop the corporate greed and support and defend our neighbors.

Here we arrive at neocon step four. Dollarize the world! With the dollar as world money states must either sell more than they buy to accumulate dollar surpluses. Or they have to borrow dollars to buy. Then maintain a volatile global financial system forcing countries to hold US dollars as a significant component of their national reserves to battle back speculative attacks on their currencies. Finally, leave buying US Treasury IOUs and dollar assets the only “sure” game in town for the dollar savings of countries like China and Japan you buy most of your goods from. This makes their positive net international investment position a mirror image of your negative one. Hence, with the dollar as world moneythe US gains an automatic borrowing mechanism giving it global policy autonomy denied other states. Given a current account deficit financed by savings of the world, US government spending on global militarization and other priorities can expand without “crowding out” private sector borrowing. Notwithstanding a low savings rate, domestic borrowing exercises little pressure on interest rates which hover around zero. In the end, the US spends well in excess of its domestic savings plus government tax revenues while no longer engendering price inflation. To become great again, the US parlayed the world’s largest national debt, its trade deficit, budget deficit, capital account deficit and savings rate deficit, into a position in the global driver seat through the dollar remaining global hub currency.

Since the end of the unbelievably profitable for Wall Street Second World War, tens of millions of innocent children, women and men have died right in their own beloved countries during unlawful and prosecutable regime change bombings and invasions by Americans. All these tens of millions died so investors in the illegal and genocidal use of US Armed Forces, CIA, sanctions and US media could make money from wars that at the same time brought the investors increased financial hegemony and more opportunity for capital and power acquisition. These millions had to die, murdered right in their homelands, because of the support and/or indifference of ordinary Americans in all walks of life, with enough of them willing to follow orders, even when unlawful orders, to bomb and invade whatever nation instructed to.

All this hell and horror for millions of fellow human beings and their children could have been avoided if enough Americans had followed Champion Muhammad Ali, who stated before the US Supreme Court, “No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end.” America’s military expenditures, including the ones he could identify at other federal agencies, is actually already over a trillion dollars a year.

Furthermore, much, if not all, of the budget for the Department of State and for international assistance programs ought to be classified as defense-related, too. In this case, the money serves to buy off potential enemies and to reward friendly governments who assist U.S. efforts to abate perceived threats. Department of Homeland Security, many observers probably would agree that its budget ought to be included in any complete accounting of defense costs. The Federal Bureau of Investigation devotes substantial resources to an anti-terrorist program. The Department of the Treasury informs us that it has ‘worked closely with the Departments of State and Justice and the intelligence community to disrupt targets related to al Qaeda, Hizballah, Jemaah Islamiyah, as well as to disrupt state sponsorship of terror. But, almost everything there relied upon mere estimates, because the Congress and the President always supply to the public numbers that are sadly uninterpretable by anyone who wants to know what percentage of the federal government is actually military. The ‘Defense’ Department is the only one that’s “unauditable” so that in one of the attempts to audit it is designed to be confusing, uninterpretable and incomprehensible. The magnitude of the problem is further demonstrated by the fact that, of $6.5 trillion of those adjustments that we audited this year, $3 trillion were unsupported by reliable explanatory information and audit trails or were made to invalid general ledger accounts.

The real U.S. National Security Budget: The figure no one wants you to see. Probably fewer than 1% of Americans have even been informed by the press as to what the currently authorized annual federal spending for the ‘Defense’ Department is.

Future generations of U.S. taxpayers will be paying the price for the profligacy of today’s U.S. aristocracy, who receive all the benefits from this scam off the public, and especially off those future generations. But the far bigger losses are felt abroad, in countries such as Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine, where the targets will be suffering the consequences of America’s invasions and coups.

Notwithstanding its pervasive corruption and enormous uncounted waste, the U.S. military is, by far, the U.S. institution that is respected above all others by the American people. A great deal of domestic propaganda is necessary in order to keep it that way. With so many trillions of dollars that are unaccounted for, it’s do-able. All that’s needed is a tiny percentage of the huge graft to be devoted to funding the operation’s enormous PR for ‘patriotism’. And this treasonous operation has been sustainable, and very successful (for its ultimate beneficiaries), that way, in the U.S., at least for decades.

The introduction of the yuan into the international basket of the IMF, global agreements for the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and Beijing’s protests against its treatment by the World Trade Organization (WTO) are all alarm bells for American strategists who see the role of the American currency eroding. In Russia, the central bank decided not to accumulate dollar reserves, favoring instead foreign currency like the Indian rupee and the Chinese yuan. The rating agencies - western financial-oligarchy tools -have diminishing credibility, having become means to manipulate markets to favor specific US interests. Chinese and Russian independent rating agencies are further confirmation of Beijing and Moscow’s strategy to undermine America’s role in western economics. De-dollarization is occurring and proceeding rapidly, especially in areas of mutual business interest. In what is becoming increasingly routine, nations are dealing in commodities by negotiating in currencies other than the dollar. The benefit is twofold: a reduction in the role of the dollar in their sovereign affairs, and an increase in synergies between allied nations. Iran and India exchanged oil in rupees, and China and Russia trade in yuan.

The reason why the United States has been able to fuel this global demand for dollars is linked to the need for other countries to own dollars in order to be able to buy oil and other goods. It may seem unbelievable, but practically all countries until a few years ago used US dollars to trade amongst each other, even countries that were anti-American and against US imperialist policies.

The largest geo-economic change in the last fifty years was arguably implemented in 1973 with the agreement between OPEC, Saudi Arabia and the United States to sell oil exclusively in dollars.

Specifically, Nixon arranged with Saudi King Faisal for Saudis to only accept dollars as a payment for oil and related investments, recycling billions of excess dollars into US treasury bills and other dollar-based financial resources. In exchange, Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries came under American military protection. It reminds one of a mafia-style arrangement: the Saudis are obliged to conduct business in US dollars according to terms and conditions set by the US with little argument, and in exchange they receive generous protection.

The second factor, perhaps even more consequential for the global economy, is the dollar becoming the world reserve currency and maintaining a predominant role in the basket of international foreign-exchange reserves of the IMF ever since 1981. The role of the dollar, linked obviously to the petrodollar trade, has almost always maintained a share of more than 40% of the Special Drawing Right (SDR)basket, while the euro has maintained a stable shareof 29-37% since 2001. In order to understand the economic change in progress, it is sufficient to observe that the yuan is now finally included in the SDR, with an initial 10% share that is immediately higher than the yen (8.3%) and sterling(8.09%) but significantly less than the dollar (41%) and euro (31%). Slowly but significantly Yuan currency is becoming more and more used in global trade.

The reason why the United States has been able to fuel this global demand for dollars is linked to the need for other countries to own dollars in order to be able to buy oil and other goods. For example, if a Bolivian company exports bananas to Norway, the payment method requires the use of dollars. Norway must therefore own US currency to pay and receive the goods purchased. Similarly, the dollars Bolivia receives will be used to buy other necessities like oil from Venezuela. It may seem unbelievable, but practically all countries until a few years ago used US dollars to trade amongst each other, even countries that were anti-American and against US imperialist policies.

This continued use of the dollar has had some devastating effects on the globe. First of all, the intense use of the American currency, coupled with Nixon’s decisions, created an economic standard based on the dollar that soon replaced precious metals like gold, which had been the standard for the global economy for years. This has led to major instability and to economic systems that have in the proceeding years created disastrous financial policies, as seen in 2000 and 2008, for example. The main source of economic reliability transferred from gold to dollars, specifically to US treasury bills. This major shift allowed the Federal Reserve to print dollars practically without limit (as seen in recent years with interests rates for borrowing money from the FED at around 0%), well aware that the demand for dollars would never cease, this also keeping alive huge sectors of private and public enterprises (such as the fracking industry). This set a course for a global economic system based on financial instruments like derivatives and other securities instead of real, tangible goods like gold. In doing this for its own benefit, the US has created the conditions for a new financial bubble that could even bring down the entire world economywhen it bursts.

The United States found itself in the enviable position of being able to print pieces of paper (simply IOU’s) without any gold backing and then exchange them for real goods.

This economic arrangement has allowed America to achieve an unparalleled strategic advantage over its geopolitical opponents (initially the USSR, now Russia and China), namely, a practically unlimited dollar spending capacity even as it accumulates an astronomical public debt (over 21 trillion dollars). The destabilizing factor for the global economy has been America's ability to accumulate enormous amounts of public debt without having to worry about the consequences or even of any possible mistrust international markets may have for the dollar. Countries simply needed dollars for trade and bought US treasures to diversify their financial assets.

The continued use of the dollar as a means of payment for almost everything, coupled with the nearly infinite capacity of the of FED to print money and the Treasury to issue bonds, has led the dollar to become the primary safe refuge for organizations, countries and individuals, legitimizing this perverse financial system that has affected global peace for decades.

The problems for the United States began in the late 1990s, at a time of expansion for the US empire following the demise of the Soviet Union. The stated geopolitical goal was the achievement of global hegemony. With unlimited spending capacity and an ideology based on American exceptionalism, this attempt seemed to be within reach for the policymakers at the Pentagon and Wall Street. A key element for achieving global hegemony consisted of stopping China, Russia and Iran from creating a Eurasian area of integration. For many years, and for various reasons, these three countries continued to conduct large-scale trade in US dollars, bowing to the economic dictates of a fraudulent financial system created for the benefit of the United States. China needed to continue in its role of becoming the world's factory, always having accepted dollar payments and buying hundreds of billions of US treasury bills. With Putin, Russia began almost immediately to de-dollarize, repaying foreign debts in dollars, trying to offload this economic pressure. Russia is today one of the countries in the world with the least amount of public and private debt denominated in dollars, and the recent prohibition on the use of US dollars in Russian seaports is the latest example. For Iran, the problem has always been represented by sanctions, creating great incentives to bypass the dollar and find alternative means of payment.

It is now widely believed that the Baby Boomers born in the 1940s and possibly their children may be the last Anglosphere generations to be better off than their parents. In Australia even young professional couples now find home ownership an impossible dream in Sydney. In America the working poor can spend most of their paltry income on minimal housing rental. This is compounded by the imposition of huge tuition debt in the Anglosphere. However the real killer for the young is inescapable Carbon Debt. The damage-related cost of carbon pollution has been estimated at about $200 per tonne of CO2-equivalent (greenhouse gas pollution measured in terms of equivalently global warming  masses of carbon dioxide).  It can be readily estimated from historical greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution data that the total Carbon Debt of the world from 1751-2016 is about 1,850 billion tonnes CO2 (1.85 trillion tonnes CO2) and, assuming a damage-related Carbon Price of $200 per tonne CO2-equivalent,   this corresponds  to a Carbon Debt of $370 trillion, similar to the total wealth of the world and 4.5 times the world’s total annual GDP. The world’s GHG pollution is increasing at a recently re-calculated 64 billion tonnes CO2-equivalent per year i.e. the Carbon Debt in increasing at $12.8 trillion each year or at about one-sixth of world GDP annually. Unlike conventional  debt that can be simply wiped out by default, bankruptcy or printing money , this horrendous Carbon Debt for future generations  is inescapable – future generations will have to act or die. Thus climate criminal Australia has a Carbon Debt (in US dollars) of $7.5 trillion that is increasing at $400 billion per year and at $40,000 per head per year for under-30 year old Australians, this Carbon Debt dwarfing the average Australian lifetime university tuition debt of circa $20,000.

Man’s behaviour has evolved through selection of favourable genes (altered by mutation of DNA) that hard-wire reproduction-enhancing behaviour, and through societal selection of favourable ideas and behaviours that also favour reproduction and survival of offspring. Some of these evolved behaviours are contradictory. Thus greedy behaviour has been selected and has led to the dominance of the One Percenters (1% corporate world's billionaires ) who now own half the wealth of the world. However neoliberal greed is opposed by the Ninety Nine Percent (99% most people on the planet) presently outnumber the One Percenters 99-fold, the worsening Climate Genocide may result in only 0.5 billion people surviving, and these survivors will be comprised of the more prosperous of humanity. As sentient creatures, humans  can overcome bad genes and bad greediest people including  user-pays, fee-charging higher education. Educating the young as a fundamental and altruistic obligation will overcome the greediest people.

The relentless need of people for consumption coupled with the relentless appetite of capitalists for accumulation, is sustaining the planetary crisis, and so the battle for survival is economized and clogged. Despite technological progress, the unholy alliance between human nature and institutional structure creates a dangerous strong-minded and reckless attitude that diminishes prospects for a livable future.

Increases in inequality of wealth and income are consistently linked with higher emissions. In explaining this, researchers note that the affluent have the most to gain from climate-disrupting activities and at the same time are able to shield themselves from the worst impacts of climate disruption. Then there is the longstanding observation that the opulent lifestyles of the wealthier classes influence the less wealthy, driving wasteful production and consumption at all income levels. To increase efficiency, that is, according to the economist’s definition: the dollar value of gross domestic product generated per ton of fossil carbon emitted. But that mathematically rigged metric is useless to anyone concerned about climate justice. The problem with inequality is not just that too many people are poor; it’s also that too many are rich, and the rich are too rich. The concentration of income and wealth into fewer and fewer hands (and even put the word "capital" in the title of his book), he did not adequately link increasing inequality to the gross imbalances of power that exist in a mature capitalist society, the imbalances between those for whom wages and salaries are the means of subsistence and those to whom they are an expense to be minimized. Foster and Yates endorsed Piketty’s proposal to address inequality, a wealth tax, but went on to write that simply calling for a tax is not enough, that “this would require in turn a reorganization and revitalization of the class/social struggle, and in every corner of the globe.”

That goes for the global ecological crisis as well. The powerful individuals, corporations, and institutions at the peak of the pyramid who have reaped the benefits of the atmospheric carbon buildup will continue to stand in the way of climate justice, because to act otherwise would cost them too much. It will fall to the 67 percent, along with millions of allies in the 33 percent, to upend the pyramid and tackle the climate emergency head-on.

Analyzing US economic power it is clear that supranational organizations like the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund and the World Bank guarantee America’s role as the economic leader. The pillars that support the centrality of the United States in the world economy can be attributed to the monetary policy of the Fed and the function of the dollar as a global reserve currency. The Fed has unlimited ability to print money to finance further economic power of the private and public sector as well as to pay the bill due for very costly wars. The US dollar plays a central role as the global reserve currency as well as being used as currency for trade. This virtually obliges each central bank to own reserves in US currency, continuing to perpetuate the importance of America in the global economic system. The introduction of the yuan into the international basket of the IMF, global agreements for the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and Beijing’s protests against its treatment by the World Trade Organization (WTO) are all alarm bells for American strategists who see the role of the American currency eroding. In Russia, the central bank decided not to accumulate dollar reserves, favoring instead foreign currency like the Indian rupee and the Chinese yuan. The rating agencies - western financial-oligarchy tools -have diminishing credibility, having become means to manipulate markets to favor specific US interests. Chinese and Russian independent rating agencies are further confirmation of Beijing and Moscow’s strategy to undermine America’s role in western economics. De-dollarization is occurring and proceeding rapidly, especially in areas of mutual business interest. In what is becoming increasingly routine, nations are dealing in commodities by negotiating in currencies other than the dollar. The benefit is twofold: a reduction in the role of the dollar in their sovereign affairs, and an increase in synergies between allied nations. Iran and India exchanged oil in rupees, and China and Russia trade in yuan.

Another advantage enjoyed by the United States, intrinsically linked to the banking private sector, is the political pressure that Americans can apply through financial and banking institutions. The most striking example is seen in the exclusion of Iran from the SWIFT international system of payments, as well as the extension of sanctions, including the freezing of Tehran's assets (about 150 billion US dollars) in foreign bank deposits. While the US is trying to crack down on independent economic initiatives, nations like Iran, Russia and China are increasing their synergies. During the period of sanctions against Iran, the Russian Federation has traded with the Islamic Republic in primary commodities. China has supported Iran with the export of oil purchased in yuan. More generally, Moscow has proposed the creation of an alternative banking system to the SWIFT system.

Private Banks, central banks, ratings agencies and supranational organizations depend in large part on the role played by the dollar and the Fed. The first goal of Iran, Russia and China is of course to make these international bodies less influential. Economic multipolarity is the first as well as the most incisive way to expand the free choice before each nation to pursue its own interests, thereby retaining its national sovereignty

This fictitious and corrupt financial system led to the financial crisis of 2008. Tools to accumulate wealth by the elite, artificially maintaining a zombie system (turbo capitalism) have served to cause havoc in the private and public sectors, such as with the collapse of Lehman Brothers or the crisis in the Asian markets in the late 1990s.

The role of America continues to be that of destruction rather than construction. Instead of playing the role of a global superpower that is interested in business and trade with other nations, the United States continues to consider any foreign decision in matters of integration, finance, economy and development to lie within its exclusive domain. The primary purpose of the United States is simply to exploit every economic and cultural instrument available to prevent cohesion and coexistence between nations. The military component is usually the trump card, historically used to impose this vision on the rest of the world. In recent years, thanks to de-dollarization and military integration, nations like Iran, Russia and China are less subject to America's unilateral decisions.



Chapter II




The US has no international mandate to work as the custodian of any world order. There’s nothing called “US exceptionalism” in any textbook on international law or diplomacy. The American military empire, and the environmental harm it spreads, expands far beyond U.S. borders. America has more foreign military bases than any other people, nation, or empire in history, numbering over 1000. This military presence brings large-scale environmental destruction to the land and peoples across the globe through dumping, leaks, weapons testing, energy consumption, and waste. It is a war against wildlife, an assault on the environment and communities. Beyond its immediate carbon footprint, the U.S. military has placed countless countries under the thumb of western oil giants. Social movements have long sounded the alarm over the link between U.S.-led militarism and climate change, yet the Pentagon continues to evade accountability. Invading other nations, overthrow by means of a coup, killing people and destroying buildings, and military occupations of foreign countries are what America's military with the UK and France, and top government contractors, have been doing since WWII.

US enemy number one is its military spending over 60% of budget.

Iran, China and Russia have over the years adopted a variety of economic and military actions to repel the continual assault on their sovereignty by the West. The pressure exerted in the South China Sea have forced Tehran, Moscow and Beijing to conclude that the United States represents an existential threat. Russia and the Arctic transit route, of great interest not only for defense purposes but also being a quick passage for transit goods. The Black Sea for these reasons has received special attention from the United States due to its strategic location. In any case, the responses have been proportional to the threat. Iran has significantly developed maritime capabilities in the Persian Gulf, often closely marking ships of the US Navy located in the area for the purposes of deterrence.

More nations are clearly rejecting American interference, favoring instead a dialogue with Beijing, Moscow and Tehran.

With the United Nations warning that millions of civilians could die from violence or starvation from the ongoing military siege of the Yemeni port city of Hodeida, there is no other way to describe what is happening except as “genocide”. The more than three-year war on Yemen waged by a Western-backed Saudi coalition has been arguably genocidal from the outset, with up to eight million people facing imminent starvation due to the years-long blockade on the Arabian country, as well as from indiscriminate air strikes.

Americans bombed Syria again just as Russia had finally defeated the terrorist groups armed by USA and Saudi Arabia. Bombed nations show that millions had to die, murdered right in their homelands, because of the support or indifference of ordinary Americans, with enough of them willing to follow orders, even when unlawful orders, to bomb and invade whatever nation instructed to. So, ‘exceptionalist’ Americans in military uniform have bombed Syria again. They bombed Syria again just as the Syrian army with the help of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah had finally, after seven years, defeated the terrorist groups, which had heavy weaponry and Toyota trucks supplied to them by United States and Saudi Arabia. The terrorist groups destroyed much of the country and caused the death of some 350,000 Syrian men, women and children. Many Syrians had their heads cut off by the fanatic terrorists. It has been an open secret that Americans and Saudi Arabians have been funding and arming them for some seven years.

Syria is not experiencing a “civil war.” It is being targeted by both proxy and direct military force organized by the United States and its allies for the explicit purpose of dividing and destroying yet another Middle Eastern nation.

The USA Navy plays violent war games in Alaska, killing fish and destroying the environment. When the U.S. Navy sails its warships into the Gulf of Alaska, they engage in military maneuvers and drop bombs, launch torpedoes and missiles, and engage in activities that stand a significant chance of poisoning those once-pristine waters, while it prepares for future battles elsewhere on the planet. Think of it as a war against wildlife, an assault on the environment and local coastal communities.

Trump has given $54 billion more to one of the world's biggest drivers of climate catastrophe. But Trump’s proposal is also dangerous for a less-examined reason: the U.S. military is a key climate polluter, likely the “largest organizational user of petroleum in the world,” according to a congressional report released in December 2012. The U.S. military has placed countless countries under the thumb of western oil giants. Social movements have long sounded the alarm over the link between U.S.-led militarism and climate change, yet the Pentagon continues to evade accountability.

The overlooked climate footprint of the U.S. military. The U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s single largest consumer of energy, using more energy in the course of its daily operations than any other private or public organization, as well as more than 100 nations.

Spreading environmental harm across the globe. The American military empire, and the environmental harm it spreads, expands far beyond U.S. borders. The United States probably has more foreign military bases than any other people, nation, or empire in history, numbering over 1000. This military presence brings large-scale environmental destruction to the land and peoples across the globe through dumping, leaks, weapons testing, energy consumption, and waste.

The oil industry is tied to wars and conflicts around the world. It has been estimated that between one-quarter and one-half of all interstate wars since 1973 have been linked to oil, and that oil-producing countries are 50 percent more likely to have civil wars. Some of these conflicts are fought at the behest of western oil companies, in collaboration with local militaries, to quell dissent.

Oil wealth is central to the global arms trade, as evidenced by the heavy imports of the oil-rich Saudi government. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Saudi Arabia was the world’s second largest arms importer in 2012-16, with an increase of 212 percent compared with 2007–11. During this period, the U.S. was the top major arms exporter in the world, accounting for 33 percent of all exports, SIPRI determines.

Some organizations are getting concrete about what it looks like to stage a “just transition” away from a military and fossil fuels economy. ‘No war, no warming’!

Syria is possibly the most secular country where Shia, Sunni, Maronite, Druze, Christian, atheists, pagans, and women enjoy much more freedom and equal opportunities than anywhere else in the Muslim World. If promotion of democracy and freedom is the prime US objective in Syria, one wonders as to why it is teaming up with Saudi Arabia and its reactionary allies, the thuggish Jabhat al-Nusra, Free Syrian Army, and last but not least, ISIS! As Fareed Zakaria told CNN, ISIS is a bigger threat to the free world. “The weaker Assad gets, ISIS becomes stronger”, he spelled out. Despite the sound and fury about Trump’s missile attack in Syria – which amounts to war crime – it’s more than a criminal act, so much so that it’s only going to boost Trump’s sinking popularity among Americans, who are historically great admirers of presidents who invade countries and kill tens of thousands of civilians, in the pursuit of democracy, freedom, and glory for the “Greatest Nation on Earth”.

America’s current annual military expenditures are around $1.5 trillion, which is to say, almost equal to that entire global estimate of more than $1.6 trillion in 2015. America’s actual annual military budget and expenditures are much higher, because there has never been an audit of the Defense Department, though an audit has routinely been promised but never delivered, and Congresses and Presidents haven’t, for example, even so much as just threatened to cut its budget every year by 10% until it is done, there has been no accountability for the Department, at all. Corruption is welcomed at the Defense Department. Furthermore, many of the military expenditures are hidden, for instance, by funding an unknown large proportion of U.S. military functions at other federal Departments, so as for those operations not to be officially Defense Department budget and expenditures, at all. The Trillion-Dollar Defense Budget is already here.

Invading other nations, overthrow by means of a coup, killing people and destroying buildings, and military occupations of foreign countries are what the US military does best along with billionaires who have a controlling interest in one of the 100 top contractors to the U.S. Government) are selling to the USA, UK and France governments.

The major tool the Fed uses to affect the supply of reserves in the banking system is open market operations—that is, the Fed buys and sells government securities on the open market. These operations are conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

When the USA military is invading or declaring war to an other nation and destroy this other nation, then it owns it, and the reconstruction of the other nation should be an import. The rebuilding includes infrastructure, socail and housing habitats, health care, and countless activities to make this other nation (s) a sustainable place to live in. When the USA helps another nation militarily (such as Israel, Saudi Arabia) and those other nations destroy other nations using the military USA hardware and other services, then the costs of those expenses should be condidered as imports when calculating the real GDP. The costs of rebuilding those other nations destroyed by friendly or allies nations are also the USA costs and should also be imports.

Enveloped in layers of subtle sophistication, there's noway to know the deeper terms Beijing and Moscow have agreed upon behind those innumerable Putin-XiJinping high-level meetings. Diplomats, off the record, occasionally let it slip there may have been a coded message delivered to NATO to the effect that if one of the strategic members is seriously harassed, be it in Ukraine or in the South China Sea, NATO will have to deal with both. For now, let's concentrate on two instances of how the partnership works in practice, and why America is clueless on how to deal with it. Russia and China quietly advancing their agreement to progressively replace the US dollar's reserve status with a gold-backed system. That also involves the key participation of Kazakhstan – very much interested in using gold as currency along OBOR. Kazakhstan could not be more strategically positioned; a key hub of OBOR; a key member of the Eurasia Economic Union (EEU); member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization(SCO); and not by accident the smelter of most of Russia's gold. In parallel, Russia and China are advancing their own payment systems. With the yuan now enjoying the status of a global currency, China has been swiftly promoting their payment system CIPS, careful not to frontally antagonize the internationally accepted SWIFT, controlled by the US.

US military power is on the decline, and the effects are palpable. In a world full of conflicts brought on by America, the economic and financial shifts that are occurring are formany countries a long-awaited and welcome development.If we were to identify what uniquely fuels American imperialism and its aspirations for global hegemony, the role of the US dollar would figure prominently. An exploration of the depth of the dollar’s effects on the world economy is therefore necessary in order to understand the consequential geopolitical developments that have occurred over the last few decades.

The largest geo-economic change in the last fifty years was arguably implemented in 1973 with the agreement between OPEC, Saudi Arabia and the United States to sell oil exclusively in dollars. Specifically, Nixon arranged with Saudi King Faisal for Saudis to only accept dollars as a payment for oil and related investments, recycling billions of excess dollars into US treasury bills and other dollar-based financial resources. In exchange, Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries came under American military protection. It reminds one of a mafia-style arrangement: the Saudis are obliged to conduct business in US dollars according to terms and conditions set by the US with little argument, and in exchange they receive generous protection.

The decisive factor that changed the perception of countries like China and Russia was the 2008 financial crisis, as well as growing US aggression ever since the events in Yugoslavia in 1999. The Iraq war, along with other factors, prevented Saddam from starting an oil trade in euro, which threatened the dollar's financial hegemony in the Middle East. War and the America’s continued presence in Afghanistan stressed America’s intentions to continue encircling China, Russia and Iran in order to prevent any Eurasian integration. Naturally, the more the dollar was used in the world, the more America had the power to spend on the military. For the US, paying a bill of 6 trillion dollars (this is the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) has been effortless, and this constitutes an unparalleled advantage over countries like China and Russia whose military spending in comparison is a fifth and a tenth respectively. The repeated failed attempts to conquer, subvert and control countries like Afghanistan, Georgia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Donbass, North Korea, Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Venezuela, have had significant effects on the perception of US military power. In military terms, America faced numerous tactical and strategic defeats, with the Crimean peninsula returning to Russia without a shot fired and with the West unable to react. In Donbass, the resistance inflicted huge losses on the NATO-supported Ukrainian army. In North Africa, Egypt is now under the control of the army, following an attempt to turn the country into a state under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood. Libya, after being destroyed, is now divided into three entities, and like Egypt seems to be looking with favorable regard towards Moscow and Beijing. In the Middle East, Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq are increasingly cooperating in stabilizing regional conflicts, where needed they are backed by Russian military power and Chinese economic strength. And of course the DPRK continues to ignore US military threats and hasfully developed its conventional and nuclear deterrent, effectively making those US threats null and void.

The US has no international mandate to work as the custodian of any world order. There’s nothing called “US exceptionalism” in any textbook on international law or diplomacy. The American military empire, and the environmental harm it spreads, expands far beyond U.S. borders. America has more foreign military bases than any other people, nation, or empire in history, numbering over 1000. This military presence brings large-scale environmental destruction to the land and peoples across the globe through dumping, leaks, weapons testing, energy consumption, and waste. It is a war against wildlife, an assault on the environment and communities. Beyond its immediate carbon footprint—which is difficult to measure—the U.S. military has placed countless countries under the thumb of western oil giants. Social movements have long sounded the alarm over the link between U.S.-led militarism and climate change, yet the Pentagon continues to evade accountability. Invading other nations, overthrow by means of a coup, killing people and destroying buildings, and military occupations of foreign countries are what America's military with the UK and France, and top government contractors, have been doing since WWII. US enemy number one is its military spending over 60% of budget. For the US Government it is more important to make weapons of destruction, build more military bases with endless military ships that threaten many nations. Social security, global affairs and environment, Medicare and health, community affairs, Veterans Benefits and education do not seem to mean anything. As a result, the American people and those of other countries are suffering numerous deprivations. All those responsible should not let this to continue to happen.

Iran, China and Russia have over the years adopted a variety of economic and military actions to repel the continual assault on their sovereignty by the West. The pressure exerted in the South China Sea have forced Tehran, Moscow and Beijing to conclude that the United States represents an existential threat. Accompanying the important economic integration is strong military-strategic cooperation, which is much less publicized. Events such as the Middle East wars, the coup in Ukraine, and the pressure exerted in the South China Sea have forced Tehran, Moscow and Beijing to conclude that the United States represents an existential threat.

In each of the above scenarios, China, Russia and Iran have had to make decisions by weighing the pros and cons of an opposition to the American model. The Ukraine coup d’état brought NATO to the borders of the Russian Federation, representing an existential threat to the Russia, threatening as it does its nuclear deterrent. In the Middle East, the destruction of Iraq, Libya and Syria has obliged Tehran to react against the alliance formed between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United States. In China, the constant pressure on South China Sea poses a serious problem in case of a trade blockade during a conflict. In all these scenarios, American imperialism has created existential threats. It is for this reason natural that cooperation and technological development, even in the military area, have received a major boost in recent years. In the event of an American attack on Russia, China and Iran, it is important to focus on what weapon systems would be used and how the attacked nations could respond.

Russia and the Arctic transit route, of great interest not only for defense purposes but also being a quick passage for transit goods. The Black Sea for these reasons has received special attention from the United States due to its strategic location. In any case, the responses have been proportional to the threat. Iran has significantly developed maritime capabilities in the Persian Gulf, often closely marking ships of the US Navy located in the area for the purposes of deterrence.

Certainly, US naval force place a serious question mark over the defense capabilities of nations like Russia, China and Iran, which strongly depend on transit via sea routes. Let us take, for example, Russia and the Arctic transit route, of great interest not only for defense purposes but also being a quick passage for transit goods. The Black Sea for these reasons has received special attention from the United States due to its strategic location. In any case, the responses have been proportional to the threat.

Iran has significantly developed maritime capabilities in the Persian Gulf, often closely marking ships of the US Navy located in the area for the purposes of ​​deterrence. China's strategy has been even more refined, with the use of dozens, if not hundreds, of fishing boats and ships of the Coast Guard to ensure safety and strengthen the naval presence in the Southand East China Sea. This is all without forgetting the maritime strategy outlined by the PLA Navy to become a regional naval power over the next few years. Similar strategic decisions have been taken by the navy of the Russian Federation. In addition to having taken overship production as in Soviet times, it has opted for the development of ships that cost less but nevertheless boast equivalent weapons systems to the Americans carrier groups.

Iran, China and Russia make efficiency and cost containment a tactic to balance the growing aggressiveness of the Americans and the attendant cost of such a military strategy. The fundamental difference between the naval approach of these countries in contrast to that ofthe US is paramount. America needs to use its naval power for offensive purposes, whereas Tehran, Moscow and Beijing need naval power exclusively for defensive purposes. In this sense, among the greatest weapons these three recalcitrant countries possess are anti-ship, anti-aircraft and anti-ballistic systems. To put things simply, it is enough to note that Russian weapons systems such as the S-300 and S-400 air-defense systems (the S-500 will be operational in 2017) are now being adopted by China and Iran with variations developed locally. Increasingly we are witnessing an open transfer of technology to continue the work of denying (A2/AD) physical and cyberspace freedom to the United States. Stealth aircraft, carrier strike groups, ICBMs and cruise missiles are experiencing a difficult time in such an environment, finding themselves opposed by the formidable defense systems the Russians, Iranians and Chinese are presenting. The cost of an anti-ship missile fired from the Chinese coast is considerably lower than the tens of billions of dollars needed to build an aircraft carrier. This paradigm of cost and efficiency is what has shaped the military spending of China, Russia and Iran. Going toe to toe with the United States without being forced to close a huge military gap is the only viable way to achieve immediate tangible benefits of deterrence and thereby block Americanexpansionist ambitions.

A clear example of where the American shave encountered military opposition at an advanced level has been in Syria. The systems deployed by Iranand Russia to protect the Syrian government presented the Americans with the prospect of facing heavy losses in the event of an attack on Damascus. The same also holds for the anti-Iranian rhetoric of certain American politicians and Israeli leaders. The only reason why Syria and Iran remain sovereign nations is because of the military cost that an invasion or bombing would have brought to their invaders. This is the essence of deterrence.

With the United Nations warning that millions of civilians could die from violence or starvation from the ongoing military siege of the Yemeni port city of Hodeida, there is no other way to describe what is happening except as “genocide”. The more than three-year war on Yemen waged by a Western-backed Saudi coalition has been arguably genocidal from the outset, with up to eight million people facing imminent starvation due to the years-long blockade on the Arabian country, as well as from indiscriminate air strikes.

But the latest offensive on the Red Sea city of Hodeida threatens to turn the world’s already worst humanitarian disaster into a mass extermination. Hodeida is the entry point for 90 per cent of all food and medical aid into Yemen. If the city’s port stops functioning from the military offensive, as UN aid agencies are warning, then an entire country population of more than 20 million will, as a result, be on the brink of death.

The Saudi coalition which includes Emirati forces and foreign mercenaries as well as remnants from the previous regime (which the Western media mendaciously refer to as “government forces”) is fully backed by the USA, Britain and France. This coalition says that by taking Hodeida it will hasten the defeat of Houthi rebels. But to use the cutting off of food and other vital aid to civilian populations as a weapon is a blatant war crime. It is absolutely inexcusable. This past week an emergency session at the UN Security Council made the lily-livered call for the port city to remain open. But it stopped short of demanding an end to the offensive being led by Saudi and Emirati forces against Hodeida, which is the second biggest strong hold for Houthi rebels after the capital Sanaa. The port city’s population of 600,000 is at risk from the heavy fighting underway, including air strikes and naval bombardment, even before food, water and medicines supply is halted. Since the Security Council meeting was a closed-door session, media reports did not indicate which members of the council voted down the Swedish call for an immediate end to hostilities. However, given that three permanent members of the council, the USA, Britain and France, are militarily supporting the Saudi-led offensive on Hodeida, one can assume that these states blocked the call for a cessation.

As the horror of Hodeida unfolds, Western media are reporting with a strained effort to white wash the criminal role of the American, British and French governments in supporting the offensive. Western media confine their focus narrowly on the humanitarian plight of Hodeida’s inhabitants and the wider Yemeni population. But the media are careful to omit the relevant context, which is that the offensive on Hodeida would not be possible without the crucial military support of Western governments. If the Western public were properly informed, the uproar would bean embarrassing problem for Western governments and their servile news media.

What is notable in the Western media reportage is the ubiquitous descriptor when referring tothe Houthi rebels. Invariably, they are described as “Iran-backed”. That label isused to implicitly “justify” the Saudi and Emirati siege of Hodeida “because” the operation is said to be part of a “proxy war against Iran”. The BBC, France 24, CNN, Deutsche Welle, New York Times and America Post are among media outlets habitually practicing this mis-information on Yemen. Both Iran and the Houthis have said that there is no military linkage. Granted, Iran politically and diplomatically supports the Houthis, and the Yemeni population generally, suffering from the war. The Houthis share a common Shia Muslim faith as Iran, but that is a far cry from military involvement. There is no evidence of Iran being militarily involved in Yemen. The claim of a linkage relies heavily on assertion by the Saudis and Emiratis which is peddled uncritically by Western media. Even the US government has shied away from making forthright accusations against Iran supporting the Houthis militarily. Besides, how could a country which is subjected to an illegal Saudi blockade of its land, sea and air routes conceivably receive weapons supplied from Iran?

By contrast, while the Western media repeatedly refer to the Houthis as “Iran-backed”, what the same media repeatedly omit is the descriptor of “American-backed” or “British and French-backed” when referring to the Saudi and Emirati forces that have been pounding Yemen for over three years. Unlike the breathless claims of Iranian linkage to the Houthis, the Western military connection is verified by massive weapons exports, and indeed coy admissions by Western governments, when they are put to it, that they are supplying fuel and logistics to aid and abet the Saudi and Emirati war effort in Yemen. The infernal conditions in Yemen as a “complex war”, as if the conflict is an unfathomable, unstoppable mystery. Why doesn’t the New York Times publish bold editorials bluntly calling for an end to US government complicity in Yemen? Or perhaps that is too “complex” for the Times’ editorial board?

The world’s most dire humanitarian crisis may get even worse. It is the Emirati-led (and Saudi) offensive underway against port city of Hodeida, which is controlled by Iran-backed Houthi rebels. In its report, the Post did not mention the fact that air strikes by Saudi and Emirati forces are carried out with American F-15 fighter jets, British Typhoons and French Dassault warplanes. Incongruously, the Post cites US officials claiming that their forces are not “directly involved” in the offensive on the port city. How is that credible when air strikes are being conducted day after day? The America Post doesn’t bother to ask further. In a BBC report last week also lamenting the “humanitarian crisis” in Hodeida, there was the usual evidence-free casual labelling of Houthi rebels as “Iran-backed”. But, incredibly, in the entire article (at least in early editions) there was not a single mention of the verifiable fact that the Saudi and Emirati military are supplied with billions-of-dollars-worth of British, American and French weapons.

In the final paragraph of its early edition of the report, the BBC editorializes: “In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and eight other mainly Sunni Muslim Arab states launched a military campaign to restore (exiled president) Hadi’s government after becoming alarmed by the rise of the Houthi group which they see as an Iranian Shia Muslim proxy. Note the BBC’s lame and unconvincing implication of Iran. This is a stupendous distortion of the Yemeni conflict by the British state-owned broadcaster which, astoundingly, or perhaps that should be audaciously, completely air brushes out any mention of how Western governments have fueled the genocidal war on Yemen. At the end of 2014, the American and Saudi puppet self-styled “president” Mansour Hadi was kicked out by a Yemeni popular revolt led by the Houthis, but not exclusive to these rebels. The Yemeni uprising involved Shiaand Sunni. To portray Iran as sponsoring a Shia proxy is a vile distortion which the Saudis and their Western backers have used in order to justify attacking Yemen for the objective of re-installing their puppet, who has been living in exile in the Saudi capital Riyadh. In short, covering up a criminal war of aggression with lies. In reality, the Yemen war is about Western powers and their Arab despot client regimes trying to reverse a successful popular revolt that aspired to bring a considerably more democratic government to the Arab region’spoorest country, overcoming the decades it languished as a Western, Saudi client kleptocracy. For over three years, Saudi and Emirati forces, supported with Western warplanes, bombs, missiles, attack helicopters, naval power, and air refueling, as well as targeting logistics, have waged a non-stop bombing campaign on Yemeni civilians. Nothing has been off-limits. Hospitals, schools, markets, mosques, funerals, wedding halls, family homes, farms, water-treatment plants and power utilities, all have been mercilessly obliterated. Even grave yards have been bombed. Even during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the Saudi-led coalition, the supposed custodian of the two holy mosques of Mecca and Medina, has continued to massacre innocents from the air.

Elsewhere in the region, Western politicians and media have mounted hysterical protests against the Syrian government and its Russian ally when they have liberated cities from Western-backed terrorists, accusing Syria and Russia of “war crimes” and “inhuman sieges”. None of these hyperbolic Western media campaigns concerning Syria has ever been substantiated. Recall Aleppo? East Ghouta? The Syrian people have gladly returned to rebuild their lives now in peace under Syrian government protection after the Western terror proxies were routed. Western media claims about Syria have transpired to be outrageous lies, which have been hastily buried by the media as if they were never told in the first place. Yet in Yemen there is an ongoing, veritable genocidal warfully supported by Western governments. The latest barbarity is the siege of Hodeida with the callous, murderous objective offinally starving a whole population into submitting to the Western, Saudi, Emirati writ for dominating the country. This is Nuremberg-standard capital crimes. With no exaggeration, Western news media are a Goebbels,like propaganda ministry, par excellence, whose duty is to white wash genocide conducted by their governments. The barefaced lies and sly omissions being told about Yemen is one more reason among many reasons why the Western media have forfeited any vestige of credibility. They are serving as they usually do, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Syria among others, as accomplices in an epic war crime against Yemen.

Americans bombed Syria again just as Russia had finally defeated the terrorist groups armed by USA and Saudi Arabia. Bombed nations show that millions had to die, murdered right in their homelands, because of the support or indifference of ordinary Americans, with enough of them willing to follow orders, even when unlawful orders, to bomb and invade whatever nation instructed to. So, ‘exceptionalist’ Americans in military uniform have bombed Syria again. They bombed Syria again just as the Syrian army with the help of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah had finally, after seven years, defeated the terrorist groups, which had heavy weaponry and Toyota trucks supplied to them by United States and Saudi Arabia. The terrorist groups destroyed much of the country and caused the death of some 350,000 Syrian men, women and children. Many Syrians had their heads cut off by the fanatic terrorists. It has been an open secret that Americans and Saudi Arabians have been funding and arming them for some seven years.

No sense in paying attention to the West’s criminal media propagated pretexts for the US government and other Western Colonial Powers ordering their airmen to bomb and invade former colonies. It is now documented history that in each case the publicly announced and promoted pretext has been either a blatant lie or an absurdity.

Absurdities and lies notwithstanding, every genocidal action performed by the GIs of superpower USA, has had all the Caucasian populated nations of the world, to one degree or another, in solidarity with USA, or looking the other way in tacit acquiescence. Meanwhile, Mr. & Mrs. America have been watching their sons and daughters in uniform go off to bomb smaller and poorer nations than their own and be acclaimed as heroic. American attitudes have been media altered from what this writer was taught as a child some seventy-five years ago. Back then when we saw a fight, we’d cheer for the little guy, and that bully on the block slapping around kids half his size made us angry. This archival research peoples historian thought it might be an enlightening reminder of similar unjust bullying for some readers, especially readers in nations that have suffered being bombed by Americans in uniform, to scroll down a list of all the smaller nations Americans have bombed since the Second World War.

Look into any of these regime change bombings upon innocent populations by GI sons and daughters of Mr. and Mrs. America, and it becomes clear that the defenders of their small but beloved countries are the real heroes facing American high tech missile weaponry and air power that can high altitude carpet bomb, strafe the ground and release fiery clouds of napalm. The insane upside down version of history propagated on American mainstream media internationally via satilite will eventually be exposed for the evil insanity that it is. With the rise in economic power of Chinese civilization, the rapid increase of populations of the victimized Third World, and personal communication technology racing forward, new sources of information will soon be available. But why wait for honest media from the victim nations for enlightenment.

Since 2011, Syria has experienced an armed insurrection supported covertly by foreign powers including the US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, France, UK and Israel. Insurgents belonging to Islamist organizations cross the border from Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. The US State Department had immediately confirmed that it was supporting the insurgency. As of April 2018, approximately 350,000 Syrians have lost their lives. A monolithic unified slant media cartel restricts reports to ‘indiscriminate killing of civilians by the Syrian government.’ At present, roughly 2,000 American troops live in Syria, despite the Syrian government citing them as unlawful invaders. For months Americans have been bombing the very Islamic invaders, who had been receiving US aid, even heavy weapons for years supplied mostly from Saudi Arabia. This has been an open secret for years, headlined even in UK tabloid newspapers and admitted various times in mainstream media

With the defeat of IS, Syria now has a chance under Assad or a like-minded leader of reverting to its former unitary existence. However a re-unified Syria is opposed by a Zionist-subverted US and Apartheid Israel that want the destruction of Syria by Balkanization for reasons connected with divide-and-rule hegemony, gas and oil exploitation and distribution plans, and, Apartheid Israeli need for water. Trump’s escalation of the Syrian crisis to a pre-WW3 level over 30 murdered children is simply a pretext for intervention to trump and cripple Russian-backed Syrian re-unification as discussed below.

Alleged chemical weapons use as a pretext for US Alliance invasion, conquest and Balkanization of Syria. The US Alliance would like a “free fly zone” in Syria that would enable destruction of Syria (formerly the most religiously tolerant country in the Middle East) just as a UN-permitted “free fly zone” enabled the France-UK-US (FUKUS) Alliance destruction of Libya (formerly the most prosperous country in Africa). In 2013 the US Alliance used alleged Syrian Government use of poison gas in the Ghouta atrocity as the basis for demanding formal UN green-lighting of US Alliance intervention. However this move was thwarted by Russian intervention that forced the Syrian Government to hand over such weapons for destruction and sign the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), noting that it is clear that both the US Alliance-backed Rebels as well as the Syrian Government had access to such weapons.

Presently 192 states, including Syria, have signed the CWC but genocidal, serial war criminal Apartheid Israel has signed but not ratified it, and Egypt, North Korea and South Sudan have not signed. One notes that chemical weapons have been seen as a “poor man’s weapon of mass destruction” and nuclear terrorist Apartheid Israel has an arsenal of up to 400 nuclear weapons. 5 UN member countries have refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) , of which 4 have nuclear weapons (India, Apartheid Israel, Pakistan and North Korea) ( South Sudan has also not signed). Egypt’s refusal to sign the CWC is directly connected with nuclear terrorist Apartheid Israel’s refusal to sign the NPT. The recent suspected chemical weapons atrocity in Syria (at Khan Sheikhoun near Idlib with 90 killed, including 30 children) has been used as a pretext for a massive and war criminal US attack on Syria, and for further attacks, and renewed US calls for the removal of Bashar al-Assad (regime change). The US actions, threats and demands have been supported by the US Alliance with the endlessly warmongering, anti-Arab anti-Semitic, pro-Zionist, US lackey Australian Government and Opposition united in their support for the US position (in contrast, the humane Australian Greens have been quite sceptical and have suggested the US attack was for domestic political reasons). The Syrian Government and the Russians deny the alleged use of chemical weapons.

Unlike the CMC signatory Syrian Government, the US Alliance-backed non-state Rebels are not bound by the CMC and indeed are evidently in possession of chemical weapons. Thus back in 2013 Carla Del Ponte (formerly Switzerland’s attorney general, prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and a member of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria) indicated that there was evidence that rebel groups had access to sarin nerve gas: “According to their report of last week, which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated … I was a little bit stupefied by the first indications we got… they were about the use of nerve gas by the opposition”.

Obviously, in the absence of conclusions from an expert, independent inquiry the world does not yet know who was responsible for the alleged chemical gas attack that killed about 90 people including about 30 children in the town of Khan Sheikhoun in the Idlib region of north-western Syria. Trump and many US Alliance lackeys immediately and unequivocally blamed the Syrians for using chemical weapons. However the Syrians and Russians have suggested that the chemical incident arose because of the bombing of a Rebel/jihadi warehouse containing chemical weapons. A search of the UK BBC and the Australian ABC (the Australian equivalent of the UK BBC) reveals that the phrase “suspected chemical attack” is widely and indeed properly used by both media. UK Labour Party leader and Leader of the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, demanded independent verification: “Unilateral military action without legal authorisation or independent verification risks intensifying a multi-sided conflict that has already killed hundreds of thousands of people.”

Cui bono & Means, Opportunity and Motive (MOM) – Rebels and jihadis had means and opportunity, benefited immensely from the gas attack disaster, and may have been responsible. The Syrians have suffered immensely from this attack whereas the Rebels/jihadis have benefited enormously. The Rebels/jhihadis had opportunity and had access to chemical weapons whereas the Syrian government surrendered all such weapons in its possession for US-monitored destruction after a similar gas attack incident at Ghouta in 2013. The fact is that we no longer know what goals America pursued when deciding to carry out these strikes, but it is univocal that they are launched de facto in the interests of Daesh [IS], al-Nusra Front and other terrorists. In this connection, we can only express regret… So far, it can be said unequivocally that these strikes did harm to the fight against terrorism. With their backs against the wall, they have next to no chance of opposing the regime militarily. As President [Donald] Trump’s recent statements show, such actions make it possible for anti-Assad groups to receive further support.

The regime of President Bashar al-Assad was not responsible for the chemical weapons attack in northern Syria. Experts suggest it could have been jihadi rebels. Presumably, a deciding factor was an analysis of the chemical weapons used in Ghouta, conducted by a British military lab, which found the gas to be of a different composition than the Syrian army used to have. Beside, why would Assad bring world opinion against him at a time when his continued rule is beginning to be accepted.

The day after US warships rained some 60 Tomahawk missiles on a Syrian government airbase, US officials made it clear that this unilateral and criminal attack against an oppressed former colonial country is merely the first shot in what is to be an escalating and widening campaign of American military aggression. The governor of Syria’s central Homs province reported Friday that the missiles killed at least 15 people, including nine civilians. Four of the dead were children. Many more civilians were injured by two of the missiles, which struck nearby villages. Six of the dead were Syrian personnel at the al-Shairat airbase. The missile strike was the first time that America has carried out a direct military attack against Syrian government forces since the US and its regional allies orchestrated a war for regime change utilizing Al Qaeda-linked Islamist “rebels” as its proxy ground troops. The attack on the airbase is a direct intervention in that war on the side of the Al Qaeda elements… America seized on an alleged incident Tuesday involving chemical weapons in the village of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province as the pretext for Thursday night’s attack. Syria has denied any use of such weapons, and America and its allies have presented no evidence to support their allegations in relation to the incident, which has all the earmarks of a provocation staged by the CIA and its Islamist proxies. Nothing unifies America at home and rallies support among its allies quicker than a bombing of a Muslim nation, no matter the ideological, political, and moral justifications about the military option as a first resort before or after the bombing… This is not to imply that the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad (2000-present) has been politically and socially just; certainly no more so than others in the region allied with the US against Syria in the civil war started in 2011 and intended to bring down the regime that the US, UK, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Israel, [Qatar] and Turkey oppose….

On 6 March 2017, the US hit Syrian Shayrat Airfield with 59 missiles from two ships in the Eastern Mediterranean. The reason given was that US officials “believed” that Damascus was responsible for the use of gas warfare against jihadist rebel targets a few days before where 100 civilians died. The UN Security Council had requested time to investigate the use of chemical weapons to determine what actually took place. Russia argued that Syria’s chemical weapons had been removed in 2014 and that its planes hit a gas chemical weapons site belonging to jihadists, thus releasing the toxic chemicals that killed innocent civilians.Who benefits for the chemical attacks? If one does use some rationality, meaning who benefits from it, the answer is definitely not Assad, and Assad should not be mistaken for either stupid or irrational. The beneficiaries are ISIS and al-Nusra (al-Qaeda in Syria). One of the side line winners as always with U.S. military mayhem in the region, is Israel, a country all our politicians seem to fawn over in spite of their terrible human rights and international law record. Israel would love to have all the rest of the Middle East broken up into fighting little fragments of tribal groups in order that their tribe can dominate the region, its resources, and perhaps find a ‘final solution’ to the Palestinian demographic problem. There is no independent evidence and no plausible motive to implicate the Syrian Government. The main sources of this allegation are those working closely with the al Qaeda groups. On the other hand, there is a long history, from 2012 onwards, of the al Qaeda groups using chemical weapons, at time falsely blaming this on the Syrian Army. The Syrian Army certainly has been bombing and killing many hundreds within the al Qaeda groups in Idlib, without need for chemical weapons. Nor does the Syrian state possess such weapons, since the unilateral disposals of 2013 – 2014, which were held as a deterrent against nuclear armed Israel. The US (which was involved in the process) has previously agreed that this disposal was effectively carried out. On the other hand, al Qaeda stocks of chemicals have been discovered several times.

The pretext for the US attack is the sinister and dubious allegation that Assad’s air force used chemical weapons in an attack on a rebel-held town on Tuesday. The claims are dubious, above all, because the Syrian government had no motive to use such weapons, knowing that it would be seized upon to demand that Trump order a direct US-led intervention. The Islamist rebels, by contrast, along with their CIA advisors, had ample motive under conditions in which they are facing complete military defeat. Moreover, the Al Qaeda-linked al-Nusra militia is known to be in possession of, and to have used chemical weapons…

On the other side of the world, an indication of how numerous US allies may respond has been given in Australia. The country’s defence minister was phoned by US officials several hours before the US strikes. Australia has fighter-bombers and other aircraft operating with American forces in Syria and Iraq. Both the [Coalition] government and the main Labor Party opposition have made statements fully endorsing the US strike, though Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull would not confirm if the Australian military would join attacks on the Syrian government. We now have the situation in Syria where deception once again trumps reality as the US seeks to gain support for broadening its military campaign to balkanise Syria and redraw the map of the Middle East. Unfounded claims about Assad using chemical weapons are front page news, mirroring similar baseless claims that occurred a few years back and mirroring the lie of WMD in Iraq. Millions are dead in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan as the US and its allies play out a continuation of a modern-day ‘Great Game’. The world is in the grip of a structural war against people, land, economies and ecosystems. It is being waged by organised, institutional criminal interests bent on monopolizing energy, food and violence across the globe.Now the Syrian government stands accused of using a chemical that was disposed of under international supervision. Is the Syrian government that stupid to risk another threat of invasion by using a non-conventional attack?

Invading other nations, overthrow by means of a coup, killing people and destroying buildings, and military occupations of foreign countries are what you sell, that’s what you (as a billionaire with a controlling interest in one of the 100 top contractors to the U.S. Government) are selling to the USA, UK and France governments.

Unlike corporations that sell to consumers, Lockheed Martin and the other top contractors to the U.S. Government are highly if not totally dependent upon sales to governments, for their profits, especially sales to their own government, which they control — they control their home market, which is the U.S. Government, and they use it to sell to its allied governments, all of which foreign governments constitute the export markets for their products and services. These corporations control the U.S. Government, and they control NATO. And, here is how they do it, which is essential to understand, in order to be able to make reliable sense of America’s foreign policies, such as which nations are ‘allies’ of the U.S. Government (such as Saudi Arabia and Israel), and which nations are its ‘enemies’ (such as Libya and Syria) — and are thus presumably suitable for America to invade, or else to overthrow by means of a coup. First, the nation’s head-of-state becomes demonized; then, the invasion or coup happens. And, that’s it.

And here’s how. Because America (unlike Russia) privatized the weapons-industry (and even privatizes to mercenaries some of its battlefield killing and dying), there are, in America, profits for investors to make in invasions and in military occupations of foreign countries; and the billionaires who control these corporations can and do — and, for their financial purposes, they must — buy Congress and the President, so as to keep those profits flowing to themselves. That’s the nature of the war-business, since its markets are governments — but not those governments that the aristocracy want to overthrow and replace.

The foreign governments that are to be overthrown are not markets, but are instead targets. The bloodshed and misery go to those unfortunate lands. But if you control these corporations, then you need these invasions and occupations, and you certainly aren’t concerned about any of the victims, who (unlike those profits) are irrelevant to your business. In fact, to the exact contrary: killing people and destroying buildings etc., are what you sell — that’s what you (as a billionaire with a controlling interest in one of the 100 top contractors to the U.S. Government) are selling to your own government, and to all of the other governments that your country’s cooperative propaganda will characterize as being ‘enemies’ — Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, etc. — and definitely not as being ‘allies’, such as are being characterized these corporations’ foreign markets: Saudi Arabia, EU-NATO, Israel, etcetera.

In fact, as regards your biggest foreign markets, they will be those ‘allies’; so, you (that is, the nation’s aristocracy, who own also the news-media etc.) defend them, and you want the U.S. military (the taxpayers and the troops) to support and defend them. It’s defending your market, even though you as the controlling owner of such a corporation aren’t paying the tab for it. The rest of the country is actually paying for all of it, so you’re “free-riding” the public, in this business. It’s the unique nature of the war-business, and a unique boon to its investors.

Thus, on 21 May 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump sold to the Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia, an all-time-record $350 billion of U.S. arms-makers’ products, which they’re now obligated to buy during the following ten years, with an up-front commitment of $100 billion during just the first year, so as to make even that one-year commitment an all-time record. This deal is by far the biggest part of Trump’s boost to American manufacturers to create jobs in America — but it’s only to military manufacturers, the people who depend virtually 100% on sales to governments, specifically to ‘friendly’ governments: to ‘allies’, such as, in this case, to the Saudi family. In fact, the Sauds’ war against their neighbor Yemen is a good example of just how this sort of operation (profit to the billionaires, bloodshed and destruction to, in this case, the Yemenites) works: Yemen’s war goes back to the “Arab Spring” revolution in Yemen, which overthrew the U.S.-and-Saud-backed President, former Colonel and then General, Saleh. Wikipedia says of him: According to the UN Sanctions Panel, by 2012 Saleh has amassed fortune worth $32-60 billion hidden in at least twenty countries making him one of the richest people in the world. Saleh was gaining $2 billion a year from 1978 to 2012 mainly through illegal methods, such as embezzlement, extortion and theft of funds from Yemen’s fuel subsidy program.

And, furthermore: New York Times Middle Eastern correspondent Robert F. Worth described Saleh as reaching an understanding with powerful feudal ‘big sheikhs’ to become ‘part of a Mafia-style spoils system that substituted for governance’. Worth accused Saleh of exceeding the aggrandizement of other Middle Eastern strongmen by managing to ‘rake off tens of billions of dollars in public funds for himself and his family’ despite the extreme poverty of his country. Saleh fled to Saudi Arabia. Yemen’s Army installed the Vice President, and former General, Hadi to succeed him.

Then, there was a second revolution, and, on 21 January 2015, the Shia Houthi tribe took over, and the rabidly anti-Shia Saud family promptly started their bombing of Yemen, using American training, weaponry and tactical and refueling support. The U.S. Government, like its ally the Saudi family, is rabidly anti-Shia. That’s to say: The U.S. aristocracy, like Saudi Arabia’s aristocracy (the royal family), is rabidly anti-Shia. But, whereas for the Sauds, this is motivated more by hate than by greed, it’s more greed than hate on the U.S. side, because at least ever since the U.S. coup in the leading Shia country, Iran, in 1953, it’s been purely about greed, specifically that of the oil (and other) companies who also (in addition to the armaments-firms) control U.S. foreign policies. (For example, international oil companies need to extract and sell oil from many countries. They’re highly dependent upon the military, though not nearly to the extent that the weapons-firms are.)

The most recent poll that has been taken of American public opinion regarding America’s arming and training Saudi forces to fly over and bomb Yemen was taken during November 2017, tabulated on 28 January 2018, and finally published a month later, on 28 February 2018. This “Nationwide Voter Survey – Report on Results – January 28, 2018” asked 1,000 scientifically sampled American voters, “Question: Congress is considering a bi-partisan bill to withdraw U.S. forces from the Saudi-led war in Yemen. Would you say that you support or oppose this bill?” It reported that, “Support” was 51.9%, “Oppose” was 21.5%, no opinion was 26.6%; and, so, 71% of the opinions were “Support”; only 29% were “Oppose.” That’s more than two-thirds supporting this bill to consider withdrawing U.S. forces from that war.

But, when the vote was taken in the U.S. Senate, it was 55% opposing the bill, opposing, that is, consideration of the matter, and 44% supporting consideration of the matter (and not voting was 1% of the 100 Senators). 55% of Senators didn’t want the Senate to even consider the matter. Here’s how the issue had managed to get even that far: On 4 December 2017, just weeks after that poll of Americans was taken, Russian Television headlined “Saleh’s death means a fresh hell beckons for Yemen”, and the U.S. Government’s participation in the bombing of Yemen then did increase. This event — the murder of Saleh — raised the Yemen war to broader public attention in the country that was supplying the bombs and the weapons to the Sauds. On 28 February 2018, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders was the lone sponsor of “S.J.Res.54 — 115th Congress (2017-2018)”: “This joint resolution directs the President to remove U.S. Armed Forces from hostilities in or affecting Yemen, except those engaged in operations directed at Al Qaeda, within 30 days unless: (1) the President requests and Congress authorizes a later date, or (2) a declaration of war or specific authorization for the use of the Armed Forces has been enacted.”

On March 19th, NBC bannered “Senators to force vote to redefine U.S. role in Yemen”, that was merely to force a vote in the Senate, not actually to vote on the issue itself. However, given how overwhelmingly America’s voters opposed America’s arming the Sauds to slaughter the Yemenese, this vote in the Senate to consider the measure was the gateway to each Senator’s being forced to go public about supporting this highly unpopular armament of the Saudis; and, so, if it had gotten that far (to a final vote on the issue itself), the arms-makers might lose the vote, because Senators would then be voting not ‘merely’ on a procedural matter, but on the actual issue itself.

So, this vote was about the gateway, not about the destination. The next day, Breitbart News headlined “Administration, Bipartisan Interventionist Establishment Kill Aisle-Crossing Effort to Rein In U.S. Military Involvement in Yemen” and presented a full and documented account, which opened: “The Senate resolution invoking the War Powers Act to demand the administration seek congressional authorization or withdraw American support from Saudi Arabia’s military operations in Yemen was defeated Tuesday by a vote of 55-44.”

The peace-activist, David Swanson, headlined at Americasblog, “Why 55 U.S. Senators Voted for Genocide in Yemen”, and he alleged that the vote would have been even more lopsided than 55% for the weapons-industry, if some of the Senators who voted among the 44 non-bloodthirsty ones hadn’t been in such close political races. The weapons-industry won’t hold against a Senator his/her voting against them if their vote won’t even be needed in order to win. Token-votes against them are acceptable. All that’s necessary is winning the minimum number of votes. Anything more than that is just icing on the cake.

So, this explains how the U.S. Government really ignores public opinion and only pretends to be a democracy. It’s done by fooling the public. On the issue of which countries are ‘allies’ and which are ‘enemies’, and other issues regarding national defense, all necessary means are applied in order to achieve, as Walter Lippmann in 1921 called it, “the manufacture of consent.”

That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic, because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb. And so, as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.

The CIA virtually controls the ‘news’ media. Corporations that aren’t on the list of top 100 U.S. Government contractors can be crucially dependent upon their income from the U.S. Government. For example, since 2014, Amazon Web Services has supplied to the U.S. Government (CIA, Pentagon, NSA, etc.) its cloud-computing services, which has since produced virtually all of Amazon’s profits, though Amazon doesn’t even so much as show up on that list of 100 top contractors to the U.S. Government; so, this extremely profitable business is more important to Jeff Bezos (the owner also of the America Post) than all the rest of his investments put together are.

The most corrupt part of the U.S. Government is the ‘Defense’ part. That also happens to be, and by far, the most popular part, the most respected (by the American public) part. That’s a toxic combination: toxic not only for a government’s domestic policies, but especially for a government’s foreign policies, such as for identifying which nations are ‘allies’, and which nations are ‘enemies’. This type of mega-toxic combination can’t exist in a nation whose press isn’t being effectively controlled by the same general group that effectively controls the Government (in America, that’s the richest few, by means of their many paid agents), the Deep State. In America, one key to it is that the ‘Defense’ firms are privately owned.

There can be no doubt that the chaos in the White House since Trump’s victory has reflected a fight behind the scenes for control of foreign policy, homeland security and military spending. It has been about the CIA’s ultimately successful attempts to ensure Trump backtracked on relevant electoral promises and complies with its own agenda. So far, Trump has backed down on Russia, North Korea, and Iran, suggesting he is well on the way to becoming the Deep State’s lackey.

It now seems the CIA wants to control the balance of power in Congress.If the US military-intelligence complex manages to pack out Congress, it will be the killer blow for any democracy remaining in America. It will clear the field for a secret state organisation, which has shown little or no regard for human life and the rule of law, to accelerate its warlike agenda. It will have unfettered access to the national finances to accelerate its programme of global aggression, and damn the consequences for anyone else.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq is the best-known example of America’s Government and press lying to fool its public to invade a foreign country that actually posed no threat to U.S. national security (so that America’s Defense Department was obviously America’s Aggression Department, and even its very name was a lie). However, that fraud and its resulting mega-violence were unfortunately typical, not at all exceptional, for the brutal American regime.

This crucial but ugly fact will be documented here, so as to destroy (by clear facts) the lying U.S. regime’s supposed credibility, and this refers to both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party wings (and their ‘news’media), of the ruling aristocracy. (Same for America’s lapdog, UK.) First, however: it’s important to document that both Americans and Brits were lied (and that word should be not only a noun, but also a verb, because “deceived” is far too soft a term for so heinous a consequence) into invading and occupying Iraq: A crucial date was 7 September 2002, when George W. Bush and Tony Blair both said that a new report had just been issued by the IAEA saying that Saddam Hussein was only six months away from having a nuclear weapon. The IAEA promptly denied that it had issued any such “new report” at all, and the ‘news’ media simply ignored the denial, which the IAEA then repeated weeks later, and it again was ignored; so, the false impression, that such an IAEA report had been issued, remained in the publics’ minds, and they consequently favored invading Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein before there would be, as Condoleezza Rice warned the next day following Bush-Blair, on September 8th, a “mushroom cloud”. It was all just lies — lies that were believed by the public, at the time, and even believed by many for a long time after we invaded.

Some of these lies were derived from torturing detainees, torturing them to say what the U.S. and British regimes wanted them to say. But all were concocted by the perpetrating dictators. Like CIA Director George Tenet told his boss, George W. Bush, fooling the public into invading Iraq would be a “slam-dunk.” Even today, many Americans still are successfully suckered into believing that torture extracts truths, instead of the desired lies, from suspects, to serve as ‘evidence’, in this ‘democracy’. So: that’s the reality behind America’s destruction of Iraq, it was based upon lies from the Government, which were stenographically published and broadcast to the public as being truths, while the actual truths were being simultaneously hidden from the public, and the truth that the regime was lying didn’t get to reach us until we had already invaded and occupied the targeted country.

That’s what happens when an evil regime fools its public, into supporting and doing its aristocracy’s invasion, at the taxpaying public’s expense, and psychopathically ignoring the massive horrors it is imposing upon the residents in the attacked country. This is psychopathy being displayed by a dictatorship, one that claims to be a ‘democracy’ and that demonizes other governments that it claims to be (and some of which, occasionally, are) dictatorships. With the ‘anti-communist’ excuse gone, only these types of lies still work; so, they’re used non-stop.

The Obama-Trump regime, which use Al Qaeda in Syria to train and arm jihadists from around the world to go to Syria to fight and overthrow Syria’s Government and replace it by one that will be a stooge-regime of the U.S. aristocracy’s allied Saudi aristocracy (the Saudi family), is, yet again, violating Trump’s promise to leave Syria as soon as ISIS is defeated. In contrast to the U.S. regime’s promises, Trump stays on in Syria after ISIS’s defeat and tries to carve out the northeastern part of Syria, now relying mainly upon Kurdish forces in Syria’s northeast, but also upon Al Qaeda-led jihadists in Ghouta and elsewhere, to serve as America’s “boots-on-the-ground,” for establishing the stooge-regime that the U.S. aristocracy and its allied Saudi and Israeli aristocracies want to control that land, so as to construct through it oil and gas pipelines feeding the EU nations and to increase the invading aristocracy’s profits. How can a news-consumer tell if a supposed ‘news’-medium is honest about Syria?

Here’s a simple and reliable method: If the ‘news’-medium uses the term ‘rebels’ instead of “jihadists” or “terrorists” in order to refer to the people who are trying to overthrow and replace Syria’s Government, then you know it’s lying, because those aren’t ‘democrats’ in any sense: they are jihadists-terrorists who are aiming to establish in Syria a fundamentalist-Sunni, Wahhabist-Salafist, and rabidly anti-Shia, dictatorship there, which will be basically run by the Sauds.

For example, on 2 April 2018, the BBC headlined “Uncertainty Over Rebel Deal in Ghouta” instead of “Uncertainty Over Jihadist Deal in Ghouta” or “Over Terrorist Deal,” and so the BBC is clearly a lying propaganda-outlet that cannot reasonably be believed, but whose reports one instead must independently verify before citing or quoting to others. Similarly, the prior day, the Telegraph had bannered “Ghouta ‘deal struck’ as rebel fighters evacuated” and thus made clear that it too is propaganda, not reliable news-reporting.

To show how consistent these types of deception are through time, the Telegraph, on 6 March 2013, had headlined an editorial “To end the conflict in Syria, President Bashar al-Assad has to go” and called his overthrow “Our moral obligation”. And, just two days later, they bannered “US and Europe in ‘major airlift of arms to Syrian rebels through Zagreb’” which ‘news’ would have been real news-reporting if only those ‘rebels’ (and what they actually represented) had been at all honestly described. The basic technique of propaganda is to lie in the framing of an issue.

It’s so routine as to be endemic in the ‘news’-reporting in any dictatorship. For yet another example: Any ‘news’-medium that refers to the overthrow in 2014 of Ukraine’s democratically elected Government, and its replacement by a racist-fascist (nazi) rabidly anti-Russian dictatorship, as having been not a coup but instead a ‘revolution’, is a rotten lying propaganda-medium, nothing better than that. If the word “revolution” is used to describe the 2014 Ukraine overthrow, and the word “rebels” is used to refer to the fighters for the overthrow of Assad, not only is the medium consistently propaganda, but it is consistently pumping to precipitate World War III.The dictatorship needed to hide this shocking news from the public, not broadcast it to the public.

The mainstream media (and some of the non-mainstream media) are fake-news media — and this comprises almost all of the ‘news’-media. On international relations, they’re just loaded with lies, and the key terms right now are, for Syria, “rebels” versus “jihadists”; and, for Ukraine, “revolution” versus “coup.”

Instances of the United States overthrowing, or attempting to overthrow, a foreign government since the Second World War. (* indicates successful ouster of a government)

• China 1949 to early 1960s
• Albania 1949-53
• East Germany 1950s
• Iran 1953 *
• Guatemala 1954 *
• Costa Rica mid-1950s
• Syria 1956-7
• Egypt 1957
• Indonesia 1957-8
• British Guiana 1953-64 *
• Iraq 1963 *
• North Vietnam 1945-73
• Cambodia 1955-70 *
• Laos 1958 *, 1959 *, 1960 *
• Ecuador 1960-63 *
• Congo 1960 *
• France 1965
• Brazil 1962-64 *
• Dominican Republic 1963 *
• Cuba 1959 to present
• Bolivia 1964 *
• Indonesia 1965 *
• Ghana 1966 *
• Chile 1964-73 *
• Greece 1967 *
• Costa Rica 1970-71
• Bolivia 1971 *
• Australia 1973-75 *
• Angola 1975, 1980s
• Zaire 1975
• Portugal 1974-76 *
• Jamaica 1976-80 *
• Seychelles 1979-81
• Chad 1981-82 *
• Grenada 1983 *
• South Yemen 1982-84
• Suriname 1982-84
• Fiji 1987 *
• Libya 1980s
• Nicaragua 1981-90 *
• Panama 1989 *
• Bulgaria 1990 *
• Albania 1991 *
• Iraq 1991
• Afghanistan 1980s *
• Somalia 1993
• Yugoslavia 1999-2000 *
• Ecuador 2000 *
• Afghanistan 2001 *
• Venezuela 2002 *
• Iraq 2003 *
• Haiti 2004 *
• Somalia 2007 to present
• Honduras 2009
• Libya 2011 *
• Syria 2012
• Ukraine 2014 *
Q: Why will there never be a coup d’état in America?
A: Because there’s no American embassy there.

The decisive factor that changed the perception of countries like China and Russia was the 2008 financial crisis, as well as growing US aggression ever since the events in Yugoslavia in 1999. The Iraq war, along with other factors, prevented Saddam from starting an oil trade in euro, which threatened the dollar's financial hegemony in the Middle East. War and the America’s continued presence in Afghanistan stressed America’s intentions to continue encircling China, Russia and Iran in order to prevent any Eurasian integration. Naturally, the more the dollar was used in the world, the more America had the power to spend on the military. For the US, paying a bill of 6 trillion dollars (this is the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) has been effortless, and this constitutes an unparalleled advantage over countries like China and Russia whose military spending in comparison is a fifth and a tenth respectively.

The repeated failed attempts to conquer, subvert and control countries like Afghanistan, Georgia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Donbass, North Korea, Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Venezuela, have had significant effects on the perception of US military power. In military terms, America faced numerous tactical and strategic defeats, with the Crimean peninsula returning to Russia without a shot fired and with the West unable to react. In Donbass, the resistance inflicted huge losses on the NATO-supported Ukrainian army. In North Africa, Egypt is now under the control of the army, following an attempt to turn the country into a state under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood. Libya, after being destroyed, is now divided into three entities, and like Egypt seems to be looking with favorable regard towards Moscow and Beijing. In the Middle East, Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq are increasingly cooperating in stabilizing regional conflicts, where needed they are backed by Russian military power and Chinese economic strength. And of course the DPRK continues to ignore US military threats and hasfully developed its conventional and nuclear deterrent, effectively making those US threats null and void.





Chapter III




The assumption of unchecked exponential growth makes no sense. Production facilities would have to be built for the necessary solar panel and wind turbines.

Our current economic systems have become addicted to “growth at all costs”, as measured by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). They assume that GDP growth is synonymous with increasing wellbeing and prosperity. However this approach has led to growing inequality, an escalating climate crisis, and the depletion of natural and social capital. Our approach to economics and development needs fundamental transformation.

The Financial Account (also known as the Capital Account). When Americans are buying properties and services in an other nation such as those private military advisers and oil and gas corporations doing business in an other nation, then the money spent should be part of the America financial deficit.

The calculation of the Financial Account should include all the money spent by private military advisers and businesses while America is invading an other nation. When the USA builds a new military base (already over a thousand bases al over the world) in an other nation, then that is creating a capital account deficit.

When Russia and China purchased bonds from the USA, they became part of the world demand for the 'dollars'. And recently, Russia sold the bonds it had purchased from the USA. Now Russia is using its own currency to make transactions in the world. Russia selling USA bonds and now getting rid of the dollar to do business has had the effect of diminishing the equilibrium.

Knowing that the USA financial account which measures the net change in ownership of national assets which used to be flowing out of the USA when Russia and China where buying USA assets to help the nation to keep going even though it had an out of control high national debt and an increasingly high annual deficit, but now that Russia is selling the USA and China will be doing the same soon, the USA Congress should reflect in getting its House in order and produce a budget, if any, to at least admit its failure of governing with care.

Government debt limits future government actions and can be hard to pay off because Congressmen are unwilling to do what is necessary to pay down the debt. To sell the State of Texas to China including all its natural resources and assets should be almost enough for the USA to solve its debt problem, but that is assuming China would even consider the deal.

Long-run economic growth is measured as the percentage rate increase in the real gross domestic product. The GDP is defined as the market value of all officially recognized final goods and services produced within a country in a given period of time.

Economic growth has the potential to make all people richer, but may have downsides such as increased inequality and environmental impacts.

Is economic growth a reasonable goal? There are a number of other factors that must be taken into account such as GDP per capita, energy consumption, pollution metrics, education levels, innovation, environmental issues, societal repercussions, etc. The concept of uneconomic growth postulates that the costs of economic growth may outweigh the benefits, those costs being the environmental and societal repercussions.

An externality is any impact, be it positive or negative, on individuals or groups not involved in a given economic transaction. That is to say, an externality is something that affects other people outside of the particular parties involved in an exchange. A classic example of externalities is the automobile. Cars consistently produce air pollution whenever they are driven, slowly eroding the health of our ecosystem. This cost is shouldered not only by the driver of the vehicle, but also by every living thing on the planet. This is an example of parties not involved in the transaction (selling or buying the vehicle) being impacted, in this case negatively. Environmental Degradation: Health care produces a great deal of chemical waste, requires a great deal of emissions (ambulances, etc.) and alters the natural ecological environment of bacteria.

The United States currently pays out around $20 billion annually to farmers and producers in agriculture in the form of subsidies via farm bills in order to artificially reduce prices and shift the supply curve outward to ensure the overall supply in the market is high enough to satisfy all prospective consumers.

Environmental concerns have also been widely cited as a reductive influence on the agriculture market. Global warming has been slowly increasing temperatures as the ozone layer erodes due to a variety of pollutants, altering the ecosystem averages outside of the evolutionary environment in which many agricultural products historically grew. Climate changes means a different growing environment for plants, which are not used to it. There is a reduction in yield as a result of altering climatic environments. Shifts in climate drastically reduce aggregate supply.

A neoliberal, profit-driven world in which Big Money and profits determine politician and public perception of reality has been simply ignoring a quarter century of pleas for action from the world’s scientists. Today's global leadership is guided by powerful climate change denialists. However, in 2017 over 15,000 scientists around the world signed a detailed statement that we are badly running out of time to save our planet from over-exploitation, man-made global warming and massive biodiversity loss. This warning was backed by data on disastrous trajectories in 9 out of 10 key areas over the last 24 years, came 25 years after a similar warning by 1,700 scientists, coincided with the 2017 UN Climate Change Conference COP 23 in Bonn, and concluded that time is running out for action. Extrapolation from quasi-linear trajectories indicates a looming disaster in key areas, with man-made CO2 emissions increasing from 12.0 Gt (Gigatonnes or billion tonnes) CO2 per year in 1992 to 26.0 in 2016 to a projected 51.1 in 2040.

The Historical Carbon Debt (or Carbon Debt) of a country can be measured by the amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) it has introduced into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century. Thus the total Carbon Debt of the world from 1751-2016 (including CO2 that gone into the consequentially acidifying oceans) is about 1,850 billion tonnes CO2. Assuming a damage-related Carbon Price of US$200 per tonne CO2-equivalent, this corresponds to a Carbon Debt of $370 trillion, similar to the total wealth of the world and about 4.5 times the world’s total annual GDP. The world has a Carbon Debt of $370 trillion that is increasing at $13 trillion per year.

Unlike conventional debt that can be expunged by default, bankruptcy, or printing money (like the US government is doing to keep its economy going) Carbon Debt is inescapable. Thus with a world facing a 1 metre sea level rise this century, coastal cities and populations will drown if sea walls are not built or the populations are not relocated to zones safe from sea surges due to warming-intensified storms. Carbon Debt involves immense climate criminality, intergenerational inequity and intergenerational injustice. If the young fully realized the awful extent of the worsening and inescapable Carbon Debt to be paid by future generations there would be a (hopefully non-violent) Climate Revolution.

The forgoing estimate of annual Carbon Debt increase does not take into account the cost of human lives lost to global warming impacts. Thus climate change is already killing an estimated 0.4 million people each year, although this may be a considerable under-estimate because climate change disproportionately impacts the tropical and sub-tropical Developing World in which 16 million people die avoidably from deprivation each year. Indeed carbon fuel burning is associated with toxic air pollutants (notably fine carbon particulates and nitrogen oxides) that eventually kill about 7 million people each year. Several leading climate scientists have estimated that only 0.5 billion people will survive this century if man-made climate change is not requisitely addressed, this predicting a Climate Genocide in which 10 billion people would perish this century at a average rate of 100 million per year.

The risk avoidance-based Value of a Statistical Life (VOSL) is about $9 million for Americans and on the basis of “all men are created equal” could thus apply to all Humanity in an ideal world. On the basis of a $9 million per person VOSL, the annual cost of fossil fuel burning and/or global warming could be $3.6 trillion (0.4 million climate change-related deaths), $63 trillion (7 million pollution-related deaths), $144 trillion (16 million climate change-impacted global avoidable deaths from deprivation), and $900 trillion (average of 100 million deaths from unaddressed climate change this century).

Global leadership today is truly about talk with not enough action over a worsening climate emergency and a worsening climate genocide as compared to a commitment to a long-term accrual cost of $6 trillion for the endless War on Terror – yet there are 400,000 climate change-related deaths globally annually (climate terrorism victims) versus an average of 4 US deaths annually in America from political terrorism since 9-11. Similarly, since 9-11 there have been 3.3 million US air pollution deaths (carbon terrorism) versus 60 US political terrorism deaths in America. The 3.3 million US air pollution deaths since 9-11 from carbon fuel burning pollutants translates to a “wasted” risk avoidance-based cost of $30 trillion. The Carbon Debt transcends measurability when one considers the worsening desertification, salinization, deforestation, ocean resource depletion, speciescide, ecocide and omnicide associated with burgeoning human population and inextricably linked GHG pollution associated with increased urban industrial activity and agricultural methanogenic livestock-related land use. Rates of extinction appear now to be 100 to 1,000 times greater than background levels, qualifying the present as an era of “mass extinction”. A letter signed by over 15,000 scientists in 2017 documented massive over-exploitation, man-made global warming and massive biodiversity loss, declaring that “Moreover, we have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century”.

We cannot destroy what we cannot replace. Any species is essentially priceless and will disappear once it has been rendered extinct. Attempts have been made to quantify the economic value of the Biosphere. The aggregated annual value of nature’s services (updated to 2000 US $) to lie in the range $18 – $61 trillion. Our current undervaluation of nature is reflected in marked underinvestment in reserves. The world spends (in 2000 US $) ~ $6.5 billion each year on the existing reserve network… the total cost of an effective, global reserve programme on land and at sea is some $45 billion per year. This sum dwarfs the current $6.5 billion annual reserve budget yet could be readily met by redirecting less than 5% of existing perverse subsidies… our hypothetical global reserve network would ensure the delivery of goods and services with an annual value (net of benefits from conversion) of between ~ $4400 and $5200 billion [$4.4-$5.2 trillion], depending on the level of resource use permitted within protected areas, and with the lower number coming from a network entirely composed of strictly protected reserves… The benefit : cost ratio of a reserve system meeting minimum safe standards is therefore around 100 : 1.

The failure to act on climate for the last three decades also means that government will spend more as each crisis has multi-hundred million or even multi-billion dollar costs. In addition, people today are leaving a bill of hundreds of trillions of dollars to future generations. It would be much less expensive if government acted responsibly and put in place infrastructure and technology to adapt to climate change as well as to ameliorate it now. The disaster in Houston is an opportunity to make those changes. The historic failure of government action on climate change shows a fatal flaw in a representative democracy that is based on the corruption of big business money and serves the corporate interests who profit from the flawed status quo.

Are countries like China and India the “worst offenders” in terms of contributing to global air pollution and other environmental ills? The blame should instead be placed where it belongs, with transnational corporations and their highly-profitable global trade networks. A recent study of air pollution in the western United States made a startling finding: despite a 50 percent drop over the past 25 years in US emissions of smog-producing chemicals like nitrogen oxides (NOx), smog actually increased during that period in the rural US West – even in such ‘pristine’ environments as Yellowstone National Park. Most of this increase was traced to the influx of pollution from Asian countries, including China, North and South Korea, Japan, India, and other South Asian countries. That’s because over the same period that NOx emissions declined in the US, they tripled in Asia as a whole. In media reports of the study, China and India are described as the “worst offenders” of this fugitive “Asian pollution”. Left only with these findings, a reasonable conclusion would be that the US has become more environmentally enlightened in recent decades, while Asia – particularly ‘developing’ Asia – is a veritable eco-reprobate, sacrificing not only its own but global airsheds to choking pollution. The new, anti-environmental EPA director, Scott Pruitt, recently expressed this view in explaining why the US should exit the Paris Climate Accord: “China and India] are polluting far more than we are. What’s missing? A similar study of global air pollution drift in 2014, focusing on China and the US, made comparable findings, but included an important factor missing from the more recent study: production for export.

Among other things, the scholars of the older study asked how much of the Chinese air pollution drifting to the Western US was occasioned specifically in the production of exports for world markets (including the top destination for Chinese manufactures, the US.) The answer? In 2006, up to 24% of sulfate concentrations over the western United States were generated in the Chinese production of goods for export to the US. Applying these findings to the more recent study, it’s likely that a significant percentage of the Asian nitrogen oxides now choking the US West were also emitted in the production of goods destined for the US. In other words, it’s meaningless to speak of “Asian pollution” in this context. Though the pollution was emitted in Asia, it properly belongs to the country/ies on whose behalf and at whose behest it was produced. Even more accurately, the pollution finally belongs to the transnational corporations (TNCs) who are the real drivers and beneficiaries not only of offshoring, but also of insatiable consumerism through marketing and obsolescence. Economic globalization has enabled the manic scouring of the world by TNCs for the most ‘liberal’ (read: unregulated) environments in which to locate production facilities – the places where expenses can be minimized and profits maximized. Since the biggest drags on corporate profiteering come from taxes, environmental regulations, and decent labor protections and wages, the global relocations of TNCs have largely been towards countries where those costs are lowest, or absent altogether. By increasing their economic power, globalization has also given TNCs the ability to capture governments, which then collude in further reshaping of the world through ‘free’ trade treaties, supra-national institutions like the IMF, WTO and World Bank, and subsidies and hand-outs to attract and retain big businesses.

This entire system of globalization, production and pollution off-shoring is driven by the profit-maximization logic governing transnational corporations, greased along by an ever-growing number of bilateral and global free trade treaties. Beginning in the late 1980s large multinational corporations, including those headquartered in the US, began a concerted effort to reverse declining profits by establishing cross border production networks (or global value chains). This process knitted together highly segmented economic processes across national borders in ways that allowed these corporations to lower their labor costs as well as reduce their tax and regulatory obligations. Their globalization strategy succeeded; corporate profits soared. It is also no longer helpful to think about international trade in simple nation-state terms. China having colluded with global capital in turning itself into the ‘factory of the world’ is bearing the lion’s share of globalization’s brunt. But at least China is getting rich as a result, right? Certainly there is an emerging wealthy (and superwealthy) class within China that is profiting from globalization, but it represents a minuscule fraction of the overall population. The mass of the workers who make up China’s labor and ‘bad-labor’ workforce are not benefiting from the country’s conversion into a TNC workshop: labor’s share of China’s GDP has been steadily falling since the late 1990s. For a high-end electronic product like the iPhone, less than 2% (about US$10) of the sales price goes to Chinese workers involved in its production.

The oil shale resources in the United States are comparable in scope and in kind to the bituminous sands (or tar sands) found in Alberta, Canada. The deposits in Alberta contain about 85% of the world’s bitumen reserves, and it is estimated that they hold 173 billion barrels of recoverable oil. One barrel is about 159 litres or 135 kg of oil (assuming a density of 0.85g/ml for oil) that corresponds to 118 kg carbon (assuming the oil is 87% carbon). Carbon has an atomic weight of 12 and CO2 a molecular weight of 44. Combustion of 1 kg of carbon (C) yields 44/12 = 3.67 kg CO2. Accordingly, complete combustion of one barrel of oil would yield 118 kg carbon x 3.67 kg CO2/kg carbon = 433 kg CO2. The “173 billion barrels of recoverable oil” in the Alberta tar sands corresponds to 173 billion barrels x 0.433 tonnes CO2/ barrel of oil = 75 billion tonnes CO2 or 85% of the world’s remaining Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget of 88 billion tonnes CO2-e.

The total technically recoverable oil shale resource in the US was estimated 2.6 trillion barrels. On combustion this 2,600 billion barrels of oil would yield 2,600 billion barrels x 0.433 tonnes CO2/ barrel of oil = 1,126 billion tonnes CO2, this being 1,126/88 = 12.8 or about 13 times greater than the world’s present remaining Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget.

One can do similar calculations in relation to the Trump promise of unlimited exploitation of all American fossil fuel reserves. Thus the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) states that: “As of January 1, 2016, EIA estimated that the remaining U.S. recoverable coal reserves totaled over 255 billion short tons [231 billion tonnes]”. Assuming that this recoverable coal is thermal coal (80% carbon, and generating 2.9 tonne CO2 per tonne coal on combustion), then this recoverable coal corresponds on combustion to 231 billion tonnes coal x 2.9 tonnes CO2/ tonne coal = 670 billion tonnes CO2 , this corresponding to 670/88 = 7.6 or about 8 times more than the world’s present Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget.

US recoverable gas reserves are about 324.3 trillion cubic feet (6.66 billion tonnes gas) and combustion of 16 tonnes CH4 (methane) yields 44 tonne CO2 . Assuming for simplicity that the gas is all methane (CH4), the CO2 from combustion of these gas reserves would be 6.66 billion tonnes CH4 x 44 tonnes CO2/16 tonne CH4 = 18.3 billion tonne CO2. However CH4 is a gas, leaks and has a Global Warming Potential (GWP) 105 times that of CO2 on a 20 year time frame and with aerosol impacts considered. One can calculate that a systemic gas leakage of 2.6% would contribute as much GHG pollution as generating CO2 by burning the remaining 97.4% of the gas, and thus pollution from exploitation of US gas reserves would total 37 billion tonnes CO2-e , equivalent to 42% of the world’s present remaining Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget.

Assuming for the purposes of argument that Trump’s promise of $50 trillion dollars worth of job-producing American energy reserves” is thermal coal (80% carbon, generating 2.9 tonne CO2 per tonne coal on combustion, and presently selling for $100 per tonne), then this corresponds to $50,000 billion x tonne coal/$100 = 500 billion tonne coal or about 500 billion tonne coal x 2.9 tonne CO2/tonne coal = 1,450 billion tonnes CO2 on combustion. This generated CO2 is 1,450/88 = 16.47 or over 16 times greater than the world’s present remaining Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget.

Global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.” If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate. Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk. Fortunately, according to Wikipedia, only 178 billion or about 10% of the 1,700 billion barrels of oil in the Canadian tar sands is presently economically recoverable. The 178 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the Alberta tar sands corresponds to 178 billion barrels x 0.433 tonnes CO2/ barrel of oil = 78 billion tonnes CO2 or about 89% of the whole world’s remaining Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget of 88 billion tonnes CO2-e as of 2017. Game over for the climate. However where there’s a will there’s a way, as well illustrated by the present Gadarene Canadian exploitation of tar sands oil. If neoliberal greed ensures that all the Canadian tars sands oil is exploited then the GHG pollution (ignoring that from purifying the oil) would be 1,700 billion barrels x 0.433 tonnes CO2/ barrel of oil = 736 billion tonnes CO2 or 736/88 = 8.4 or over 8 times more than the whole world’s remaining Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget of 88 billion tonnes CO2-e as of 2017. Game well and truly over.

Global CO2 pollution is increasing at a record rate of 3 ppm CO2 per year and atmospheric CO2 is at a record level of about 430 ppm CO2. The evident failure to tackle climate change is contributing to a worsening climate genocide in which 10 billion people may perish this century if global warming is not requisitely addressed. Already 7.5 million people die each year from air pollution (7 million) or climate change (0.5 million). However the latter figure may be an under-estimate because 17 million people presently die avoidably each year from deprivation in Developing Countries that already disproportionately impacted by climate change. The consequences of failing to keep the temperature below 1.5C will be to wilfully condemn hundreds of millions of the poorest citizens of Earth to certain deaths from the severe impacts of climate change.

The ongoing subsidising of fossil fuels in many countries, combined with the failure so far for a carbon price to account for the true cost of burning fossil fuels, means today’s markets are distorted. To unlock these benefits, the private sector needs clear and credible long-term policy frameworks that provide the right incentives. Global GDP will be boosted by around or $4.6tn, by 2050, through economic growth and new employment opportunities. The cumulative GDP gain from now up to 2050 amounts to $19tn. Even in its worse-case scenario, GDP is boosted by 0.6% in 2050. The energy sector (including energy efficiency) will create around six million additional jobs in 2050. Job losses in fossil fuel industry would be fully offset by new jobs in renewables, with more jobs being created by energy efficiency activities. The overall GDP improvement will induce further job creation in other economic sectors.

In fact, when externalities such as reduced air pollution and other health benefits are considered, the overall benefits will be between two and six times greater than the system costs of decarbonisation. In its scenario, 20% of the decarbonisation options identified are economically viable without consideration of welfare benefits, while the remaining 80% are economically viable if benefits, such as reduced climate impacts, improved public health, and improved comfort and performance, are considered. In absolute terms, reduced externalities can bring benefits of up to $10tn annually by 2050.Costs and reduced externalities of decarbonisation in 2050. Benefits from reduced externalities exceed the costs of decarbonisation by a factor of between two and six, with health benefits from reduced air pollution alone exceeding the costs.Drastic improvements in air pollution, cuts in fossil fuel import bills and lower household energy expenditures would complement the decarbonisation achieved, if well designed policies are used.

The costs for action will be more than offset by a combination of fuel savings, avoided climate impacts and reduced air and noise pollution, even before wider economic impacts in terms of jobs and growth are taken into account.G20 accounts for around 80% of the world’s total primary energy demand – including almost 95% of its coal demand and nearly three-quarters of its gas and oil demand. Overall, it is responsible for more than 80% of total CO2 emissions. However, G20 countries are also the key driver of low-carbon technology deployment, holding 98% of global installed wind power generation, 96% of solar PV and 94% of nuclear power capacity. Its passenger vehicle fleet represents almost 95% of all electric vehicles worldwide. This means G20 governments will have to play a crucial role in meeting the obligations under the Paris Agreement.

The assumption of unchecked exponential growth makes no sense. An extrapolation of the historical annual growth rate (39.14%) means that the final doubling of capacity occurs in the last 25.2 months. Huge productions facilities would have to be built for the necessary solar panel and wind turbines – to be used only for a very short time.

What would a more realistic model be? A necessary solution would be to use growth models limited by a capacity factor such as the available food or land. But organisms will reproduce until the capacity is exhausted, often going into overshoot followed by a period of population collapse.

The phenomenon of Climate Change has many other components to worry about as well, in addition to fossil fuel based energy systems. It is not just the transformation of energy scenario alone, which is required. We need an entirely different paradigm to the way we view the nature around us. Even if we assume that the political willingness across the world will allow the possibility of moving over to 100% renewable energy (RE) based scenario by 2040/50, it may not suffice. The enormous number of solar PV modules, wind turbines, batteries, bio-energy units, geo-thermal units, hydropower units, computers, control systems, communication systems, protection systems, energy meters, associated transmission and distribution systems etc. required for such a scenario with a business as usual approach up to 2040/50 will be so much overwhelming that we may end up being the losers anyway. Because, the total energy required by 2040/50 at the global level would have reached such high levels, if we continue with the energy demand growth rate as it is now (which may mean a CAGR of 3 to 5% between now and 2050). In this context, the projected energy scenario in the case of India can be a good example for discussion. The national energy policy draft has projected that India’s (i) energy related Emissions per capita may increase from 1.2 tons of Carbon Dioxide Equivalent/capita in 2012 to 2.7-3.5 tons of Carbon Dioxide Equivalent/capita in 2040; (ii) Per capita electricity consumption may go up from 887 kWh in 2012 to 2,911-2,924 kWh in 2040; (iii) CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of electricity supply may be 5.5% between 2012-2040. Most countries from the developing world are likely to have similar growth trajectory, because of which the total energy demand at the global level can be massive by 2040/50. Even if the global energy demand growth rate between now and 2050 is assumed to grow only @ 1% CAGR, the total energy demand would have increased by about 100% as compared to that of the demand today. Even to meet this much energy demand the global economy has to manufacture enormous number of appliances/gadgets/machineries (to generate and distribute commercial forms of energy such as solar power, wind energy, bioenergy, hydel power etc.). Such a vast economic activity alone at the global scale will require the mining and processing of large quantities of the ores of iron, copper, aluminium and many kinds of rare earth minerals, which in turn will require large amounts of energy, most of which may have to come from conventional technology energy sources such as coal power technology. Hence by 2050, the total CO2 emissions (or the total GHG emissions) would have gone much beyond 450 PPM as against the desired level of 350 PPM. And the CO2, which would have been accumulating in the atmosphere during this period, will last for hundreds of years. The ability of various natural elements to control the temperature rise would have been severely curtailed. Many of the natural process, such as glacier melting and ocean acidification, would have become irreversible. The forests and vegetation cover will have to come down considerably, and the pollution/contamination may exceed all limits.

Our current economic systems have become addicted to “growth at all costs”, as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP). They assume that GDP growth is synonymous with increasing wellbeing and prosperity. However this approach has led to growing inequality, an escalating climate crisis, and the depletion of natural and social capital. We are no longer generating genuine progress. Our approach to economics and development needs fundamental transformation. A global movement is coalescing among a large number of individuals and organizations around the need to shift economies away from a narrow focus on marketed goods and services (i.e. GDP) to one more broadly focused on ‘sustainable wellbeing’. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a step in this direction, encompassing a broad set of 17 goals that go far beyond GDP growth, and include eliminating hunger and poverty, reducing gender and overall inequality, urgent action on climate change, and restoring marine and terrestrial ecosystems. So what is a wellbeing economy? Society needs an economy that has the fundamental goal of achieving a socially sustainable development with dignity and fairness for humans and the rest of Nature. The outcome of a convergence of factors, including good human mental and physical health, greater equity and fairness, good social relationships and a flourishing natural environment. This is in stark contrast to current economies that are wedded to a very narrow vision of development, indiscriminate growth of GDP. This economic model recognizes that the economy is embedded in society and Nature. It must be understood and managed as an integrated, interdependent system.

An economy based on the overriding goal of GDP-growth inevitably crashes through the boundaries of planetary capacity. By affording no value to unexploited resources and assets, and by making no judgments about the quality or meaning or consequence of production and consumption, its growth conflicts with natural and social equilibria. In contrast to this destructive path, the social sustainability economy model specifically strengthens social and natural capital while generating human development. A ‘virtuous circle’ can be created whereby value that is measured in terms of wellbeing feeds the improvements in the human and natural capitals upon which the creation of value depends. The negative impact on the environment will be greatly reduced as the ‘circular economy’ model of resource recycling and systems for up-cycling are integrated into mainstream business models. The ecosystem services that the GDP model considers free of charge will become fully valued components of society’s infrastructure, supported by new common asset governance institutions that connect people more closely to natural ecosystems. Economic ‘growth’ in this model lies not in the exploitation of natural, social, and human resources but in improving the quality and effectiveness of human-to-human and human-to-ecosystem interactions, supported by appropriate enabling technologies.

The different components to explain the growth (or reduction) in total emissions are growth of the economy measured as GDP per capita (GDP/population); growth of the population; the energy intensity needed per unit of economic output (energy/GDP) and the emission intensity of that energy (CO2e/energy).

It can be readily appreciated that emissions from the last two components can be reduced as a result of:

• Increasing energy efficiency – the amount of energy used per unit of economic output/service is reduced brought about by more insulation in buildings, lighter more efficient vehicles, machinery etc.

• Decarbonising energy sources – the amount of carbon used in generating energy is reduced by switching to renewables – wind, solar, tidal, wave etc. It also requires changes to the grid to balance for “intermittency” as well as switching to an electric infrastructure (e.g. electric cars)

With global population increasing at 1.3% and the global per capita income increasing at 1.4% per year in real terms, the required technical improvement (reduction) in carbon intensity is greater than 2.7% (1.4% + 1.3%) per year. So what has the rate of technical improvement been? Carbon intensity has only been improving at 0.7% per annum. Thus, emissions have been increasing at 2% per annum. While the efficiency with which the global economy uses energy, as measured by the energy/GDP ratio, has continued to improve, the slow decarbonisation of the global energy supply has been put into reverse. The carbon intensity of energy is actually increasing, particularly as more coal is being used. The fact that there is so little sign of hope appears to be because, as depletion has driven up oil and gas supplies and prices, coal is being turned to instead, as well as more emission intensive sources of oil and gas (like Canadian tar sands and shale). Keeping global climate close to a safe range will require a long-term atmospheric CO2 level of about 350 ppm or less. If emissions reduction had begun in 2005, reduction at 3.5%/year would have achieved 350 ppm at 2100. Now the requirement is at least 6%/year. Delay of emissions reductions until 2020 requires a reduction rate of 15%/year to achieve 350 ppm in 2100. If we assume only 50 GtC reforestation, and begin emissions reduction in 2013, the required reduction rate becomes about 9%/year.

Just to stop global emissions growing, if GDP growth rates are 2.7% pa then carbon intensity must reduce at 2.7% per annum, which is nearly 4 times the current rate of improvement. In order for emissions to fall at 10% per annum, if growth continued at 2.7% pa, this would require carbon intensity to improve (reduce) at 12.7 % per annum. This is 18 times the current rate of improvement. Dangerous climate change can only be avoided if economic growth is exchanged for a period of planned austerity within Annex 1 nations at the same time as there is a rapid transition away from fossil-fuelled development within non-Annex 1 nations. An organised agency must be found with the political will and power to set an absolute ceiling on the amount of carbon based fuels that are allowed into the economy.

A Fiscal Policy is the use of government spending and taxation to influence the economy.

• The government has two levers when setting fiscal policy: it can change the levels of taxation and/or it can change its level of spending.

• There are three types of fiscal policy: neutral policy, expansionary policy, and contractionary policy.

• In expansionary fiscal policy, the government spends more money than it collects through taxes. This type of policy is used during recessions to build a foundation for strong economic growth and nudge the economy toward full employment.

• In contractionary fiscal policy, the government collects more money through taxes than it spends. This policy works best in times of economic booms. It slows the pace of strong economic growth and puts a check on inflation.
Fiscal policy is the use of government spending and taxation to influence the economy, the level of aggregate demand in the economy, in an effort to achieve the economic objectives of price stability, full employment, and economic growth.

Monetary policy is referred to as either being expansionary or contractionary. Expansionary policy seeks to accelerate economic growth, while contractionary policy seeks to restrict it. Expansionary policy is traditionally used to try to combat unemployment in a recession by lowering interest rates in the hope that easy credit will entice businesses into expanding. This is done by increasing the money supply available in the economy. Expansionary policy attempts to promote aggregate demand growth. Aggregate demand is the sum of private consumption, investment, government spending and imports. Monetary policy focuses on the first two elements. By increasing the amount of money in the economy, the central bank encourages private consumption. Increasing the money supply also decreases the interest rate, which encourages lending and investment. The increase in consumption and investment leads to a higher aggregate demand. It is important for policymakers to make credible announcements. If private agents (consumers and firms) believe that policymakers are committed to growing the economy, the agents will anticipate future prices to be higher than they would be otherwise. The private agents will then adjust their long-term plans accordingly, such as by taking out loans to invest in their business. But if the agents believe that the central bank’s actions are short-term, they will not alter their actions and the effect of the expansionary policy will be minimized.

The primary means a central bank uses to implement an expansionary monetary policy is through open market operations. Commonly, the central bank will purchase government bonds, which puts downward pressure on interest rates. The purchases not only increase the money supply, but also, through their effect on interest rates, promote investment. Because the banks and institutions that sold the central bank the debt have more cash, it is easier for them to make loans to its customers. As a result, the interest rate for loans decrease. Businesses then, presumably, use the money it borrowed to expand its operations. This leads to an increase in jobs to build the new facilities and to staff the new positions. The increase in the money supply is inflationary, though it is important to note that, in practice, different monetary policy tools have different effects on the level of inflation.

Expansionary fiscal policies are usually implemented during recessions because they attempt to increase economic demand, and as a result, increase economic output which is reduced during a recession. Expansionary fiscal policies involve reducing taxes or increasing government expenditure. Remember that government revenue is based on collected taxes. When taxes exceed government spending, the government is characterized as having a surplus. When taxes equal government expenditures, the government has a balanced budget. When the government spends more than the revenue it collects, it has a deficit. Increasing government spending, creating a budget deficit, and financing the shortfall through debt issuance are typical policy actions in an expansionary fiscal policy scenario. When the government runs a budget deficit, funds will need to come from public or foreign borrowing.

Trade policies can shift aggregate demand. Protectionism, for example, is a policy that interferes with the free workings of the international marketplace. By implementing protectionism policies such as tariffs and quotas, a government can make foreign goods relatively more expensive and domestic goods relatively cheaper, increasing net exports and therefore aggregate demand. Since the world demands more goods produced in the home country, the demand for the domestic currency increases and the exchange rate rises.

In the United States, the Federal Reserve implicitly maintains a target inflation range of 1.7%-2.0%. When inflation falls below this range, the Fed would lower interest rates and raising the money supply in order to push inflation up. Likewise, when inflation rises above the target range, the Fed would raise interest rates and decrease the money supply in order to suppress the high level of inflation. While the inflation rate and the interest rate generally have an inverse relationship, these tools are not always successful in affecting inflation – for example, in response to the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing recession, the Fed raised its target inflation level to 2% and lowered interest rates to nearly zero. This did not, however, succeed in raising inflation to 2%.

The interest rate is the rate at which interest is paid by a borrower (debtor) for the use of money that they borrow from a lender (creditor). It is viewed as a “cost” of borrowing money . Interest-rate targets are a tool of monetary policy. The quantity of money demanded varies inversely with the interest rate. Central banks in countries tend to reduce the interest rate when they want to increase investment and consumption in the economy. However, low interest rates can create an economic bubble where large amounts of investments are made, but result in large unpaid debts and economic crisis. The interest rate is adjusted to keep inflation, the demand for money , and the health of the economy in a certain range. Capping or adjusting the interest rate parallel with economic growth protects the momentum of the economy.

An open economy can import and export without any barriers to trade, such as quotas and tariffs. In an open economy there is a flow of funds across borders due to the exchange of goods and services. An open economy can import and export without any barriers to trade, such as quotas and tariffs. Citizens in a country with an open economy typically have access to a larger variety of goods and services. They also have the ability to invest savings outside of the country. An open economy allows a country to spend more or less than what it earns through the output of goods and services every year. When a country spends more than it make, it borrows money from abroad. If a country saves more money than it makes, it can lend the difference to foreigners.

Long-run economic growth is measured as the percentage rate increase in the real gross domestic product. The GDP is defined as the market value of all officially recognized final goods and services produced within a country in a given period of time.

In principle, all of the approaches should yield the same result for the GDP of a country. For example, the equation for the expenditure approach is: GDP = C + I + G + (X – M). Written out in full, the gross domestic product (GDP) equals private consumption (C) plus, gross investment (I), government spending (G), and the exports minus the imports (X – M). For economic purposes, the economic growth is calculated and compared to the population, also know as per capita income (indicator of a country’s standard of living). When the per capita income increases it is called intensive growth. When the GDP growth is only caused by increases in population or territory it is called extensive growth.

On a global scale, economic growth is the sum of the growth of individual countries to give a worldwide total. Economic growth and global impact varies by country based on the individual economy, the development of the country, accumulation of human and physical capital, and level of productivity.

When an economy or industry experiences imbalanced in economic growth, the government can respond in order to assist in securing the market. Economic growth has the potential to make all people richer, but may have downsides such as increased inequality and environmental impacts. Compare and contrast the consequences of economies in which growth is a goal.

• Over the long-run economic growth looks at the growth of the ratio of GDP to the population. Economic growth is an expansion of the economic output of a country.

• Arguments in support of economic growth include increased productivity, the expansion of power, and an increase in the quality of life.

• Arguments opposed to economic growth include resource depletion, environmental impacts, and equitable growth.

Arguments in Favor of Growth.

There are numerous arguments in support of economic growth that describe its positive impact on society. Arguments in favor of economic growth include:

• Increased productivity: in countries that experience positive economic growth, the growth is often attributed to an increase in human and physical capital. Also, economic growth is usually accompanied by new and improved technological innovations.

• Expansion of power: economic growth is influential within a country even if the percentage of growth is small. With a small growth rate, a country will experience a substantial increase in power over the long-run. For example, a growth rate of 2.5% per annum leads to a doubling of the GDP within 29 years. In contrast, a growth rate of 8% per annum leads to a doubling of the GDP within 10 years. The power expansion associated with economic growth has long-run influences on a country.

• Quality of life: the quality of life increases in countries that experience economic growth. Economic growth alleviates poverty by increasing employment opportunities and labor productivity. It has been found that happiness increases with a higher GDP per capita, up to a level of at least $15,000 per person.

Arguments Opposed to Growth.

There are a series of arguments that are opposed to economic growth. Arguments opposed to growth include:

• Resource depletion: economic growth has the potential to deplete resources if science and technology do not produce viable substitutes or new resources. Also, some arguments state that better technology and more efficient production will deplete resources quicker in the long-run even though advancements are perceived as positive right now.

• Environmental impact: some argue that a narrow view of economic growth combined with globalization could collapse the world’s natural resources. Portions of society have advocated the ideas of uneconomic growth and de-growth (economic contraction) in an attempt to lessen these effects of economic growth.

• Equitable growth: it has been found that while economic growth has a positive impact on society as a whole, it is common that poor sections of society are not able to participate in economic growth. Economic growth has many positive effects, but a society must not favor economic growth over solving pressing social issues such as poverty. For example, in a country with low inequality, a country with a growth rate of 2% per head and 40% of the population living in poverty can halve the poverty in 10 years. In contrast, if the same country has high inequality it will take nearly 60 years to achieve the same level of poverty reduction.

Global Economic Growth.

There are specific factors that have a direct impact on the economic growth of a country. Every country is unique based on population, technology, government, wealth, etc. Economic growth can be compared between countries, although no two countries are the same. Some of the factors that impact economic growth include:

• Growth of productivity: the growth of productivity is the ratio of economic output to input (capital, labor, energy, materials, and services). When productivity increases the cost of goods decreases causing an increase in the per capita GDP. Lower prices create an increase in higher aggregate demand. The growth of productivity is the driving force behind economic growth.

• Demographics: demographics change the employment to population ratio as well as the labor force participation rate. The age structure of the population affects the labor force participation rate. For example, when women entered the workforce in the U.S. it contributed to economic growth, as did the entrance of the baby boomers into the workforce.

• Labor force participation: the rate of labor force participation impacts economic growth. It is the number of people working in the labor force. When manufacturing increased, it created a higher productivity rate, but lowered the labor force participation, prices fell, and employment shrank.

• Human capital: human capital is referred to as the skills of the population. Education is a commonly used measurement for human capital. Human capital increases the society’s skill which increases economic growth.

• Inequality: inequality in wealth and income has a negative impact on economic growth. Inequality results in high and persistent unemployment. This has a negative effect on long-run economic growth.

• Trade: international trade represents a significant part of GDP for most countries. It is the exchange of goods and services across national borders.

• Quality of life: happiness has been shown to increase with a higher GDP per capita. Quality of life is a direct result of economic growth. When poverty is alleviated and society has access to what it needs, the quality of life increases. Consistent quality of life leads to continued economic growth.

• Employment rate: in order for the employment rate to have a positive impact on economic growth there must also be increases in productivity. If employment increases, but productivity does not, then there is a higher number of working poor.

• Environmental issues.

Is Economic Growth a Good Goal? There are a number of other factors that must be taken into account such as GDP per capita, energy consumption, pollution metrics, education levels, innovation, environmental issues, societal repercussions, etc. It is difficult to compare countries across large time horizons, but, after controlling for as many of these effects as you can, comparisons are possible. The concept of uneconomic growth postulates that the costs of economic growth may outweigh the benefits, those costs being the environmental and societal repercussions.

Economic growth is typically viewed as positive, but there are mixed repercussions of increased productivity within an economic system.

• The relationship between economic growth and the well-being of a society has largely been viewed as positive throughout the course of history.

• Economic growth increases consumer purchasing power and leisure time along with governmental purchasing power for societal benefits.

• It is imperative that increased productivity can be created in a context in which the value can be captured in a positive and meaningful way.

Why is Growth Good?

Economic growth is the increase in the market value of the goods and services produced by an economy over time. Simply, more economic growth means that people are able to buy more of the things they like. Presumably, this translates into higher overall utility. On a societal level, increases in GDP growth and overall productivity generates high prospective tax revenues, both on business profits and consumer purchases. Higher tax revenues will allow governments more financial flexibility to invest in social services such as education, welfare, transportation, etc.

Drawbacks to Economic Growth.

There are, however, some downsides to economic growth, which are summarized in the idea of uneconomic growth. The concept of uneconomic growth postulates that the costs of economic growth – primarily environmental and social costs – may outweigh the benefits. There are a few specific observations of this that are worth noting:

• Environmental Degradation: The final criticism is often the most discussed, particularly in light of the overwhelming evidence of global warming and the destructive nature of excessive consumption. It is also reasonable to consider the finite nature of natural resources. Scientific modeling by environmental scientists often demonstrate significant long-term risks for the well-being of the ecosystem, posing a very real threat to the overall value in continued economic growth. Is it worth having more to consume if there is no ecosystem in which to enjoy it?

GDP and Growth.

• Economic growth is the increase in the market value of the goods and services that an economy produces over time. It is measured as the percentage rate change in the real gross domestic product (real GDP ).

• Determinants of long-run growth include growth of productivity, demographic changes, and labor force participation, and envonmental issues.

• When the economic growth matches the growth of money supply, an economy will continue to grow and thrive.

• Inflation occurs in an economy when the prices of goods and services continue to rise while the purchasing power decreases.

• When the GDP growth is only caused by increases in population, the growth is excessive.

• inflation: An increase in the general level of prices or in the cost of living.

• economic growth: The increase of the economic output of a country.

Impact of Education on GDP.

As the number of years of education within a country increase, so does the per capita GDP. Economics is one field of study that researches the effectiveness of education policies. Education policies are designed to cover all education fields from early childhood education through college graduate programs. Policies focus on school size, class size, school choice, tracking, teacher education and certification, teacher pay, teaching methods, curricular content, and graduation requirements. To ensure economic growth, a country must have strong education policies.

Calculating Real GDP.

Real GDP growth is the value of all goods produced in a given year; nominal GDP is value of all the goods taking price changes into account.

Calculate real and nominal GDP growth

• The following equation is used to calculate the GDP:

GDP = C + I + G + (X – M) or GDP = private consumption + gross investment + government investment + government spending + (exports – imports).

• Nominal value changes due to shifts in quantity and price.

• In economics, real value is not influenced by changes in price, it is only impacted by changes in quantity. Real values measure the purchasing power net of any price changes over time.

• Real GDP accounts for inflation and deflation. It transforms the money -value measure, nominal GDP, into an index for quantity of total output.

• nominal: Without adjustment to remove the effects of inflation (in contrast to real).

The Gross domestic Product (GDP) is the market value of all final goods and services produced within a country in a given period of time. The GDP is the officially recognized totals. The following equation is used to calculate the GDP:

GDP = C + I + G + (X - M)

Written out, the equation for calculating GDP is:

GDP = private consumption + gross investment + government investment + government spending + (exports – imports).

For the gross domestic product, “gross” means that the GDP measures production regardless of the various uses to which the product can be put. Production can be used for immediate consumption, for investment into fixed assets or inventories, or for replacing fixed assets that have depreciated. “Domestic” means that the measurement of GDP contains only products from within its borders.

The real GDP is the total value of all of the final goods and services that an economy produces during a given year, accounting for inflation. It is calculated using the prices of a selected base year. To calculate Real GDP, you must determine how much GDP has been changed by inflation since the base year, and divide out the inflation each year. Real GDP, therefore, accounts for the fact that if prices change but output doesn’t, nominal GDP would change.

The nominal GDP is the value of all the final goods and services that an economy produced during a given year. It is calculated by using the prices that are current in the year in which the output is produced. In economics, a nominal value is expressed in monetary terms. For example, a nominal value can change due to shifts in quantity and price. The nominal GDP takes into account all of the changes that occurred for all goods and services produced during a given year. If prices change from one period to the next and the output does not change, the nominal GDP would change even though the output remained constant.

Government can promote free trade by reducing tariffs, quotas, and non-tariff barriers. Free trade is a policy by which a government does not discriminate against imports or interfere with exports by applying tariffs (to imports), subsidies (to exports), or quotas. According to the law of comparative advantage, the policy permits trading partners mutual gains from trade of goods and services.

There are a number of barriers to free trade that governments can mitigate, most importantly, tariffs (government imposed import taxes) and quotas (government imposed limits on the quantity of a good that can be imported). Tariffs and quotas are explicit government policies that are designed to protect domestic producers, even if they are not the most efficient producers. There are a number of reasons why governments place tariffs or other barriers to free trade, but they necessarily reduce overall societal welfare. Governments can promote free trade and impact economic growth. In addition to tariffs and quotas, there are a number of other barriers to free trade that countries use. Broadly, they are categorized as non-tariff barriers (NTBs). NTBs come in a variety of forms. One example of an NTB are product standard requirements. A country can set high quality standards for a product, knowing that not all foreign producers will be able to meet the standard. Another way that countries can implement NTBs is through customs procedures. Countries can force foreign exporters to fill out arduous paperwork over the course of months, and perhaps in a language the foreign producer does not speak. NTBs act just like tariffs and quotas in that they are barriers to free trade.

Countries that recognize the benefits for growth from promoting free trade can take unilateral, bilateral, or multilateral action to reduce some of these barriers to trade. Unilateral promotion of free trade is when a country decides to reduce its own trade barriers without any promise of action from its trading partners. This would lead to a reduction in import prices, but could be unpopular with domestic industries who are not afforded lower barriers in the countries with which they wish to trade. Bilateral promotion of free trade is when two countries come to an agreement to reduce barriers together. This solves the problem of one country giving the benefit of reduced barriers to foreign exporters without any promise of similar benefits in return. Multilateral promotion of free trade is when a group of countries agree to reduce their barriers together. Examples of multilateral promotion of free trade are trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in which the US, Mexico, and Canada agreed to allow free trade among one another. Reducing barriers to free trade may be politically difficult, but due to the law of comparative advantage, will allow for increased overall surplus for each trading partner in the long run.

Trade policies can shift aggregate demand. Protectionism, for example, is a policy that interferes with the free workings of the international marketplace. By implementing protectionism policies such as tariffs and quotas, a government can make foreign goods relatively more expensive and domestic goods relatively cheaper, increasing net exports and therefore aggregate demand. Since the world demands more goods produced in the home country, the demand for the domestic currency increases and the exchange rate rises.

Economic interdependence and globalization has resulted in a system, where each country is largely dependent upon other countries for economic sustainability (though to varying degrees). This results in a substantial national security threat in the form of conflicting or offensive trade strategies between countries. Indeed, economics is often used directly as a weapon of war and conflict via trade sanctions. This highlights a critical protectionist argument pertaining to the very real risk of dependency upon other nations for economic sustainability.

Trade protectionism is defined as national policy restricting international economic trade to alter the balance between imports and goods manufactured domestically, usually executed via policies and governmental regulations such as import quotas, tariffs, taxes, anti-dumping legislation, and other limitations.

One of the strongest arguments for trade protectionism is unfair competition emerging due to differences in policy and enforcement ability. Protectionist policies are a highly charged topic in economic debates, as economies work to attain the optimal balance of free trade and trade protectionism to capture the most value. In many ways, the global markets are torn between pursuing what is best on the global level and what is best at the domestic level, and there is sometimes dissonance between the two. One of the strongest arguments for some degree of trade protectionism is the tendency for unfair competition to emerge, particularly in developing markets without the infrastructure to monitor their businesses and enforce penalties. This is called the unfair competition argument.

Another critical risk in the global market is intellectual property (IP) protection. Patents, in a domestic system, protect the innovator to allow them to generate returns on the substantial time investment required to invent or innovate new products or technologies. On a global scale, however, it is quite common for developing nations to copy new technologies via reverse engineering. This results in copycats violating the patents in an environment where the infrastructure domestically will probably not take legal action. This reduces the desire for innovation and places large economic risks on countries dependent upon this for growth. This is addressed through international patent laws and trade agreements as well, alongside political pressures such as raising tariffs and placing import quotas on countries suspected to be in violation of patents. The downside to this is that utilizing these measures creates political unrest, global factions, and strained business relationships.

Another unfair competition threat is the emergence of global monopolies. Some of the larger ones attain enough global power and geographic diversification to be difficult to break up via domestic antitrust laws. demonstrates the substantial threat of deadweight losses being incurred in economies where consolidation results in a lack of competitive forces to drive down price. On the domestic level monopolies are widely seen as being addressed (though this is hotly debated by many economists in light of the ‘too big to fail’ and ‘too big to jail’ banks). On a global scale it is even more difficult to regulate, as the size and scale of these companies often extends beyond the power of the governments where these companies are located. This is addressed through international standards and trade agreements, standardizing governmental policy on a global level to reduce the risk of monopoly and unfair consolidation towards market dominance.

Many policy makers who are proponents of trade protectionism argue that limiting imports will create or save more jobs at home.

• Local governments leverage subsidies, tariffs, import quotas, and anti- dumping policies to maximize strategic capacity domestically, thus creating jobs.

• A sentiment towards protectionism has developed in the U.S. due to the jobs argument in view of an imbalanced trade ratio, where more exports (production and jobs at home) is required to sustain the ongoing consumption of imports.

• Along similar lines, it is common practice for companies to identify strategic alliances abroad and send much of the production work to these locations (outsourcing), motivating governments to bring these jobs back home.

• Local governments leverage subsidies, tariffs, import quotas, and anti-dumping policies to maximize strategic capacity domestically, thus creating jobs.

Many policy makers who are proponents of trade protectionism make the argument that limiting imports will create more jobs at home. This argument is predicated on the idea that buying more domestically will drive up national production, and that this increased production will in turn result in a healthier domestic job market. Domestic industries will not have to compete with foreign producers, and are therefore protected from losing marketshare to cheaper imports.

It is useful to consider the concept of a trade balance, or net exports, in the context of the jobs argument. It is interesting to look at to assess the extremity to which some nations are ‘consumer nations’ and others are ‘producer nations’. The U.S. and China are a great example of opposite sides of the spectrum, where the trade balance is heavy on one side of the spectrum.

Along similar lines, it is common practice for companies to identify strategic alliances abroad and send much of the production work to these locations. This is often a result of cheaper labor and easier systems of governance in those regions. The obvious perspective, from a policy making context, is that these are jobs lost to overseas competitors. While this perspective is often criticized for being short-sighted and against the modern economic view of free markets, it has resulted in policy makers providing incentives to ‘bring jobs back home. This idea of limiting outsourcing in light of the protectionist jobs argument has resulted in governmental subsidies that work to offset the costs of manufacturing domestically (in the U.S. particularly). These subsidies are essentially grants or tax breaks for companies operating domestically and creating jobs, driving up employment rates via protectionist strategies.

Offsetting the threats of outsourcing and trade imbalances and driving domestic purchasing, and thus domestic production, is done through a variety of political vehicles. Most notable among them are:

• Import Quotas: This is the act of limiting the number of a certain good that can be purchasing from a given country, ensuring that domestic producers maintain a portion of the market share.

• Tariffs: Tariffs are fairly straight-forward, essentially taxes to bring goods into a given country. High tariffs will raise the cost for foreign producers to sell their goods in a domestic system, providing strategic advantages for local producers. One of the pitfalls of tariffs is the likelihood of retaliation, where the foreign government returns with similar tariffs. This will in turn damage global prospects for domestic suppliers.

• Anti-dumping:Anti-dumping legislation actively offsets the ability of low cost or highly subsidized producers in foreign countries to undercut prices in a domestic system. Dumping is the process of selling goods far below market value to drive out competition, often in pursuit of creating a monopoly.

• Subsidies: On the other end of the spectrum, and as noted above, governments can provide subsidies to domestic producers to lower their costs and drive up competitive ability. This can in turn create jobs.







Chapter IV




A united Iran, Russia and China are changing the world for the better. These nations have fully understood that union and cooperation are the only means for mutual reinforcement. The need to fight a common problem, represented by a growing American influence in domestic affairs, has forced Tehran, Beijing and Moscow to resolve their differences and embrace a unified strategy in the common interest of defending their sovereignty.

Because our forbears did not account for the biophysical flow of material resources from the environment through the production process and back into the environment, the real worth of natural resources and social labor is not factored into the economy. It is this centralized, hierarchical model that has led to the degradation and devaluation of our commons.

Requirements for ensuring a socially just, economically secure and ecologically stable global environment.

In recent years, it has become clear to many nations opposing America that the only way to adequately contain the fallout from the collapsing US empire is to progressively abandon the dollar. This serves to limit America’s capacity for military spending by creating the necessary alternative tools in the financial and economic realms that will eliminate America's dominance. This is essential in the Russo-Sino-Iranian strategy to unite Eurasia and thereby render the US irrelevant. De-dollarization for Beijing, Moscow and Tehran has become a strategic priority. Eliminating the unlimited spending capacity of the FED and the American economy means limiting US imperialist expansion. Without the usual US military power to strengthen and impose the use of US dollars, China, Russia and Iran have paved the way for important shifts in the global order.

For China, Iran and Russia, as well as other countries, de-dollarizationhas become a pressing issue. The number of countries that are beginning to see the benefits of a decentralized system, as opposed to the US dollar system, is increasing. Iran and India, but also Iran and Russia, have often traded hydrocarbons in exchange for primary goods, thereby bypassing American sanctions.

To grow the economy and reduce carbon emissions at the same time can be done with various proponents of degrowth not denying that it is possible to increase the efficiency with which energy and materials are used in the economy. They do not deny that the amount of carbon emitted per unit of output can be decreased.

An organised agency can be found with the political will and power to make legal a policy that would set an absolute ceiling on the amount of carbon based fuels that are allowed into the economy. Such a policy would lead to a very dramatic process of “degrowth” because production is dependent on energy. With fossil energy availability radically reduced by a cap that really bites, the amount of production in the economy would be driven downwards.

The Earth’s atmosphere is a Nature's resource that ought to be managed as a global commons.

Why the extinction crisis isn't just about the environment, but social justice. An anti-capitalist movement against extinction must be framed in terms of a refusal to turn land, people, flora, and fauna into commodities. The genomic information of plants, animals, and human beings is the common wealth of the planet, and all efforts to make use of this environmental commons must be framed around principles of equality, solidarity, environmental and climate justice.

Economic growth (measured as Gross Domestic Product) and value are seen as the same. Meanwhile, the actual value generated outside of market capitalism – the “care economy,” social labor, eco-stewardship, digital communities and commons – are mostly ignored or considered merely personal (“values”). These types of “value” are seen as extraneous to “the economy.” Society needs to develop a post-capitalist, commons-friendly theory of value that could begin to represent and defend these other types of value.

Cities need to begin making preparations for the incoming tides, and many coastal towns, both in the U.S. and around the world.

The extinction crisis is an environmental issue and a social justice issue, one that is linked to long histories of capitalist domination over specific people, animals, and plants. The extinction crisis needs to be seen as a key element in contemporary struggles against accumulation by dispossession. This crisis, in other words, ought to be a key issue in the fight for climate justice. If techno-fixes such as deextinction facilitate new rounds of biocapitalist accumulation, an anti-capitalist movement against extinction must be framed in terms of a refusal to turn land, people, flora, and fauna into commodities. We must reject capitalist biopiracy and imperialist enclosure of the global commons, particularly when they cloak themselves in arguments about preserving biodiversity. Most of all, an anti-capitalist conservation movement must challenge the privatization of the genome as a form of intellectual property, to be turned into an organic factory for the benefit of global elites. Synthetic biology should be regulated. The genomic information of plants, animals, and human beings is the common wealth of the planet, and all efforts to make use of this environmental commons must be framed around principles of equality, solidarity, and environmental and climate justice.

What would be the shape and fundamental goals of an expansive anti-capitalist movement against extinction and for environmental justice? It would have to commence with open recognition by the developed nations of the long history of ecocide. Such an admission would lead to a consequent recognition of the biodiversity debt owed by the wealthy nations of the global North to the South. Building on the demands articulated by the climate justice movement, the anti-capitalist conservation movement must demand the repayment of this biodiversity debt. How would this repayment take place? The climate justice movement’s call for a universal guaranteed income for inhabitants of nations who are owed climate debt should serve as a model here. Why not begin a model initiative for such a carbon and biodiversity-based guaranteed income program in the planet’s biodiversity hotspots? Of the twenty five terrestrial biodiversity hotspots, fifteen are covered primarily by tropical rainforests, and consequently are also key sites for the absorption of carbon pollution. These threatened ecosystems include the moist tropical woodlands of Brazil’s Atlantic coast, southern Mexico with Central America, the tropical Andes, the Greater Antilles, West Africa, Madagascar, the Western Ghats of India, Indo-Burma, Indonesia, the Philippines, and New Caledonia. They make up only 1.4% of the Earth’s surface, and yet, these regions are the exclusive homes of 44% of the world’s plant species and more than a third of all species of birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. All of these areas are under heavy assault from the forces of enclosure and ecocide. A universal guaranteed income for the inhabitants of these hotspots would create a genuine counterweight to the attractions of poaching, and would entitle the indigenous and forest-dwelling peoples who make these zones of rich biodiversity their homes with the economic and political power to push their governments to implement significant conservation measures.

Where would the capital for such a guaranteed income program for biodiversity hotspots come from? There is certainly no shortage of assets. The 1% rich people on the planet have accumulated their increasingly massive share of global wealth by siphoning off collectively produced surpluses not through hard work but through financial machinations such as dividends, capital gains, interests, and rent, much of which is then hidden in tax havens. Indeed, if we consider the massive upward transfer of global wealth that has taken place over the last half century, it would be fair to say that never before was so much owed by so few to so many. One way to claw back some of this common wealth would be through a financial transactions tax, of even only a very small percentage of the speculative global capital flows that enrich the 1%, would generate billions of dollars to help people conserve hotspots of global biodiversity. Such funds could also be devoted to ramping up renewable energy-generating infrastructures in both the rich and the developing countries.

Yet a universal guaranteed income in recognition of biodiversity debt should not be a replacement for existing conservation programs. Instead, such a measure should be seen as an effort to inject an awareness of environmental and climate justice into debates around the extinction crisis. Biodiversity debt would thus augment existing conservation programs while militating against the creation of conservation refugees. Any and all such efforts to work against extinction should be undertaken as acts of environmental solidarity on the part of the peoples of the global North with the true stewards of the planet’s biodiversity, the people of the global South. Only in this way can the struggle against extinction help promote not simply forgiveness and reconciliation, but also survival after five hundred years of colonial and imperial ecocide.

The struggle to preserve global biodiversity must be seen as an integral part of a broader fight to challenge an economic and social system based on feckless, suicidal expansion. If, as we have seen, capitalism is based on ceaseless compound growth that is destroying ecosystems the world over, the goal in the rich nations of the global North must be to overturn our present expansionary system by fostering de-growth . Most importantly, nations that have benefited from burning fossil fuels must radically cut their carbon emissions in order to stem the lurch towards runaway climate chaos that endangers the vast majority of current terrestrial forms of life. Rather than false and impractical solutions such as the carbon trading and geoengineering schemes championed by advocates of neoliberal responses to the climate crisis, anti-capitalists should fight for some version of the contraction and convergence approach proposed by Global Community. This proposal is based on moving towards a situation in which all nations have the same level of emissions per person (convergence) while contracting them to a level that is sustainable (contraction).

A country such as the United States, which has only 5% of the global population, would be allowed no more than 5% of globally sustainable emissions. Such a move would represent a dramatic anti-imperialist shift since the US is at present responsible for 25% of carbon emissions. The powerful individuals and corporations that control nations like the US are not likely to accept such revolutionary curtailments of the wasteful system that supports them without a struggle. Already there is abundant evidence that they would sooner destroy the planet than let even a modicum of their power slip. Massive fossil fuel corporations such as Exxon, for example, have funded climate change denialism for the past quarter century despite abundant evidence from their own scientists that burning fossil fuels was creating unsustainable environmental conditions. Such behavior should be seen frankly for what it is: a crime against humanity. We should not expect to negotiate with such destructive entities. Their assets should be seized. Most of these assets, in the form of fossil fuel reserves, cannot be used anyway if we are to avert environmental catastrophe. What remains of these assets should be used to fund a rapid, managed reduction in carbon emissions and a transition to renewable energy generation.

These steps should be part of a broader program to transform the current, unsustainable capitalist system that dominates the world into steady state societies founded on principles of equality and environmental justice.

An environmental catastrophe cannot be averted if a major international effort is not begun immediately. In order to avoid a 2°C increase in temperature, the level above which catastrophic damage will occur, global emissions must be reduced to half their current level by 2050. Unless all countries make a strong commitment to reduce carbon emissions immediately, the world’s environment will pass the tipping point and suffer the irredeemable consequences of doing too little too late. If no major global effort to reduce carbon emissions is made in the very near future, at least 177 million people, mostly in Asia (about 50 million of them in China), will experience frequent floods by the end of this century. This is in addition to the large number of people living in low-lying countries and in island nations, such as the Netherlands, Bangladesh and the Maldives, which are already seeing increasingly frequent flooding. But flooding is occurring in other countries as well, such as in the UK and along the Mississippi River in the US.

Flooding not only endangers lives but also has very high economic costs. It is estimated that rising seas could put American property worth 66 to 106 billion dollars literally under water by 2050 and noted that If the numbers are any guide, the real damage would be greater still. Droughts have been becoming longer and more severe worldwide in recent decades. These droughts are imposing an increasing economic cost and endangering the lives of more and more people because they reduce the water available for drinking, agriculture and many other uses and increase the frequency of large-scale forest fires. This is because today’s developed economies are the economies that have been emitting greenhouse gases and polluting the air since they began to industrialize. Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per person measured in tons in 2012 were: 16.4 for the US; 10.4 for Japan; 9.7 for Germany; 7.7 for the UK; 7.1 for China; and 1.6 for India, according to estimates made in 2013 by the European Commission. In short, the developed economies are responsible for the environmental crisis we are facing today.

Hence, the transformation of energy systems to renewable energy based system alone should not be our focus. The real issues must be: (a) how much minimum energy demand can we manage with in order to eradicate the poverty at the global levels; (b) how best to distribute this much energy in the most equitable way possible; (iii) how to produce this much of energy without adding to total GHG emissions from the energy sector; (d) and how to minimise the pollution/contamination/depletion of our natural resources in this process. Even, this extraordinary approach may not be good enough. In a business as usual scenario, by 2050 the forest/vegetation wealth may get degraded to a point of no return; the pollution and contamination of the air, water and soil may become unbearable because of the human activities such as transportation, manufacturing, entertainment, military operations, construction etc. Many other human activities, which were not needed by our ancestors or till recently, would have come to be deemed as essential by 2050. For example the huge demand for electronic, computer and communication devises. All these activities, which will need lot of energy, materials, water etc., and which will also produce waste/contaminants, will continue to drag us down the path of ecological disaster, even if 100% RE scenario is feasible by 2050.

The phenomenon of Global Warming can be basically associated with the vastly accelerated depletion/degradation of various elements of Nature. So, in order to address this phenomenon, various activities contributing to the accelerated depletion of Nature have to be thoroughly reviewed to ensure they become sustainable. Hence, humanity has a critical imperative to undertake urgently effective measures to minimise the consumption of water, materials (including even the forest based materials such as wood) and energy to a very low level starting from this moment. Only such an approach seems to be the lasting solution. This requires a paradigm shift in our lifestyle. Can we muster enough conviction and determination to move towards a vastly simpler lifestyle where we will be happy to share the locally available natural resources much more equitably than it is now; can this be as effective as our ancestors did?

Can we minimise the air travel, travel for pleasure etc.; can we minimise the movement of people and materials between provinces/regions/countries, and even within the countries; can we minimise the production of military wares, machines and ammunitions; can we reverse the trend of forest diversion and embark on massive afforestation to reverse the growing presence of CO2 in the atmosphere; can we stop diverting the agricultural lands, and embark on more of agroforestry; can we minimise the pollution/ contamination/ interference in the rivers and fresh water bodies as well as oceans; can we move over to a sustainable scenario of food production and consumption?

If large economies like China, India, Brazil, and other developing countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Philippines etc. adopt policies to grow their economies at high rates, can the global warming be satisfactorily addressed by transforming to 100% RE scenario alone? How many of our on-going/projected problems due to Climate Change are likely to be addressed satisfactorily by 100% RE scenario alone? How many of our political leaders and bureaucrats can be expected to have even a semblance of thinking on these lines? What are our chances to avert the ecological disasters associated with the Climate Change without such paradigm shift to our lifestyle? One reason we are failing to do what is necessary (for addressing the Climate Change) is because nature is still seen as “nice to have, rather than essential in sustaining our health, wealth and security. Many companies, economists and governments regard environmental destruction as a regrettable but inevitable consequence of economic growth – the “price of progress”. If we don’t change this mind-set, then there will be little prospect for the revolution in ideas that is needed to avoid a mass extinction event and disastrous climatic changes.

What could be causing this worldwide ecological devastation? The number of human beings on Earth was 2+ billion in the year of my birth (1945). In all of recorded human history there is no evidence to indicate that the human population was ever larger than it was then. Hundreds of thousands of years passed by without an incredible increase in absolute global human population numbers such as we have seen in one lifetime… in the past three score and ten years. During the past 70 years human numbers have increased by 5+ billion. There is only one question worth asking. Why have human numbers increased so rapidly in so short a period of time? The answer is simple. The spectacular capability of humankind to increase annual production and distribution of food for human consumption has given rise to the colossal growth of the human population in our planetary home. One of the most significant unintended consequences of this bacterial-like growth of a mammalian species is the onset of the Anthropocene Era when The One Percent of Homo sapiens sapiens (self-named to signify ‘the wisest of wise’ species) became the momentary rulers of the world we inhabit. The skyrocketing increase of the human population on a planet with the size, composition and ecology of Earth has given rise to a number of apparently unforeseen and exceedingly deleterious outcomes. Among these potentially catastrophic, human-driven results is climate destabilization. What is fortunately becoming relatively easy to see now here, as we observe what is happening through our naked eyeballs, is the manifold ways overproduction, overconsumption and overpopulation activities of the human species are occurring synergistically and simultaneously threatening life as we know it, environmental health and future human well-being. The spectacular increase of these distinctly human, overgrowth activities is causing the unrestricted extirpation of global biodiversity, the relentless dissipation of limited natural resources, the unbridled degradation of the environment and the reckless threat to a good enough future for children everywhere.

There is a lack of unity between Western workers and the workers of the world. The gap between the prosperity of a few highly professionalised workers in the West who are more and more aligned with the capitalists and managers, and the rest of us, has unfortunately increased in recent years. One way to find a new unity among workers is to explain again the mathematics of social and ecological destruction and how the failures of capitalism concern even the highest paid workers, and indeed even the bosses.

A human being consumes 2500 kilocalories of energy a day from plant and animal matter. Expressed in Watts for an easy comparison with electricity for example, it allows a person to do 2500 kilocalories / 860 kilocalories = 2.9 kWh of work per day. As there are 24 hours a day a living breathing person is expending 121 Watt per day to live. Living can mean such things as idly consuming or producing information from or for the internet, operating weapons of mass destruction, or it can be digging a field, climbing a tree, making love, or sleeping. The work can be done using machines run on commercial energy, or it can bethe work of looking after children, families, or natural forests that live and grow in ecosystems. Work that does not involve commercial energy is much more likely to contribute to a social system that contributes to balanced carbon cycles of sequestration and release of carbon dioxide. Even if in the long run there may be ecological degradation, it takes much longer to degrade an ecosystem if the group has only the physical work of its members at its disposal. Unlike capitalist production based on herding workers into machine rooms, it takes much skill and love and patience to create and maintain associations of independent producers who support each other to do manual work in a productive and non-destructive metabolism with nature.

A litre of diesel has an energy value of 16700 kilocalories. Thus a litre of diesel mined from the earth displaces the work of 16700 kilocalories /2500 kilocalories = 6.67 person days. Under capitalism a litre of diesel is valued at around Rs 60, or let us say one Swiss Frank / United States Dollar / European Euro / UK Pound. So if a capitalist has to pay more than 1 SFr / 6.67 = 15 cents/10 Indian Rupees for a day of the work of a person, she is better off paying a machine that runs on diesel to get the work done. A 1 litre of diesel when burnt emits 2.6 kg of carbon dioxide. Combined with the damage to flora and fauna at the place where fossil fuels are extracted, the damage to ecology of mining and burning coal and petroleum products has resulted in an average global temperature rise on earth of 1.63 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times.

Much can be said about these numbers and the relationship between work, energy, money and climate change. For example, trade unions and professional bodies have successfully managed to raise the wages of those workers who handle machines on behalf of capitalists to a level above the natural wage as calculated above. Or, commercial energy can be renewable and does not cause climate change. All this, and its significance, can be debated. For example, renewable energy technologies can be manufactured with renewable energy, but certainly not under capitalism nor in the short time frame set by the feedback effects in the climate system that are already happening. Worst of all, under the present system, there is overwhelming evidence that renewable energy is simply being used to produce products not really needed for human consumption and at the same time they cause the emission of carbon dioxide when produced, distributed and used.

No man-made energy conversion system, whether renewable energy technology, fossil fuels or nuclear energy can do the work of ecological processes which functionas part of the natural ecology that human beings are intended for. When we do manual work and look after other living things, when we live and die as joyous workers using only our hands and bodies to engage with all other living things around us, we contribute to the ecological wealth of which all living things are a part. When we use commercial energy we are cranking the global heat machine.

In the interest of human survival and the survival of the remaining plants and animals, we must refuse to work on machines running on commercial energy, whether such machines are computers or car assembly robots let alone weapons of war. We must unite to overthrow the system which gives overwhelming priority to the growth of private property of capitalists and focus on the social, cultural, material means to do peaceful physical work on the land. The best kind of physical work involves building up soil, growing food, and supporting the natural cycle of carbon sequestration and release in natural forests and other natural ecosystems of which we are a part. It involves, for example, swimming in the oceans and catching fish. Whether you call it the landscape approach, as biodiversity conservationists do, or land redistribution like landless labourers, or de-growth, or revolution, it all amounts to the same thing. We must overthrow capitalism, which may or may not be possible now. We must, however, at the very least put it under strict social control; if we don’t most human beings except for those in very favourable ecological niches with old cultures will most likely be wiped out along with most other fauna and flora.

Global social sustainability to save all life on Earth requiresthe change to a just and sustainable global future in the coming decades to a form of global development rooted in justice, equity and ecological sustainability. Younger people can lead the world towards a more just, democratic, ecologically sustainable, equitable, and progressive economy and society. It is evident that youth everywhere, forced to deal with a much more insecure and uncertain future, are more open to creative approaches to change that recognize and seek to address various inequalities and injustices.

The rich US Alliance Anglosphere countries (the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand) charge students huge fees for university education while committing trillions of dollars to the cost of war, corporate tax evasion and terracidal climate crimes. Thus the US War on Terror (actually a genocidal US War on Muslims) has been associated with a long-term accrual cost of $6 trillion just for the Iraq War and Afghan War and 32 million Muslim deaths from violence, 5 million, or imposed deprivation, 27 million, in 20 impoverished countries invaded by the US Alliance since the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity. Rapacious capitalism means that millions of American workers live as the “working poor” in dire poverty and 1.7 million Americans die preventably each year. The rich US Alliance Anglosphere countries are among the world leaders in income-weighted annual per capita greenhouse gas pollution. Students’ university fees are inextricably part of the wealth pool paying for deadly war, deadly corporate greed, and deadly climate criminality.Free education can help minimize existential nuclear, poverty and climate threats. The 3 key, existential threats to humanity are nuclear weapons (that could wipe out all of Humanity), poverty (that presently kills 17 million people annually) and man-made climate change (that unaddressed could wipe out all but 0.5 billion of Humanity. The informed young and future generations will have to solve these problems and free university education will accordingly help Humanity find the solutions.

Free University Education is the least we can offer as we bequeath the young a dying planet. The 2015 Paris Climate Conference achieved a consensus that a maximum temperature rise limit relative to 1900 of 1.5 degrees Centigrade ( 1.5C) was most desirable and that a universally-agreed catastrophic plus 2C must be avoided. However the world got to +1.2C in 2016, +1.5C will now be reached in 4-10 years, and a catastrophic +2C temperature rise is now effectively unavoidable. Presently about 7.5 million people die avoidably (prematurely) each year due to carbon fuel burning and climate change – from the consequent deadly effects of carbon burning pollutants (7.0 million) or of climate change (0.5 million). This latter estimate of presently about 0.5 million climate change-related deaths annually may be an under-estimate because presently 17 million people die avoidably (prematurely) each year (half of them children) due to poverty and deprivation in the Developing World (minus China), with these impoverished, tropical or sub-tropical developing countries already being severely impacted by global warming. The direst estimates are that the death toll due to climate change could rise to 100 million such deaths per year this century if man-made climate change is not requisitely addressed.

With the world now facing the inevitability of catastrophic global warming beyond a plus 2 degrees Centigrade temperature rise, the least our present ruling generations can do to the young (and unborn) that they have betrayed is to grant them free university education to empower them to help make the future globally sustainable. Young people (born and unborn) face the daunting task of reversing several centuries of profligacy and returning the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) to a safe and sustainable 300 parts per million (ppm) CO2 (300 ppm CO2) from the present damaging, dangerous and coral-killing 430 ppm CO2 that is increasing at a record 3 ppm CO2 per year. We need a climate revolution now, and if the young cannot even secure free university education using the above arguments, what hope is there for a world needing a return to 300 ppm CO2 ASAP? Global Community proposes free university education and young people who are serious about saving what remains of their world must utterly reject the mendacious, endlessly greedy, speciescidal, ecocidal, omnicidal and terracidal neoliberal 1% who have egregiously betrayed them. Young people have the numbers and the energy, if not the money , and should be unstoppable globally in their demand for free university education.

Transitioning the world to 100 percent renewable electricity isn't just some environmentalist pipe dream, it's feasible at every hour throughout the year, and is more cost-effective than the current system, which largely relies on fossil fuels and nuclear energy. A full decarbonization of the electricity system by 2050 is possible. Solar power and battery storage are critical parts of the transition. Falling prices will also lead to widespread adoption of the technologies. The existing renewable energy potential and technologies coupled with storage can generate enough energy to meet the global electricity demand by 2050. To make the change will bring the total levelized cost of electricity on a global average down to $65 per megawatt-hour, including curtailment, storage and some grid costs, compared to $89 megawatt-hour in 2015. Globe's electricity mix by 2050 will consist of solar photovoltaics (70 percent), wind energy (17 percent), hydropower (9 percent) and bioenergy (4 percent). Energy transition is no longer a question of technical feasibility or economic viability, but of political will. By following this path, greenhouse gas emissions in the electricity sector will come down to zero and drastically reduce total losses in power generation, the study found. Not only that, the renewable energy transition would create 36 million jobs by 2050, 17 million more than today. There is no reason to invest one more dollar in fossil or nuclear power production. Renewable energy provides cost-effective power supply. All plans for a further expansion of coal, nuclear, gas and oil have to be ceased. More investments need to be channeled in renewable energies and the necessary infrastructure for storage and grids. Everything else will lead to unnecessary costs and increasing global warming.

With global resources such as air, water, fossil fuels, raw materials and entire ecosystems it has been quite different. These were once seen as inexhaustibly abundant, enabling everybody to use them for free and without any duties to preserve or replace them. In our day we have barely begun to realize that they are finally becoming scarce. But now it is property law that preserves the ancient perception of their unlimited availability. Since the law imposes few if any restrictions on access, the law continues to absolve owners of any obligation to respect global resources. This kind of freedom is the condition for an endless expansion of capitalism. The essence of capitalism is “to accumulate by dispossession”, since the progress of capital accumulation depends on the capability to find and exploit new external sources of wealth that can be appropriated. In this sense property rights fuel the expansion of capitalism. They invite property owners to externalize costs on to those resources that ought to be treated as common property. Externalizing costs means using shared resources to the point where they are exhausted while failing to maintain or reinvest in them. The displaced costs are borne by the resources themselves, which are diminished and depreciated, as a way to boost profits. Thus property law encourages the opposite of sustainability. It promotes the relentless consumption of resources and thereby enhances capitalism. What we need is the contrary: to encourage sustainable ecological stewardship by reinvesting externalized costs, i.e., profits, into the preservation of resources, and transforming global resources into Commons.

Such a legislative amendment is needed because present laws constitute a barrier to sustainable stewardship of natural resources, and a particular barrier to the task of commoning. Without amending the law it would not only be difficult to create and manage local commons as exchange trading systems and complementary currencies, it would be nearly impossible to establish networks that manage the preservation of global resources as commons. Under current laws each single stockholder of a corporation can sue the management for having ordered investments in protection of the environment that go beyond existing law. Because corporations are so deeply committed – legally and economically – to make profits by externalizing costs, how could managers be persuaded to invest this profit into preserving the consumed global resources? It is impossible so long these resources are not acknowledged as common property. Commoning the global resources, or some of them, must therefore begin with lobbying to convince legislative bodies to withdraw any legal rules that allow or even induce persons, companies, councils or governmental authorities to exploit global resources. Those rules must be replaced with responsible regulations preserving global resources.

To transform a natural resource into a commons can be done using specific strategies. Apart from treaties between states, there are currently two basic strategies for protecting global resources: emissions trading and commons trusts. Emissions trading requires that the emission of CO2-equivalents be restricted to the amount of emission rights the emitter has bought, and that the overall amount of buyable rights will be reduced over time. Hence the price of the emission rights will rise, the quantity of emissions will be reduced, and the climate system as a global resource will be preserved. A commons trust is an independent non-profit enterprise assigned with fiduciary duties to look after the long-term interests of beneficiary commoners, and the power to sell and restrict emission and extraction rights. The trust should be assigned the sole responsibility of preserving a given common resource and be required to distribute any remaining receipts to the people who hold a stake in that resource. Both concepts depend upon governments to set effective, enforceable rules. But where preserving a common resource results in shortages, governments must withstand the concentrated pressures exerted by buyers, sellers and workers who insist upon economic growth as a source of earnings, sales and jobs. The Monhegan example shows that such pressures can be overcome peacefully, if one group of buyers, sellers, and/or workers who are strongly motivated for sustainable development defend their interest in resource preservation against other groups with somewhat lower legitimation. The state’s role is then to mediate the conflict instead of imposing a regulation influencing people’s decisions by outer stimuli like prices or instructions. A growing number of both suppliers and consumers who long for the opportunity to preserve the natural resources, will be motivated to preserve the resources they use and to prevent others from continuing to externalize costs. The above-suggested legal regime, which stipulates the preservation of natural resources and thereby forbids the externalization of costs, would be a general rule intended primarily to stimulate a general understanding that we are as responsible for our common resources as for our private plants, facilities and investments.

At the same time it would be the basis of specific regulations that may prove to be a necessary condition of legal security. Since externalizing is still common practice, however, it would not be reasonable if we left it wholly to government authorities to find out and prescribe how externalization should be avoided or compensated in each of numerous specific situations. The general rule, if it were in force, would open a second way. It would encourage those who prefer cost internalization to contribute to that search process by joining in communities that work out agreements on what is needed to preserve specific common resources after use. In order to make it easier to join in commons of the type indicated, the legal basis for accountability should be even further broadened by amending the com­petition law, too, which under the current property law forces competitors to externalize costs. Any hidden externalization of costs should from now on be treated as unfair competition, which is principally forbidden by law in several European countries and most states of the US, although with different provisions. Take, for instance, the German law against unfair competition. It prohibits a supplier from enjoying a competitive market advantage by making deceptive claims about its product(s), as misleading advertisements or taking advantage of consumers’ lack of knowledge.

In this way amendments to property and competition laws could help bring into being a network of commons-like communities of enterprises, civil associations and individuals that would monitor the use of global ecological resources. While there is a huge variety of separate problems that have to be solved in this field, encouraging the formation of commons would not only be an effective way to enforce the law but also a way to bring about a general awareness of common resources and everybody’s responsibility for them. This, in turn, could open the door for two hidden implications of sustainability that are already knocking at it but aren’t allowed to enter. First, by getting serious about preserving global resources, and acknowledging that markets are not inseparably joined to capitalism, sustainable development could become separated from capitalism but aligned with the market economy. Second, not only natural resources ought to be treated as global commons, but so should the many socially organized institutions that provide employment opportunities, public health systems, educational opportunities, social integration, income and wealth distribution, and communication systems such as the Internet. To put it in a nutshell: sustainability is commoning global resources by applying the commons principle of wisely moderating demands on common resources. It is time to ask what perspectives will open up when we proceed this way.

The imminent collapse of industrial civilization means we’ll have to organize human communities in a much different fashion from the completely unsustainable, highly-centralized, earth-destroying, globalized system we have now: capitalism of the global 1%. We are in for some profound changes in the 21st century. There will need to be a move to much smaller, human-scale, localized and decentralized systems that can sustain themselves within their own land base. Industrial civilization and suburban living relies on cheap sources of energy to continue to grow and expand. That era is coming to an end. One of the most important tasks right now is to prepare for a very different way of life. Nonetheless, Obama, Trump and their cohorts have recklessly decided to try to extend our period of dependence on oil for “business as usual” instead of using a significant portion of it, along with a lavish amount of federal funds, to establish a firm foundation for alternative energy provision and the massive, societal changes that are on the way. In other words, they are still trapped in an all-out effort to support globalized industry (including its offshored job market and gargantuan transportation network) instead of their preparing the public for post-peak oil lifestyles, in which human welfare and regionalized community development are emphasized.

Assuredly, facilitation of such a constructive switch would help America across the board. The reason is that the redirection of wealth away from horrific resource wars, macro-scale business and pernicious corporate bailouts toward the creation of robust decentralized economic bases would yield many benefits. The action could generate jobs, serve to protect the raw materials and the natural environments on which communities rely and curb fossil fuel use since many products would be created and used locally. It could, also, lead individuals and groups into gaining the necessary skills and understandings to create assorted merchandise, foster developments of co-ops, as well as strengthen the US economy at the grassroots level. Moreover, their backing of transnational corporate agendas is plainly ruinous for environmental well-being and multitudinous societies across the globe. It, also, ensures that the most affluent class continues to make staggering financial gains at the expense of others. As such, many people face increasing deteriorating circumstances while, in tandem, their surrounding natural world falls apart due to resource plunder and environmental disasters. The results of exceeding the constraints are undeniably clear. They include armed invasions and resource grabs from populations least capable to defend their assets and lands from aggressors, dwindling supplies of critical commodities as thresholds are reached and, ultimately, diminished economic gains, anyway. All the same, any government employee who advocates for a cutback in energy use or globalized trade would be committing political suicide. He would, also, face a hostile public, including industrialists and farm owners, along with his being shunned by lobbyists and re-election campaign contributors alike.

Simultaneously, it is apparent that “revolving door” politics among corporate executives, politicians and bureaucrats with whom global-scale moguls sometimes collude do, in fact, exist and even lead, in some instances, to regulatory capture. The overall outcome from such a pattern is unchecked corporate exploitation, deceit and power mongering, during which time nations’ general populations become progressively destitute. Meanwhile, the über-class, without meaningful regulatory brakes on free market enterprise, obtains ever greater control over worldwide resources and the financial wherewithal to seize even more control over time. Likewise, the overall arrangement leads to multinational business owners seeking ever-cheaper labor wherever it exists and even if it involves young children or unsafe practices, ever new consumers and an endless supply of raw materials from developing regions with lax (if any) conservation regulations. They, also, abandon countries in which coveted materials, when not already commandeered, are protected by stiff environmental laws. Concurrently, jobs continue to drain from nations if their standard minimum wages are not the absolute lowest to be found or there are no new stores of resources to tap. Social relations are defined today by tolerance of tyranny: of harmful industrial profit schemes, unfair ownership of huge property holdings, and astronomical financial wealth. As soon as the post-peak oil house of cards topples, ‘new’ social structures will be (re)established. There’s a growing number of people already welcoming the end of false wealth’s tyranny and of civilized arrogance. Clearly, our choices in terms of the future that we want to create will in time be largely determined by limitations in oil and other resources. It stands to follow that we can either have a last-man-standing orientation in which only the most affluent and powerful people have lavish supplies of expensive energy and material goods or we can foster deglobalization, which leads into equitable sharing of resources, job creation, strengthening of community ties, assurance that local resource bases are not exceeded and creation of a social foundation that does not increasingly divide the world between the rich and the poor members of society.

A commons must have the capacity to self-regulate its relations with the market and to assure that significant aspects of its common wealth and social relationships remain inalienable, not for sale via market exchange. A commons must be able to develop “semi-permeable boundaries” that enable it to safely interact with markets on its own terms. The commons are not incompatible with commodity markets. Markets and commons may form mutually beneficial relations with each other. only if commoners can have value "sovereignty" over their resources and community governance. Market players such as businesses and investors cannot be able to freely appropriate the fruits of a commons for themselves without the express authorization of commoners. Nor should markets be allowed to uses their power to force commoners to assume market, money -based roles such as “consumers” and “employees.” In short, a commons must have the capacity to self-regulate its relations with the market and to assure that significant aspects of its common wealth and social relationships remain inalienable – not for sale via market exchange. A commons must be able to develop “semi-permeable boundaries” that enable it to safely interact with markets on its own terms.

So, for example, a coastal fishery functioning as a commons may sell some of its fish to markets, but the goals of earning money and maximizing profit cannot be allowed to become so foundational that it crowds out commons governance and respect for ecological limits. Of course, market/commons relations are easier when it comes to digital commons and their shared wealth such as code, text, music, images and other intangible (non-physical) resources. Such digital resources can be reproduced and shared at virtually no cost, so there is not the “subtractability” or depletion problems of finite bodies of shared resources. In such cases, the problem for commons is less about preventing “free riding” than in intelligently curating digital information and preventing mischievous disruptions. In digital spaces, the principle of “the more, the merrier” generally prevails. Digital commoners must also be able to prevent powerful market players from simply appropriating their work for commercial purposes, at no cost. Digital commoners should not simply generate “free resources” for larger market players to exploit for private gain. That is why some digital communities are exploring the use of the newly created Global Production License, which authorizes free usage of digital material for noncommercial and commons-based people but requires any commercial users to pay a fee. The terms by which a commons protects its shared wealth and community ethos will vary immensely from one commons to another, but assuring a stable, benign relationship with markets is a major and sometimes tricky challenge.

There has been an explosion of urban commons in the past several years, or at least a keen awareness of the need and potential of self-organized citizen projects and systems, going well beyond what either markets or city governments can provide. And there is growing interest in platform co-operatives, mutually owned and managed platforms to counter the extractive, sometimes-predatory behaviors of proprietary platforms such as Uber, Airbnb, Taskrabbit and others. But there are many types of urban commons that already exist and that could expand, if given sufficient support. Urban agriculture and community gardens, for example, are important ways to relocalize food production and lower the carbon footprint. They also provide a way to improve the quality of food and invigorate the local economy. As fuel and transport costs rise with the approach of Peak Oil, these types of urban commons will become more important. It is not just about growing food but about the distribution, storage and retailing of food along the whole value-chain. There is no reason that regional food systems could not be re-invented to mutualize costs, limit transport costs and ecological harm, and improve wages, working conditions, food quality (e.g., no pesticides; fresher produce), and affordability of food through commons-based food systems.

There are growing “community chartering” movements that give communities the ability to express their own interests and needs, often in the face of hostile pressures by corporations and governments. There are also efforts to develop data commons that will give ordinary people greater control over their data from mobile devices, computers and other equipment, and prevent tech companies from asserting proprietary control over data that has important public health, transport, planning or other uses. Another important form of urban commons is urban land trusts, which enable the de-commodification of urban land so that the buildings (and housing) built upon it can be more affordable to ordinary people. This is a particularly important approach as more “global cities” becomes sites of speculative investment and Airbnb-style rentals; ordinary city dwellers are being priced out of their own cities. Commons-based approaches offer some help in recovering the city for its residents.

Why bring the commons to the management and governance of a city? Urban commons can also reduce costs that a city and its citizens must pay. They do this by mutualizing the costs of infrastructure and sharing the benefits — and by inviting self-organized initiatives to contribute to the city’s needs. Urban commons enliven social life simply by bringing people together for a common purpose, whether social or civic, going beyond shopping and consumerism. And urban commons can empower people and build a sense of fairness. In a time of political alienation, this is a significant achievement. Urban commons can unleash creative social energies of ordinary citizens, who have a range of talents and the passion to share them. They can produce artworks and music, murals and neighborhood self-improvement, data collections and stewardship of public spaces, among other things. Finally, as international and national governance structures become less effective and less trusted, cities and urban regions are likely to become the most appropriately scaled governance systems, and more receptive to the constructive role that commons can play. Contemporary struggles for protection of commons appear to be strongly intertwined with ecological matters which implies that there a direct link between the commons and ecology. Commoning is a way for we humans to re-integrate our social and commercial practices with the fundamental imperatives of nature. By honoring specific local landscapes, the situated knowledge of commoners, the principle of inalienability, and the evolving social practices of commoning, the commons can be a powerful force for ecological improvement.

State power could play many useful roles in supporting commoning. For example, the state could provide greater legal recognition to commoning, and not insist upon strict forms of private property and monetization. State law Is generally so hostile or indifferent to commoning that commoners often have to develop their own legal hacks or workarounds to achieve some measure of protection for their shared wealth. Think about the General Public License for software, the Creative Commons licenses, and land trusts. Each amounts to an ingenious re-purposing of property law to serve the interests of sharing and intergenerational access. The state could also be more supportive of bottom-up infrastructures developed by commoners, whether they be wifi systems, energy coops, community solar grids, or platform co-operatives. If city governments were to develop municipal platforms for ride-hailing or apartment rentals – or many other functions – they could begin to mutualize the benefits or such services and better protect the interests of workers, consumers and the general public. The state could also help develop better forms of finance and banking to help commoning expand. The state provides all sorts of subsidies to the banking industry despite its intense commitment to private extraction of value. Why not use “quantitative easing” or seignorage (the state’s right to create money without it being considered public debt) to finance the building of infrastructure, environmental remediation, and social needs? Commoners could benefit from new sources of credit for social or ecological purposes – or a transition to a more climate-friendly economy — that would not likely be as remunerative as conventional market activity.

Direct participation in commoning is preferred and often essential. However, each of us has only so many hours in the day, and we can remember the complaint that “the trouble with socialism is that it takes too many evenings.” Still, there are many systems, particularly in digital commons, for assuring bottom-up opportunities for participation along with accountable governance and transparency. And there are ways in which commons values can be embedded in the design of infrastructures and institutions, much as Internet protocols favor a distributed egalitarianism. By building commons principles into the structures of larger institutions, it can help prevent or impede the private capture of them or a betrayal of their collective purposes.

Neither legal forms or nor organizational forms are a guarantee that the integrity of a commons and its shared wealth will remain intact. Consider how some larger co-operatives resemble conventional corporations. That is why some elemental forms of commoning remain important for assuring the cultural and ethical integrity of a commons. We are entering in an age of aggressive privatization and degradation of commons: from privatization of water resources, through internet surveillance, to extreme air pollution. What should be the priorities of the movements fighting for protection of the commons? What about their organizational structure? Besides securing their own commons against the threats of enclosure, commons should begin to federate and cooperate as a way to build a more self-aware Commons Sector as a viable alternative to both the state and market. We can see rudimentary forms of this in the “assemblies of the commons” that have self-organized in some cities, and in the recently formed European Commons Assembly. Within the best organizational structure for such work, participants themselves must decide what will be most suitable at that time. The forms will consist of many disparate types of players loosely joined; it won’t be a centralized, hierarchical organization. What is your vision of a commons-based society? How would it look like? As human beings, we are hard-wired to cooperate, coordinate and co-evolve together. Especially as the grand, centralized market/state systems of the 20th century begin to implode through their own dysfunctionality, the commons will more swiftly step into the breach by offering more local, convivial and trusted systems of survival.

The transition of “commonification” will likely be bumpy, if only because the current masters of the universe will not readily cede their power and prerogatives. They will be incapable of recognizing a “competing” worldview and social order. But the costs of maintaining the antiquated Old Order are becoming increasingly prohibitive. The capital expense, coercion, organizational complexities, and ecological instability are growing even as popular trust in the market/state and its political legitimacy is declining. Rather than proposing a glowing vision of a commons-based society, let us be content to pointing out to hundreds of smaller-scale projects and movements. As they find each other, replicate their innovations, and federate into a more coordinated, self-governance.

Russia, on the other hand, has stressed the creation of "an alternative," in the words of Russian Central Bank's Elvira Nabiullina, in the form of the Mir payment system , a Russian version of Visa/ MasterCard. What's implied is that were America feel inclined to somehow exclude Russia from SWIFT, even temporarily, at least 90 percent of ATMs in Russia now are able to operate on Mir.China's UnionPay cards and are already an established fixture all across Asia – enthusiastically adopted by HSBC, among others. Combine "alternative" payment systems with a developing gold-backed system – and "toxic" does not even begin to spell out the reaction of the US Federal Reserve. Andit's not just about Russia and China; it's about the BRICS. What First Deputy Governor of Russia's Central Bank Sergey Shvetsov has outlined is just the beginning: "BRICS countries are large economies with large reserves of gold and an impressive volumeof production and consumption of this precious metal. In China, the gold trade is conducted in Shanghai, in Russia it is in Moscow. Our idea is to create a link between the two cities in order to increase trade between the two markets. "Russia and China already have established systems to do global trade bypassing the US dollar. What America did to Iran ,cutting their banks off SWIFT – is now unthinkable against Russia and China. So we're already on our way, slowly but surely, towards a BRICS " gold market place." A "new financial architecture" is being built. That will imply the eventual inability of the US Fed to export inflation to other nations – especially those included in BRICS, EEU and SCO.

There is a new economic paradigm waiting in the wings, offered by China and Russia, an Economy of Peace. An economy backed by labor, by construction, by research, education, by culture, and by gold. No fiat economy, an economy of Equal Rights and equal benefits for all participants; a non-war based economy, totally contrary of the western usury rent-seeking destructive economy. Who would not be attracted by this new model of Peace Economics? The new Silk Road, also President Xi Jinping’s OBI, One Belt Initiative, formerly known as “The One Belt One Road” (OBOR), an economic development program spanning the entire super-Continent of Eurasia and North Africa, from Vladivostok to Lisbon, and from Shanghai to Hamburg. Every territory in between is invited to participate, in what is possibly the largest and most wide-ranging economic expansion initiative in modern history. It is a multi-trillion-dollar (equivalent) endeavor that could literally stretch out for centuries, creating infrastructure, work, trade, income, new technologies, education, the palette is almost endless, for many areas still largely deprived of human well-being. The “Road” encompasses land route development from Central China to Central Asia, Iran, Syria, Turkey, Greece, Eastern Europe, construction of ports and coastal infrastructure from Southeast Asiato East Africa and the Mediterranean. In fact, OBI was initiated by President Xi in 2013 and is already well under way. China’s modernization of Greece’s Port of Piraeus, arguably the largest in the Mediterranean, is already part of it.

This revival of the ancient Silk road with 21st Century technology, as China calls it, also comes with financing to promote basic needs, such as urban planning, water supply, sanitation, food production and distribution. The old axiom of comparative production advantages will be applied in an open market of equals among equals, already begun under the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), signed by Presidents Putin and Xi in May 2015, and rapidly expanding westward. The OBI is sometimes referred to as the Eastern Marshall Plan or the Xi Plan. It comes with the appropriate financial instruments, fore most the Beijing based Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB). The Xi Plan is destined for economic development and peoples’ well-being. Whereas the Marshall Plan was designed for deceit, exploitation and enslavement of Europe with its subservient Bretton Woods Institutions, and it succeeded.

The warning suggests five steps needed immediately. That was a generation ago. They can still help prevent the worst impacts. We must bring environmentally damaging activities under control to restore and protect the integrity of the earth’s systems we depend on. It specifically mentions reducing greenhouse gas emissions and air and water pollution. It also highlights the need to address deforestation, degradation and loss of agricultural soils and extinction of plant and animal species.

We must also manage resources crucial to human welfare more effectively.” This one is obvious. Finite resources must be exploited much more efficiently or we’ll run out.

And we must stabilize population. This will be possible only if all nations recognize that it requires improved social and economic conditions, and the adoption of effective, voluntary family planning.

We must reduce and eventually eliminate poverty. and must ensure sexual equality, and guarantee women control over their own reproductive decisions.

The warning recognizes that we in the developed world are responsible for most global pollution and therefore must greatly reduce overconsumption while providing technical and financial aid to developing countries. This is not altruism but self-interest, because all of us share the same biosphere. Developing nations must realize environmental degradation is the greatest threat to their future, while rich nations must help them follow a different development path. The most urgent suggestion is to develop a new ethic that encompasses our responsibility to ourselves and nature and that recognizes our dependence on Earth and its natural systems for all we need. Energy represents an enormous capital investment. In the global energy system, replacement cost is probably $25 trillion or even $30 trillion. That's an investment that turns over in the normal course of things in 30 to 40 years. That's the average lifetime of these energy facilities, refineries, transmission lines, power plants, drilling rigs. You can't take a $25 trillion investment and turn it over overnight. So there's this enormous amount of inertia in the energy system. That's the bad brakes in the car. And the fog is we don't know exactly where the tipping points that could really turn it into a catastrophe are, but there are quite a few of them that are understandable in terms of how they would work.

Beyond state capitalism: the commons economy in our lifetimes. Because our forbears did not account for the biophysical flow of material resources from the environment through the production process and back into the environment, the real worth of natural resources and social labor is not factored into the economy. It is this centralized, hierarchical model that has led to the degradation and devaluation of our commons.

Over the past seventy years especially, the macroeconomic goals of sovereign states, for high levels and rapid growth of output, low unemployment and stable prices, have resulted in a highly dysfunctional world. The global economy has integrated dramatically in recent decades through financial and trade liberalization; yet the market is failing to protect natural and social resources, the state is failing to rectify the economic system, and the global polity is failing to manage its mounting imbalances in global resources and wealth. Without a ‘unified field theory’ of economics to explain how the commons is drastically undervalued and why world society is amassing huge debts to the environment, the poor and future generations, policymakers and their institutions lack the critical tools and support to address the massive instability that is now gripping the global economy. Businesses and governments are facing the Herculean challenge of reducing climate change and pollution while alleviating poverty without economic growth, a task for which the Market State is neither prepared nor designed to handle.

Meanwhile, the essential ideals of state capitalism, the rule-based systems of government enforcement and the spontaneous, self-regulating social order of markets, are finding direct expression in the co-governance and co-production of common goods by people in localities across the world. Whether these commons are traditional (rivers, forests, indigenous cultures) or emerging (energy, intellectual property, internet), communities are successfully managing them through collaboration and collective action. This growing movement has also begun to create social charters and commons trusts, formal instruments that define the incentives, rights and responsibilities of stakeholders for the supervision and protection of common resources. Ironically, by organizing to protect their commons through decentralized decision-making, the democratic principles of freedom and equality are being realized more fully in these resource communities than through the enterprises and policies of the Market State.

These evolving dynamics, the decommodification of common goods through co-governance and the deterritorialization of value through co-production, are shattering the liberal assumptions which underlie state capitalism. The emergence of this new kind of management and valuation for the preservation of natural and social assets is posing a momentous crisis for the Market State, imperiling the functional legitimacy of state sovereignty, national currencies, domestic fiscal policy, international trade and finance, and the global monetary system. Major changes are on the way. The transformation of modern political economy will involve reconnecting with, and reformulating, a pre-analytic vision of the post-macroeconomic global commons. Another world is coming: where common goods are capped and protected; a portion of these resources are rented to businesses for the production and consumption of private goods; and taxes on their use are redistributed by the state as public goods to provide a social income for the marginalized and to repair and restore the depleted commons.

Although people’s rights to their commons are often recognized and validated in smaller communities, scaling these lessons to the global level will require a new dimension of popular legitimacy and authority. The world community is rapidly evolving a sense of social interconnectivity, shared responsibility and global citizenship, yet the sovereign rights of people to the global commons have not been fully articulated.

These issues will be filtering into mainstream discussion over the next two decades. Already the system of state capitalism is breaking down, threatening the entire planet, its institutions and species. When this collapse can no longer be contained and a global monetary crisis ensues, world society will have the choice of creating an economic system that follows the universal laws of biophysics and commons preservation, or accepting a new version of 18th-20th century mechanistic economics, obliging humanity to continue living off the common capital of the planet under corporate feudalism and über-militaristic regimes. Our decision will likely come down to this: global commons or global autarchy. As an economist, I don’t pretend to speak for the conscience of humanity; but as a human being, my heart tells me that we shall see the beginnings of a commons economy in our lifetimes. The long-forsaken global commons are beckoning.

Requirements for ensuring a socially just, economically secure and ecologically stable global environment.

Ensuring a socially just, economically secure and ecologically stable global environment requires:

a) that rich nations consume less to free up the ecological space needed for justifiable consumption increases in poorer countries; and

b) that the world implement a universal population management plan designed to reduce the total human population to a level that that can be supported indefinitely at a more-than-satisfactory average material standard. This is what it means to “live sustainably within the means of nature.”

Fortunately, various studies suggest that planned de-growth toward a quasi steady state economy is technically possible, would benefit the poor and could be achieved while improving overall quality of life even in high-income countries. Considering the human suffering that would be avoided and number of non-human species that would be preserved, this is also a morally compelling strategy. The foregoing diagnosis is anathema to the prevailing growth ethic, the naive fallacy that well-being is a continuous linear function of income, and politically correct avoidance of the population question. Many will therefore object on grounds that the suggested policy prescription is politically unfeasible and can never be implemented. They may well be correct. The problem is that what is politically feasible is likely to be ecologically irrelevant or downright dangerous. Accelerated hydrocarbon development, better pipeline regulations and improved navigational aids for tanker traffic on B.C.’s coast, for example, don’t cut it as sustainable development in a world that should be abandoning fossil fuels.

The data show clearly that we are at a crucial stage of a slow but accelerating crisis. To be effective and timely, sustainability policy should already be consistent with the real-world evidence. Nature can no longer endure the consequences of “alternative facts.” Failure to implement a global sustainability plan that addresses excess consumption and over-population while ensuring greater social equity may well be fatal to global civilization. Indeed, adherence to any variant of the growth-bound status quo promises a future of uncontrollable climate change, plummeting biodiversity, civil disorder, geopolitical turmoil and resource wars. In these circumstances, should not elected politicians everywhere have an obligation to explain how their policies reflect the fact of global overshoot?

Denying reality is not a viable option; self-delusion can become all-destroying. If our leaders reject the foregoing framing, they should be required to show how the policies they are pursuing can deliver ecological stability, economic security, social equity and improved population health to future generations. Ordinary citizens should assert their right-to-know as if their lives depend upon it.

A system of economic governance aimed at promoting such a model will therefore need to account for all of the impacts (both positive and negative) of economic activity. This includes valuing goods and services derived from a healthy society (social capital) and a thriving biosphere (natural capital). Social and natural capital are part of the commons. They are not (and should not be) owned by anyone in particular, but make significant contributions to social sustainability. True freedom and success depend on a world where we all prosper and flourish. Institutions serve humanity best when they foster our individual dignity while enhancing our interconnectedness. To thrive, all institutions (including businesses) and society must pivot toward a new purpose: shared wellbeing on a healthy planet. To achieve a wellbeing economy, a major transformation of our world view, society and economy are needed to:

1. Stay within planetary biophysical boundaries – a sustainable size of the economy within our ecological life support system.

2. Meet all fundamental human needs, including food, shelter, dignity, respect, education, health, security, voice, and purpose, among others.

3. Create and maintain a fair distribution of resources, income, and wealth – within and between nations, current and future generations of humans and other species.

4. Have an efficient allocation of resources, including common natural and social capital assets, to allow inclusive prosperity, human development and flourishing. A social sustainability economy recognizes that happiness, meaning, and thriving depend on far more than material consumption.

5. Create governance systems that are fair, responsive, just and accountable.

There are many individuals and groups who have espoused versions of these basic ideas for decades. They may have used different approaches and different languages, but all share common approaches and, above all, a common goal. Perhaps more important are the many individuals and groups already putting the ideas of a wellbeing economy in practice. These include millions of activists and social entrepreneurs of various types from around the world. The challenge is to acknowledge these many diverse initiatives and harmonize these voices, while allowing a diversity of language to communicate with a variety of audiences.

Here are a few examples of the many new directions, experiments, and models of the social sustaibility economy already happening around the world.

• The ability to communicate in real time with everyone empowers millions of people at virtually no cost and makes social organizing easier than ever before. Peer-to-peer networking has become a reality, whether sharing information, data, software, goods, services, car rides, accommodation, lending and/or political strategies.

• Renewable energy allows for decentralized systems of production and consumption, turning households into independent nodes of a global network. Costs are now below fossil fuels, despite the $10 million a minute in subsidies that fossil energy still enjoys. Advanced economies and developing nations are already transitioning to renewable energy. Jobs are being lost in the fossil fuel industry, but are on the rise in renewable energies: the US solar sector employs 77% more people than coal mining, creating employment opportunities 17 times as fast as the job creation of the economy as a whole. By 2015, China alone had created 3.5 million renewable energy jobs. In 2016, renewable energy employment was growing at 5% a year globally.

• As the world realises the new era of the ‘anthropocene’ and accepts the UN Sustainable Development Goals businesses around the world begin to protect natural capital and ecosystems.

• The Senegalese government has equipped 100 villages with techniques learned from ecovillages, and aims to creat 14,000 ecovillages. More than a thousand Transition Towns have been initiated across the world.

• As central authorities fail citizens, more states, regions and cities take the lead. From Vermont to California, US states have defied America’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement by adopting their own climate change response plans. Civil society organisations are taking the lead in pulling together innovative funding to transform urban areas and at the same time achieve the SDGs. Two hundred city regions will be involved by 2022.

• California committed to double energy efficiency and generate half of the state’s electricity from renewable sources by 2030. They will actually achieve this by 2020. Nine New England states require car makers to shift to zero-emission vehicles. New York launched an energy plan to help residents produce and share their own energy. Smart villages using off-the-grid solutions are mushrooming in Asia and Africa. Sweden is on track to become fossil fuel free by 2040.

• Economic and social innovations: Millions of people are rethinking the economy by introducing alternative currencies, most of them in digital format, following the explosion of BitCoin and the ‘blockchain’ process on which it is based. Basic income experiments are underway, in places as diverse as Kenya, Finland and India. Transition Towns have developed a guide for creating resilient local economies and local currencies. The European Union has put forward a circular economy policy.

• More and more countries are joining the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) so that local people can follow the money generated by companies working within their boarders.

• Regenerative agriculture, pioneered in Africa, South America and South Asia, offers sufficient food for all using methods that restore ecosystems and capture carbon and increase yield.

Under the Agreement the BRICS Development Bank, as it was first called – now the NDB, they set up a “reserve currency pool” of US $ 100 billion. Each of the five-member countries was to allocate an equal share of the US $ 50 billion start-up capital, to be expanded later to the US $100 billion. Contributions per country were, Brazil, $18 billion, Russia $18 billion, India $18 billion, China $41 billion and South Africa $5 billion. The problem is that the initial capital and the Contingency Reserve Arrangement (CRA) of US $ 100 billion was set up in US dollars. How canthey break loose from the western dollar-based monetary system, if their contribution is dollar based?

Perhaps even more consequential for the global economy, is the dollar becoming the world reserve currency and maintaining a predominant role in the basket of international foreign-exchange reserves of the IMF ever since 1981. The role of the dollar, linked obviously to the petrodollar trade, has almost always maintained a share of more than 40% of the Special Drawing Right (SDR)basket, while the euro has maintained a stable shareof 29-37% since 2001. In order to understand the economic change in progress, it is sufficient to observe that the yuan is now finally included in the SDR, with an initial 10% share that is immediately higher than the yen (8.3%) and sterling(8.09%) but significantly less than the dollar (41%) and euro (31%). Slowly but significantly Yuan currency is becoming more and more used in global trade.

In recent years, it has become clear to many nations opposing America that the only way to adequately contain the fallout from the collapsing US empire is to progressively abandon the dollar. This serves to limit America’s capacity for military spending by creating the necessary alternative tools in the financial and economic realms that will eliminate America's dominance. This is essential in the Russo-Sino-Iranian strategy to unite Eurasia and thereby render the US irrelevant. De-dollarization for Beijing, Moscow and Tehran has become a strategic priority. Eliminating the unlimited spending capacity of the FED and the American economy means limiting US imperialist expansion and diminishing globald estabilization. Without the usual US military power to strengthen and impose the use of US dollars, China, Russia and Iran have paved the way for important shifts in the global order.

For China, Iran and Russia, as well as other countries, de-dollarizationhas become a pressing issue. The number of countries that are beginning to see the benefits of a decentralized system, as opposed to the US dollar system, is increasing. Iran and India, but also Iran and Russia, have often traded hydrocarbons in exchange for primary goods, thereby bypassing American sanctions.

Likewise, China's economic power has allowed it to open a 10-billion-euro line of credit to Iran to circumvent recent sanctions. Even the DPRK seems to use crypto currencies like bitcoin to buy oil from China and bypass US sanctions. Venezuela (with the largest oil reserves in the world) has just started a historic move to completely renounce selling oil in dollars, and has announced that it will start receiving money in a basket of currencies without US dollars. (This is not to mention the biggest change to have occurred in the last 40 years). Beijing will buy gas and oil from Russia by paying in yuan, with Moscow being able to convert yuan into gold immediately thanks to the Shanghai International Energy Exchange. This gas-yuan-gold mechanism signals a revolutionary economic change through the progressive abandonment of the dollar in trade.

A major issue in climate economics is whether it is possible to halt the growth in carbon emissions and to achieve, instead, a rapid reduction. Carbon emissions will never fall at a sufficient rate in a growth economy. An entirely different way of thinking about climate issues is needed, one that is consistent with the limits to growth paradigm. The alternative way of framing the climate debate is:

• Humanity is faced with the high likelihood of a catastrophic ecological tipping point and this crisis is part of a general crisis at the limits to economic growth

• There are many unknowns at that tipping point – beyond which there might be runaway climate change because of feedback

• This tipping point imposes the need for an absolute limit on what can safely be emitted and what must be clawed back out of the atmosphere – given the uncertainty with a need for a high margin of safety

• This limit trumps any growth agenda because the danger is so great and ecological scale limits must be imposed in physical quantities (e.g. of allowed carbon emissions) before the market can be allowed to operate

• The limits to economic growth require that climate policy be part of a more general transition of society and economy for which efforts must be made to enrol everyone.

• Techno-innovation may have a role in the transition but will not be the sole or even the main method of reducing energy consumption – moral, cultural, behavioural and other changes are also needed.

• Limits need to be imposed as equitably as possible as part of the larger transition

• We need to get on with this task now, as a matter of urgency

To grow the economy and reduce carbon emissions at the same time can be done with various proponents of degrowth not denying that it is possible to increase the efficiency with which energy and materials are used in the economy. They do not deny that the amount of carbon emitted per unit of output can be decreased. The question at stake here is whether it is possible to grow the economy and, at the very same time, achieve an absolute reduction in the throughput of energy and materials, that is, to decouple growth from increased material and energy usage. More specifically, in relation to the climate crisis, is it possible to grow the economy and reduce carbon emissions at the same time? Various proponents of degrowth do not deny that it is possible to increase the efficiency with which energy and materials are used in the economy. They do not deny that the amount of carbon emitted per unit of output can be decreased.

No good or service can be produced without energy – even “information” requires energy to run the computers or make and print books, magazines and newspapers. As the economy grows it requires more energy and, because virtually all energy in our society is generated by burning carbon fuels, that means more CO2 emissions.

In the past, it was showed that energy production and world GDP are highly correlated and, since most of the energy is derived from fossil fuels, this involves increased emissions. Unless the connection between growth of production and growth of emissions can be broken, and to a sufficient extent, there can be no reduction of carbon emissions without an end to growth – indeed without contraction.

It may be that depleting fossil fuel supplies and the production crunch brought about by rising energy and material costs that was described in an earlier chapter, will achieve a considerable turn down in carbon emissions anyway. This would not be a particularly pleasant resolution of the crisis but it would certainly change the conditions in which the climate crisis would have to be resolved. On the other hand, the global power elite appear to be hell bent on continuing to extract and use carbon based fossil energy if they can, so we cannot totally be sure if things will evolve into this kind of crunch. This is despite the fact that in 2012 the International Energy Agency acknowledged that 2/3 of recoverable carbon in fuels needs to stay in the ground up to 2050 to have any change of staying below a temperature increase of 2degrees C. This matches findings from the IPCC working group 3. (IPCC.WG3.Final Draft AR5. Presentation 2014)

There is plenty of carbon here to bring greenhouse gas concentration levels well above 600 ppm. As we have already seen, fracking for shale gas is just one of several options being pursued to get new fossil energy sources out of the ground in the face of the depletion gradients, bringing with it the threat of high fugitive methane losses. Underground gasification of coal is another technology based on extracting the energy from deep coal seams by partially burning it underground to extract the energy in the form of syngas. When it comes to the surface, syngas can be burned to generate electricity. If this can be made to work, there are unfortunately very large reserves of coal in the world that can still be used as energy sources.

Worse still, attempts are being made to tap “frozen” methane from the oceans called methane hydrates. This is a dangerous process because methane hydrate unfreezes from its crystalline form directly into methane gas and, when it does so, it enormously expands in volume. The process is thus, very unstable and explosive.

Perhaps 1% of the global population accounts for 50% of all emissions, and if we take the top 5% we are talking about the top 60% of emissions. It is above all the carbon intensity of the lifestyle of the global elite that is taking us all to climate hell, and it is the lifestyle of this elite that needs to be tackled. The assumption for now is that some organised agency can be found with the political will and power to set an absolute ceiling on the amount of carbon based fuels that are allowed into the economy. Or, put the other way around, an agency is created with the power to keep most remaining fossil fuels in the ground untouched. This will then, in turn, force a number of other processes such as:

• Lifestyle changes – eating less meat which is an energy and carbon intense foodstuff; cycling and walking more and less travel; more growing your own food; voluntary reductions in consumption with a culture of “sufficiency” reductions.

• Energy efficiency in buildings, production, transport plus…

• Renewable generation: wind; solar voltaics + thermal, concentrated solar power; hydro, tidal, wave power; some bio-

• Technologies to complement renewables: electric storage technologies and grid balancing

• Land use changes, ecological design, organic agriculture with protection against deforestation and degradation of peat lands; and

• Enhancement of carbon sequestration in land and biomass

But is it possible to impose a carbon price (or a cap)? How is it possible to drive a process of decarbonisation? What can be done about emissions from land use changes and deforestation? What is to be done about other sources of global warming like black carbon, methane emissions, N2O emissions, HCFCs and so on? There are lots of questions in climate policy that need answers. It is not straightforward by any means.

The very idea of a “cap” is greeted with scepticism by many climate activists because current policies of “cap and trade” have been so ineffectual. But, to be fair, the word “cap” has been abused. A “cap” should mean an absolute limit but in current policy frameworks it is no such thing. The so called “cap” operated by the European Union does not function as a real restraint. It has been designed to leak because fossil fuel business interests had control of the policy making process and the policy making implementation. The problem is not with the idea of a cap. It should not surprise that the cap and trade policy in Europe has failed. As we have seen repeatedly, policy is written by the polluters for the polluters and when the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme was set up, it was no exception. For a long time, the major fossil fuel suppliers had resisted any restraint on emissions but, at the end of the 1990s, some of them changed tack.

The starting point for understanding how a cap should work are the following easily available conversion figures. They show the carbon content of different fuels when burned, reduced to a common measure. Thus, 1 kg CO2 = 1 Carbon Unit (Note the Global Warming Potential of non-CO2 warming gases like methane are measured in units called “Carbon dioxide equivalents” which are noted with an “e” after CO2, as in “CO2e”). As examples natural gas = 0.18404 carbon units per kWh or industrial coal = 0.31304 carbon units per kWh (a tonne of industrial coal = 2339.1 carbon units) For each physical quantity of a particular kind of fuel, or for each quantity of energy, it can readily be calculated how much CO2 will be emitted when that quantity is burned. If the political will could be found, it is therefore entirely possible to construct a policy administration that could control how much carbon can be allowed to be burned in any time period. All fossil fuel sales would be banned unless first authorised by a permit. The number of permits, which would be denominated in carbon units, would be limited and reduced rapidly year on year.

In order to acquire some of the limited numbers of permits, the fossil fuel sellers would have to obtain them. As is obvious, the permits would be very expensive to buy if the cap were tight enough. The fossil fuel sellers would pass on the permit cost to their customers so that the price of fossil fuels would rise, perhaps very considerably. The prices of goods made with large amounts of fossil fuels would also rise. This would not be at all popular and would particularly hit people with a carbon intensive lifestyle, which, as we have seen already, is largely the very rich. However, poor people would be hit too. That is why it would be necessary that the large amount of money raised when permits are sold, should be recycled back to the population on a per capita or some other equitable basis. This scheme would cut the carbon intensive lifestyle of the rich most, while making a very large number of poor people better off, at least in the early stages of the process. The reason that they will be better off is that if the revenue from carbon permit sales is recycled back to the public on a per capita basis, then everyone, rich or poor, will get exactly the same amount of the revenue from permit sales. However, the poor tend to have a less carbon intensive lifestyle. Although prices for their lifestyle will rise, they will still get more from their share of the carbon permit revenues than they will pay extra in rising prices.

The 1%”, however, will be paying a huge amount more because, directly and indirectly, their energy intensive lifestyle accounts for 50% of all carbon emissions and carbon will have become very expensive. Despite this, they will only be getting back the same share from the carbon permit revenues as everyone else. A majority would be in favour of maintaining a tight cap, since they gain financially. This is a force to counterbalance the vested interests who would push for a cap to be relaxed or abandoned, and this counterbalance gives a certain political robustness to C&S in the face of shocks and political events. If such a scheme was adopted in 2020, the number of carbon units permitted would need to be reduced by at least 10% per annum to have an outside chance of the planet staying under 2 degrees C. A reduction of available energy of this magnitude, if at all possible, would need to drive a massive reduction of production, chiefly, the production of things that enter into carbon intensive lifestyle of rich people in the manner explained above. A policy that would lead to a very dramatic process of “degrowth” because production is dependent on energy. With fossil energy availability radically reduced by a cap that really bites, the amount of production in the economy would be driven downwards.

An upstream cap imposed on sellers of coal, oil and gas can cover all fossil fuels entering the economy and would be simple to impose, at least in administrative terms. Most countries already impose duties on fossil fuel sales so there are procedures already in place monitoring the input of fossil fuels into different economies. Obviously, administrative simplicity is only a part of the problem of setting and operating a cap. Driving a contraction of the economy would be immensely unpopular, unless accompanied by multiple other policies and social changes to enable billions of people to achieve dramatic changes in their lifestyles. These changes should be, above all, concentrated on the rich and would have to be made anyway because of depleting fossil energy and materials resources. Needless to say, this is nothing like the working of the policy architecture designed in Europe by BP, its corporate allies and government. The European Union policy was designed, consciously or unconsciously, to deflect direct controls away from the fossil fuel industry onto its customers. It is riddled with loopholes and special clauses that make it easy for large businesses to game the system and generally to make it unworkable. Because of business pressure so many permits have been issued that there is no real restraint on emissions in practice. Rather than having a direct control over what fossil fuels are allowed into the economy, the policy architecture has been focused upon the users and uses of fossil fuels at the demand end. In the jargon, the policy is imposed “downstream” rather than “upstream”. As is obvious, the number of users and uses of fossil fuels “downstream” is much greater than the number of suppliers “upstream”.

It would have made sense to control emissions by capping the amount of fossil fuels going into the system at the source of initial supply. This is called capping the emissions “upstream”. The fossil fuel suppliers would have to have emissions permits (indicated by the yellow rectangles) to cover the emissions caused by the fossil fuels they bring into the system. What happened instead in Europe was that the ETS was imposed downstream on large fossil fuel users. These are companies running power stations, cement works, steel mills and the like. This covers 45% of the EU’s CO2 emissions. Individuals are not covered in this scheme but could be through “personal carbon trading” (PCA), based on “personal carbon accounts”. The problem is that this would be administratively complex. Everyone would have to have their own personal carbon account, presumably by using a carbon card rather like a debit or credit card. In the early stages of the European ETS, most permits to emit were initially distributed to the main emitters for free. This meant that, to the extent that the permits had any market value, it was the companies that captured their value. The mechanism and reasoning worked like this: companies that have to surrender their permits because they have been emitting CO2 reason that, because the surrendered permits have a market value, surrendering them means the loss of this market value to the company. Thus, as far as the company is concerned, this loss when their permits are surrendered is one of their costs of operation. So, even though they were given the permits in the first place, they pass on this “cost” to their customers in increased prices. Because it was designed by pushers of fossil fuels, the European Union established a system that runs on a “pay the polluter” principle. The idea is supposed to be that, over time, more of the permits will be auctioned by states which will capture the revenue raised. However, there has been some dragging of feet on this and governments are reluctant to implement this system in favour of their fossil fuel corporations. Poland has even wanted to use revenues arising from ETS permits to subsidise new coal fired power stations

Why the extinction crisis isn't just about the environment, but social justice. An anti-capitalist movement against extinction must be framed in terms of a refusal to turn land, people, flora, and fauna into commodities. The genomic information of plants, animals, and human beings is the common wealth of the planet, and all efforts to make use of this environmental commons must be framed around principles of equality, solidarity, and environmental and climate justice. The extinction crisis is an environmental issue and a social justice issue, one that is linked to long histories of capitalist domination over specific people, animals, and plants. The extinction crisis needs to be seen as a key element in contemporary struggles against accumulation by dispossession. This crisis, in other words, ought to be a key issue in the fight for climate justice. If techno-fixes such as deextinction facilitate new rounds of biocapitalist accumulation, . We must reject capitalist biopiracy and imperialist enclosure of the global commons, particularly when they cloak themselves in arguments about preserving biodiversity. Most of all, an anti-capitalist conservation movement must challenge the privatization of the genome as a form of intellectual property, to be turned into an organic factory for the benefit of global elites. Synthetic biology should be regulated. The genomic information of plants, animals, and human beings is the common wealth of the planet, and all efforts to make use of this environmental commons must be framed around principles of equality, solidarity, and environmental and climate justice.

What would be the shape and fundamental goals of an expansive anti-capitalist movement against extinction and for environmental justice? It would have to commence with open recognition by the developed nations of the long history of ecocide. Such an admission would lead to a consequent recognition of the biodiversity debt owed by the wealthy nations of the global North to the South. Building on the demands articulated by the climate justice movement, the anti-capitalist conservation movement must demand the repayment of this biodiversity debt. How would this repayment take place? The climate justice movement’s call for a universal guaranteed income for inhabitants of nations who are owed climate debt should serve as a model here. Why not begin a model initiative for such a carbon and biodiversity-based guaranteed income program in the planet’s biodiversity hotspots? Of the twenty five terrestrial biodiversity hotspots, fifteen are covered primarily by tropical rainforests, and consequently are also key sites for the absorption of carbon pollution. These threatened ecosystems include the moist tropical woodlands of Brazil’s Atlantic coast, southern Mexico with Central America, the tropical Andes, the Greater Antilles, West Africa, Madagascar, the Western Ghats of India, Indo-Burma, Indonesia, the Philippines, and New Caledonia. They make up only 1.4% of the Earth’s surface, and yet, these regions are the exclusive homes of 44% of the world’s plant species and more than a third of all species of birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. All of these areas are under heavy assault from the forces of enclosure and ecocide. A universal guaranteed income for the inhabitants of these hotspots would create a genuine counterweight to the attractions of poaching, and would entitle the indigenous and forest-dwelling peoples who make these zones of rich biodiversity their homes with the economic and political power to push their governments to implement significant conservation measures.

The struggle to preserve global biodiversity must be seen as an integral part of a broader fight to challenge an economic and social system based on feckless, suicidal expansion. If, as we have seen, capitalism is based on ceaseless compound growth that is destroying ecosystems the world over, the goal in the rich nations of the global North must be to overturn our present expansionary system by fostering de-growth . Most importantly, nations that have benefited from burning fossil fuels must radically cut their carbon emissions in order to stem the lurch towards runaway climate chaos that endangers the vast majority of current terrestrial forms of life. Rather than false and impractical solutions such as the carbon trading and geoengineering schemes championed by advocates of neoliberal responses to the climate crisis, anti-capitalists should fight for some version of the contraction and convergence approach proposed by Global Community. This proposal is based on moving towards a situation in which all nations have the same level of emissions per person (convergence) while contracting them to a level that is sustainable (contraction). A country such as the United States, which has only 5% of the global population, would be allowed no more than 5% of globally sustainable emissions. Such a move would represent a dramatic anti-imperialist shift since the US is at present responsible for 25% of carbon emissions. The powerful individuals and corporations that control nations like the US are not likely to accept such revolutionary curtailments of the wasteful system that supports them without a struggle. Already there is abundant evidence that they would sooner destroy the planet than let even a modicum of their power slip. Massive fossil fuel corporations such as Exxon, for example, have funded climate change denialism for the past quarter century despite abundant evidence from their own scientists that burning fossil fuels was creating unsustainable environmental conditions. Such behavior should be seen frankly for what it is: a crime against humanity. We should not expect to negotiate with such destructive entities. Their assets should be seized. Most of these assets, in the form of fossil fuel reserves, cannot be used anyway if we are to avert environmental catastrophe. What remains of these assets should be used to fund a rapid, managed reduction in carbon emissions and a transition to renewable energy generation. These steps should be part of a broader program to transform the current, unsustainable capitalist system that dominates the world into steady state societies founded on principles of equality and environmental justice.

What is “value” and how shall we protect it? It’s a simple question for which we don’t have a satisfactory answer. For conventional economists and politicians, the answer is simple: value is essentially the same as price. Value results when private property and free markets condense countless individual preferences and purchases into a single, neutral representation of value: price. That is seen as the equivalent of “wealth.” This theory of value has always been flawed, both theoretically and empirically, because it obviously ignores many types of “value” that cannot be given a price. No matter, it “works,” and so this theory of value generally prevails in political and policy debates. Economic growth (measured as Gross Domestic Product) and value are seen as the same. Meanwhile, the actual value generated outside of market capitalism – the “care economy,” social labor, eco-stewardship, digital communities and commons – are mostly ignored or considered merely personal (“values”). These types of “value” are seen as extraneous to “the economy.” There is a need to develop a post-capitalist, commons-friendly theory of value that could begin to represent and defend these other types of value. Marx’s labor theory of value has long criticized capitalism for failing to recognize the full range of value-creation that make market exchange possible in the first place. Without the “free,” unpriced services of child-rearing, social cooperation, ethical norms, education and natural systems, markets simply could not exist. Yet because these nonmarket value-regimes have no pricetags associated with them, they are taken for granted and fiercely exploited as “free resources” by markets. The absence of a credible theory of value is one reason that we have a legitimacy crisis today. There is no shared moral justification for the power of markets and civil institutions in our lives. Today, we have a dictatorship of one kind of value as delivered by the market system, which determines for everyone how they can live. Consider how the labor of a nurse is regarded under different value regimes: A nurse working as a paid employee is considered value, and a contributor to the Gross Domestic Product. But the same nurse doing the same duties as a government employee is seen as an expense, not a value-creator. The same nurse working as a volunteer “produces no value at all” by the logic of the market system. It’s perfectly possible to talk about the ‘good life’ without the notion of value.” The word “value” is useful to merchants and economists in talking about money and markets. But it has little relevance when talking about ethical living or the human condition.

The green technologies of future can have a potential solution to address climate change. But does an economic system driven by cultural values determined by profit motive, take it to a scale and make it available for the masses? Will the green technologies be accessible to all? When even agricultural technologies and gas cylinder hasn’t been able to reach the masses and the producers, how can the greener technologies reach the masses? Similar to acceptance of the Earth’s capacities to support modern unsustainable lifestyles are to be agreed upon, similarly limits of the economic system driven by profit motive to make shift to sustainable future needs to be questioned. The global socioeconomic system of capitalism, is forcing us to work harder to surpass previous consumption and population numbers until we have devoured everything that maintains life, ending up with a polluted, lifeless, and a scorched planet. Civilisation’s present and ultimate mode, capitalism is the system that can only lead us to our annihilation. This isn’t any individual’s, or any group of people’s fault, it’s the economic system that took form first with the energy of slaves to produce the raw materials that were then manufactured with the energy of fossil fuels. The economic success of that was dishonestly attributed to the capitalist system but it came from the benefit of using slave, which was overwhelm by non-renewable fossil fuels that are burned as renewables. The work force was then educated to use fossil fuels in its entire myriad of uses and also to integrated workers in a system of contradicting values by using competition as the regulator in a social setting that must also be cooperative to be social. To maintain a general satisfaction in a social system that’s driven and motivate with competition, endless growth is needed, but in a finite system it must end when resources are exhausted. However, we also have a double whammy, that of pollution that impairs life and the carbon that’s heating the biosphere and acidifying the oceans, they would end life if the system is maintained to its exhaustion. It’s like been inside a spinning treadmill, the faster a few people run the faster each individual needs to run to stay in position. The only ones that can slow and stop that nonsense are the wealthy people, who have successfully blocked any attempts to head off that stampede, so the wealthiest are riding that wave of people and getting the benefits with little effort. To keep up with that momentum, society must take what it can, leaving nothing. Our options within the capitalist system is limited because competition entices and pressures us to keep doing more of everything or suffer the consequences of losing the little power we still have.

The power that controls the economy is with the 1% they have the power to stop and change that exploitive, chaotic violent world economy. The 1%, power comes from finance which’s depended on economic growth, and that can’t be jeopardised just to save a few millions poor people around the planet who are already suffering, which’s the present worry for concerned people. Sadly the 1% dominates and controls the information services; it’s the only power that is able to disseminate the needed information to change our self-destructive way of life to an inclusive positive one. If we can show the 1% that they’re facing a dire situation in a overpopulate world that’s depleted of vital resources, in an unliveable hot and violent climate. They are likely to avoid continuing on that path as wealth can’t have any value in that unendurable social chaotic violence, when the economy goes from sour to putrid and as well the 1% may be an early victim of vengefulness. Without affordable oil we can’t produce the quantity of coal, gas, and pump the vital water that’s also needed to grow our food, it will curtail transporting all that stuff around the world. The difficulty will also be magnified by global warming which will need much more energy to counteract its effects. Global warming alone can kill us all. One must understand that burning that vast store of carbon that nature managed to accumulate in the ground has never happen before, it will also release the carbon from the permafrost and methane hydrates that will produce a colossal positive feedbacks. To sustain life in those extreme conditions would require more energy but there will be less to share, especially with more people. There’s no certainty of how much time we have to turn the world economy from an exploitative one, to one that functions within nature, as a part of nature before it becomes irretrievable. We desperately need to show the 1% how closes they and we are in producing an unliveable world due to the outcome of capitalist economy. The 1% life is at stake like everyone, they must not only cooperate to live within nature’s ability, but promote it on a world scale. They are the only ones with the power to do so, and it may be the only way to survive. All living things have to have a survival instinct to be alive; it will save us all if we use it. However, that instinct will only kick in when those multi billionaires realise that their life is at stake and they can only be saved if they do their best to save everyone. That would mean an unreserved sharing with all people and a qualified one with nature, the sooner we can accomplish that, the easier and satisfying life will be, for the more cooperative our life is the more satisfying and secure it must be. In a cooperative based society there would be no advantage to be deceitful; people will then revert to honest relationships. That correlation in societies and also as a part of nature infers that people would see exploiting nature as destructive for us.The reason we are destroying our habitat thus ourselves is due to the competitiveness of civilisation and its intensification under capitalism, that competition is capitalism lifeblood and now it’s our foe. The more social one is the more cooperative one must be, the less conflict we have, and as well it’s the most efficient way to live, it’s our nature. That means having to share the efforts and the benefits, even of its unfamiliarity for the 1%.

Although the yearning for peace is deep-seated, it has never been achieved during civilisation due to its competitive nature. If we keep capitalism, the ultimate in competitiveness, it will finish us. Peace can’t be attained with military force; one can’t fight for peace or for cooperation, as they’re an outcome of mutual agreements to benefit everyone. Peace is now possible because we have to have it to survive. People have the intellectual and the emotional ability to work out the multitude of changes to enable us to be fully social and survive, if it’s our goal.

Achieving climate and development goals without the full backing of business and investors is not possible. Fortunately, evidence shows that more and more businesses and investors are taking a lead—and saving costs and making money in the process. While the private sector is hugely diverse and different sectors have different contributions to climate change and opportunities to take action, a growing number of businesses have shown that reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can be linked to significant cost savings and benefits without adverse impact on overall profits or performance.

Indeed, there is evidence that such actions can lead to overall improvements in corporate profitability. At the same time, the emergence of new technologies and the growth of climate policy around the world have created a global market in low-carbon goods and services with a value of around $5.5 trillion, larger than the global pharmaceutical industry. Thus, although many businesses remain powerful opponents of climate-related policies, it is unsurprising that many others are now leading the charge for climate action.

Similarly shareholders and other investor stakeholders are increasingly aware that they need to take responsibility for the emissions associated with financial services provided to clients (called “financed emissions”). Using more than 20 percent of the currently listed coal, oil and gas reserves over the next 40 years would push global warming over the 2°C warming target. This indicates that if we are to meet our climate goals, then a significant portion of such reserves would become stranded assets. Financial investors must end ways to avoid exposure to stranded assets and to take advantage of the growing market in low-carbon goods and services.

The scale and influence of major global businesses and investors means that any effort to decarbonize the economy, whether at the global, national or sub-national level, requires their engagement. Public policy plays a key role in requiring or incentivizing businesses to reduce their emissions and in stimulating innovation, but business and investor leadership is also crucial. Such leadership was highlighted in the chair’s conclusions to the United Nations Secretary General’s Climate Summit 2014 and by the Governments of Peru and France, who organized high-level events during recent climate negotiations showcasing business climate action. The Government of France also signaled the importance of business action by mandating the business community to hold a high-level summit dedicated to this topic in May 2015, with nearly 2,000 attendees, which was turned into an annual event with a successor in London in June 2016.

The private sector was active in the run-up to and during the 2015 climate negotiations in Paris—most notably through vehicles such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Non-State Actor Zone for Climate Action (NAZCA) Portal, which included commitments of action by 2,090 companies and 448 investors as of April 2016, and the Paris Pledge for Action, signed by over 688 companies and 176 investors with over $11 trillion in assets under management, that committed to help implement and exceed commitments made by governments in Paris. Other initiatives co-led by business that aim to catalyze action around the low-carbon transition include the Low-Carbon Technology Partnerships initiative (LCTPi). It is not just in the climate arena that business leaders have been playing a significant role; in January 2016 the Business and Sustainable Development Commission (BSDC) was launched with the aim of articulating and quantifying the economic case for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals agreed by governments in September 2015, with global CEOs at the heart of project. The commitments discussed in such fora are almost all the output of international cooperative initiatives. These initiatives bring business and investors together, often with other actors, to deliver activities like target setting and implementation of action such as increasing the use of renewable energy, reducing drivers for deforestation, developing roadmaps for new low-carbon technologies like carbon capture and storage, or agreeing on common reporting and monitoring standards. These initiatives have the potential to shift corporate behavior and scale up impact in significant ways.

Increasing numbers of major companies are taking part in such initiatives, but their coverage is far from universal and the level of their ambition is not yet consistent with a 2°C pathway to stabilize climate change, let alone the aspirational goal of 1.5°C in the Paris Agreement. By collaborating with other private sector partners and with public sector bodies, including national and local governments and international institutions, businesses can significantly increase the impact they are able to have. By working together to set and achieve commitments, businesses can share best practice, prompt positive competition, and improve their confidence that ambitious targets are credible and achievable. By pooling resources to engage with policy-makers, businesses can develop stronger arguments and more efficient engagement strategies. They make their voice more credible by demonstrating greater backing. Finally, to address systemic challenges such as deforestation, or rapid technology substitution, which requires simultaneous action from multiple fronts, businesses are increasingly realizing they need to be part of broad public-private partnerships that can change the terms of a whole market.

What is “value” and how shall we protect it?  It’s a simple question for which we don’t have a satisfactory answer. For conventional economists and politicians, the answer is simple:  value is essentially the same as price. Value results when private property and free markets condense countless individual preferences and purchases into a single, neutral representation of value:  price.  That is seen as the equivalent of “wealth.” This theory of value has always been flawed, both theoretically and empirically, because it obviously ignores many types of “value” that cannot be given a price. No matter, it “works,” and so this theory of value generally prevails in political and policy debates. Economic growth (measured as Gross Domestic Product) and value are seen as the same. Meanwhile, the actual value generated outside of market capitalism – the “care economy,” social labor, eco-stewardship, digital communities and commons – are mostly ignored or considered merely personal (“values”).  These types of “value” are seen as extraneous to “the economy.” My colleagues and I wondered if it would be possible to develop a post-capitalist, commons-friendly theory of value that could begin to represent and defend these other types of value. Marx’s labor theory of value has long criticized capitalism for failing to recognize the full range of value-creation that make market exchange possible in the first place.  Without the “free,” unpriced services of child-rearing, social cooperation, ethical norms, education and natural systems, markets simply could not exist.  Yet because these nonmarket value-regimes have no pricetags associated with them, they are taken for granted and fiercely exploited as “free resources” by markets. The absence of a credible theory of value is one reason that we have a legitimacy crisis today.  There is no shared moral justification for the power of markets and civil institutions in our lives. Today, we have a dictatorship of one kind of value as delivered by the market system, which determines for everyone how they can live.  Consider how the labor of a nurse is regarded under different value regimes, he said:  A nurse working as a paid employee is considered value, creating, a contributor to Gross Domestic Product.  But the same nurse doing the same duties as a government employee is seen as “an expense, not a value-creator,” said Bauwens.  The same nurse working as a volunteer “produces no value at all” by the logic of the market system. It’s perfectly possible to talk about the ‘good life’ without the notion of value.”  The word “value” is useful to merchants and economists in talking about money and markets.  But it has little relevance when talking about ethical living or the human condition.

Economists are eager to protect their ideas about “value” as money -based and make them normative. Commoners and others, by contrast, want to broaden the meaning of the term to apply to all of human experience. The conventional economic definition of “value” has a significant rhetorical advantage over other notions of value/s.  It can be encapsulated in numbers, manipulated mathematically and ascribed to individuals, giving it a tidy precision.  Value defined as price also has an operational simplicity even though it flattens the messy realities of actual human life and ecosystems. This point is illustrated by open value accounting systems and by organizational experiments in finance, ownership and governance.

To avoid ecological destruction, prosperity must be separated from economic growth. Endless economic growth endangers our future thus the need to envision a post-growth economy. If endless growth is essential to prosperity and, at the same time, leads to ecological destruction, what should we do? The structural affinity for growth impedes our ability to think clearly about our situation. Growth drives both prosperity and erodes the very preconditions for its sustainability. Within the actual measurement and calculation of economic growth, the real GDP, economic prosperity, and the annual budget, there is a contradiction between relentless expansion of income and throughput, on one hand, and ecological survival, on the other. The actual need for global growth is directly seen as a survival premise to the global capitalist system. Today the fear of a post-growth economy is totally inconceivable. People are told that without growth job creation will falter, leading to high unemployment and social instability, and that is a formula for ending the career of any politician. The complex relationship between growth, jobs, and survival is connected by labor productivity and technological advances. Politicians are mentally locked into a growth-jobs-prosperity process, a mindset which itself is a premise of the modern capitalism system. In order to get beyond this falsehood, we need to understand and debate the fundamental assumptions guiding modern capitalist societies. Many aspects need debating. For instance, we need to question the inequalities between the very rich and the poor that capitalism creates. Without a fundamental change in our ways the poor will still be poor, and the government will have no money to spend. Capitalism is sacrosanct in our ways, and we believe that it is the best way to achieve growth. It is a sociological phenomenon as much as an economic one. As we are educated to believe, there are no limits to growth, because there are no limits to human ingenuity and creativity. We associate the solution to the environmental impacts of unlimited growth to technoligical advances, hoping technology will have a way to save us all. But technological solutions will not be sufficient to save the world. Nothing positive can be accomplished in a society in which the entrenched forces of free market capitalism and the disregard for sustainable solutions of dominant institutions are committed to obstructing the change required. The relentless need of people for consumption coupled with the relentless appetite of capitalists for accumulation, is sustaining the planetary crisis, and so the battle for survival is economized and clogged. Despite technological progress, the unholy alliance between human nature and institutional structure creates a dangerous strong-minded and reckless attitude that diminishes prospects for a livable future.

The world needs an economy in which business provides outputs that enable people to flourish without destroying ecosystems; where work offers respect, motivation, and fulfillment to all; where investment is prudential in terms of securing long-term prosperity for all humanity; and where systems of borrowing, lending, and creating money are firmly rooted in long-term social value creation rather than in trading and speculation.

The building blocks of a new economy are within reach. While current trends may well be cause for despair, history is replete with structural changes that redefine economic relations, for better or for worse. We need to question the fundamental assumptions of an economic system that is patently dysfunctional. What is going on today is largely attributable to the failure of growth-based capitalism. We need to address the structural deficiencies in the existing system. We still struggle to open up debates and minds to the nature of the system, to question the political influences seeking to turbo-charge a failed capitalism that continues to spawn growing inequality. Global Dialogue 2019 in fostering a post-growth dialogue, a societal transformation rooted in well-being, solidarity, and ecological resilience.

A legally imposed contraction of the fossil energy supply and a rapid global conversion to renewable energy, is a necessary step toward saving our world, Earth. With the response to the climate emergency following two necessary tracks, a legally imposed contraction of the fossil energy supply and a rapid global conversion to renewable energy, the economic onus will inevitably fall on our 33 percenters. First, there is the initial conversion to green energy capacity and infrastructure, the costs of which have been optimistically estimated at $15 trillion for the United States and $100 trillion globally (and the latter will require a large U.S. contribution.) The conversion has to happen over years rather than decades and will have to be heavily subsidized, with the money coming from taxation of higher incomes and slashing of military appropriations and other wasteful spending. And it will have to be regulated so that it provides plenty of employment but no profiteering. Meanwhile, the tightening of fossil-fuel availability and the consequent cutbacks in production will cut deeply into the profits of industries not involved in green conversion. Stock prices of companies not working on the conversion will fall. Owners, investors, and upper managers, the great majority of whom belong to the 33 percent, will take a big hit from all of the above economic forces. And if the economy stagnates or if shortages and inflation strike, then price controls, subsidies, and other assistance will have to be directed at vulnerable households and regions. That will require even greater shifts of income and wealth from the 33 to the 67 percent. Furthermore, the top one-third are not a homogeneous group. Most probably think of themselves as middle class, while up there at the high end are found those seven-, eight- and nine-figure incomes.

For purposes of funding the transition, the fattest target will be the infamous 1 percent at the peak of the pyramid. Nevertheless, rich as they are, all of the 1-percenters roped together wouldn’t have enough income to fund and sustain such a conversion. Those 1.2 million households at the summit are now bringing in about $1.8 trillion a year, Uncle Sam is already raking $600 billion of that back in taxes, and what’s left will dwindle rapidly in a climate-ready economy. Under a climate emergency, the 1 percent’s brobdingnagian wealth can be mostly taxed away, and the proceeds can be put to much higher uses; even so, a windfall of that size won’t be enough to spare the other 32 percent from feeling the pain.

But put the 1 percent and the 32 percent together and now we have a population of close to 100 million people, numerous and affluent enough to shoulder the economic burden of the climate emergency. Who are these 33 percenters? Currently, they are households with incomes that exceed about  $90,000 per year. Together, this one-third of U.S. households receives two-thirds of the U.S. population’s total income. The 33 percent own 94 percent of stocks by value. Their incomes are higher now than before the Great Recession hit in 2007, while the other 67 percent’s incomes are still lower. They have an average household net worth of approximately $700,000, in contrast to another 40 percent of households whose average net worth is negative, at -$22,000. The U.S. 33 percent are the global 4 percent, with higher incomes than 96 percent of the world’s people. And 33 percent doesn’t add up to 33 for everyone. Only 18 percent of Hispanic and 15 percent of black households are members of the American top third. Affluence versus survival An economy in which production is aimed at protecting the Earth and meeting human needs rather than maximizing profit could make long strides toward eliminating both great wealth and deep poverty. And, research shows, economic and ecological fairness form a positive feedback loop: if climate mobilization helps shrink inequality, it will drive greenhouse emissions even lower.

The need for Russia, China and Iran to find an alternative economic system is also necessary to secure vital aspects of the domestic economy. The stock-market crash in China, the depreciation of the ruble in Russia, and the illegal sanctions imposed on Iran have played a profound role in concentrating the minds of Moscow, Tehran and Beijing. Ignoring the problem borne of the centrality of the dollar would have only increased the influence and role of America. Finding points of convergence instead of being divided was an absolute must and not an option. A perfect example, explaining the failed American economic approach, can be seen in recent years with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), two commercial agreements that were supposed to seal the economic trade supremacy of the US. The growing economic alternatives proposed by the union of intent between Russia, China and Iran has enabled smaller nations to reject the US proposals to seek better trade deals elsewhere. In this sense, the Free Trade Area of ​​the Asia Pacific (FTAAP) proposed by Beijing is increasingly appreciated in Asia as an alternative to the TPP. In the same way, the Eurasian Union (EAEU) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) have always been key components for Moscow. The function these institutions play was noticeably accelerated following the coup in Ukraine and the resulting need for Russia to turn east in search of new business partners. Finally, Iran, chosen by Beijing as the crossroad of land and sea transit, is a prime example of integration between powers geographically distant but with great intentions to integrate vital structures of commerce.

The Chinese model of development, called Silk Road 2.0, poses a serious threat to American global hegemonic processes. The goal for Beijing is to reach full integration between the countries of the Heartland and Rimland, utilizing the concept of sea power and land power. With an investment of 1,000 billion US dollars over ten years, China itself becomes a link between the west, represented by Europe; the east, represented by China itself; the north, with the Eurasian economic space; the south, with India; Southeast Asia; the Persian Gulf and Middle East. The hope is that economic cooperation will lead to the resolution of discrepancies and strategic differences between countries thanks to trade agreements that are beneficiary to all sides.

Beyond state capitalism: the commons economy in our lifetimes. Because our forbears did not account for the biophysical flow of material resources from the environment through the production process and back into the environment, the real worth of natural resources and social labor is not factored into the economy. It is this centralized, hierarchical model that has led to the degradation and devaluation of our commons.

In considering the essential problem of how to produce and distribute material wealth, virtually all of the great economists in Western history have ignored the significance of the commons, the shared resources of nature and society that people inherit, create and utilize.

Despite sharp differences in concept and ideology, economic thinkers from Smith, Ricardo, and Marx to Keynes, Hayek, Mises and Schumpeter largely based their assumptions on the world’s seemingly unlimited resources and fossil fuels, their infinite potential for creating economic growth, adequate supplies of labor for developing them, and the evolving monoculture of state capitalism responsible for their provision and allocation. Hence, in the Market State that has emerged, corporations and sovereign states make decisions on the production and distribution of Earth’s common resources more or less as a unitary system, with minimal participation from the people who depend on these commons for their livelihood and well-being. Because our forbears did not account for the biophysical flow of material resources from the environment through the production process and back into the environment, the real worth of natural resources and social labor is not factored into the economy. It is this centralized, hierarchical model that has led to the degradation and devaluation of our commons.

Over the past seventy years especially, the macroeconomic goals of sovereign states, for high levels and rapid growth of output, low unemployment and stable prices, have resulted in a highly dysfunctional world. The global economy has integrated dramatically in recent decades through financial and trade liberalization; yet the market is failing to protect natural and social resources, the state is failing to rectify the economic system, and the global polity is failing to manage its mounting imbalances in global resources and wealth. Without a ‘unified field theory’ of economics to explain how the commons is drastically undervalued and why world society is amassing huge debts to the environment, the poor and future generations, policymakers and their institutions lack the critical tools and support to address the massive instability that is now gripping the global economy. Businesses and governments are facing the Herculean challenge of reducing climate change and pollution while alleviating poverty without economic growth, a task for which the Market State is neither prepared nor designed to handle.

Meanwhile, the essential ideals of state capitalism, the rule-based systems of government enforcement and the spontaneous, self-regulating social order of markets, are finding direct expression in the co-governance and co-production of common goods by people in localities across the world. Whether these commons are traditional (rivers, forests, indigenous cultures) or emerging (energy, intellectual property, internet), communities are successfully managing them through collaboration and collective action. This growing movement has also begun to create social charters and commons trusts, formal instruments that define the incentives, rights and responsibilities of stakeholders for the supervision and protection of common resources. Ironically, by organizing to protect their commons through decentralized decision-making, the democratic principles of freedom and equality are being realized more fully in these resource communities than through the enterprises and policies of the Market State.

These evolving dynamics, the decommodification of common goods through co-governance and the deterritorialization of value through co-production, are shattering the liberal assumptions which underlie state capitalism. The emergence of this new kind of management and valuation for the preservation of natural and social assets is posing a momentous crisis for the Market State, imperiling the functional legitimacy of state sovereignty, national currencies, domestic fiscal policy, international trade and finance, and the global monetary system. Major changes are on the way. The transformation of modern political economy will involve reconnecting with, and reformulating, a pre-analytic vision of the post-macroeconomic global commons. Another world is coming: where common goods are capped and protected; a portion of these resources are rented to businesses for the production and consumption of private goods; and taxes on their use are redistributed by the state as public goods to provide a social income for the marginalized and to repair and restore the depleted commons.

Although people’s rights to their commons are often recognized and validated in smaller communities, scaling these lessons to the global level will require a new dimension of popular legitimacy and authority. The world community is rapidly evolving a sense of social interconnectivity, shared responsibility and global citizenship, yet the sovereign rights of people to the global commons have not been fully articulated. In declaring our planetary rights for these commons, we shall be confronting many decisive questions:

(1) Are modern societies prepared to create a framework in which the incentives behind production and governance are not private capital and debt-based growth, but human solidarity, quality of life and ecological sustainability?

(2) How soon, and how peacefully, will the subsystems of the Market State integrate their structures of value-creation and sovereign governance with the greater biophysical system of ecological and social interdependence?

(3) Can the global public organize effectively as a third power to develop checks and balances on the private and public sectors and establish the resource sovereignty and preservation value needed for a commons economy?

These issues will be filtering into mainstream discussion over the next two decades. Already the system of state capitalism is breaking down, threatening the entire planet, its institutions and species. When this collapse can no longer be contained and a global monetary crisis ensues, world society will have the choice of creating an economic system that follows the universal laws of biophysics and commons preservation, or accepting a new version of 18th-20th century mechanistic economics, obliging humanity to continue living off the common capital of the planet under corporate feudalism and über-militaristic regimes. Our decision will likely come down to this: global commons or global autarchy. As an economist, I don’t pretend to speak for the conscience of humanity; but as a human being, my heart tells me that we shall see the beginnings of a commons economy in our lifetimes. The long-forsaken global commons are beckoning.

Requirements for ensuring a socially just, economically secure and ecologically stable global environment.

Ensuring a socially just, economically secure and ecologically stable global environment requires:

a) that rich nations consume less to free up the ecological space needed for justifiable consumption increases in poorer countries; and

b) that the world implement a universal population management plan designed to reduce the total human population to a level that that can be supported indefinitely at a more-than-satisfactory average material standard. This is what it means to “live sustainably within the means of nature.”

Fortunately, various studies suggest that planned de-growth toward a quasi steady state economy is technically possible, would benefit the poor and could be achieved while improving overall quality of life even in high-income countries. Considering the human suffering that would be avoided and number of non-human species that would be preserved, this is also a morally compelling strategy. The foregoing diagnosis is anathema to the prevailing growth ethic, the naive fallacy that well-being is a continuous linear function of income, and politically correct avoidance of the population question. Many will therefore object on grounds that the suggested policy prescription is politically unfeasible and can never be implemented. They may well be correct. The problem is that what is politically feasible is likely to be ecologically irrelevant or downright dangerous. Accelerated hydrocarbon development, better pipeline regulations and improved navigational aids for tanker traffic on B.C.’s coast, for example, don’t cut it as sustainable development in a world that should be abandoning fossil fuels.

The data show clearly that we are at a crucial stage of a slow but accelerating crisis. To be effective and timely, sustainability policy should already be consistent with the real-world evidence. Nature can no longer endure the consequences of “alternative facts.” Failure to implement a global sustainability plan that addresses excess consumption and over-population while ensuring greater social equity may well be fatal to global civilization. Indeed, adherence to any variant of the growth-bound status quo promises a future of uncontrollable climate change, plummeting biodiversity, civil disorder, geopolitical turmoil and resource wars. In these circumstances, should not elected politicians everywhere have an obligation to explain how their policies reflect the fact of global overshoot?

Denying reality is not a viable option; self-delusion can become all-destroying. If our leaders reject the foregoing framing, they should be required to show how the policies they are pursuing can deliver ecological stability, economic security, social equity and improved population health to future generations. Ordinary citizens should assert their right-to-know as if their lives depend upon it.















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