Global Parliament.

The situation is looking increasingly hopeless for the ragtag group of insurgents that have lost  more than half the territory they held in just the last week. Every attempt they’ve made to break through Syrian Army lines has been repelled leaving them to defend a few shrinking districts where they will either surrender or die.

On Sunday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov delivered an ultimatum to the remaining militants that clarified the position of the Syrian government and its allies. he said:

“Those groups which refuse to leave eastern Aleppo will be treated as terrorists.  By refusing to walk out from eastern Aleppo they will in fact go ahead with armed struggle. We will treat them accordingly, as terrorists and extremists, and support the Syrian army in its operation against such armed gangs.”

US Secretary of State John Kerry has made every effort to stop the fighting to protect US-backed jihadists that are trying to topple Syrian President Bashar al Assad. Unfortunately, a proposal that was accepted by both Kerry and Lavrov concerning the withdrawal of fighters in Aleppo, was rejected by higher-ups in the Obama Administration ending the prospects for a negotiated settlement. Lavrov expressed his frustration in comments to the media where he said:

“They have withdrawn their document and have a new one. Our initial impression is that this new document backtracks, and is an attempt to buy time for the militants, allow them to catch their breath and resupply. The same thing happened with our agreement of September 9. It’s difficult to understand who makes decisions there, but apparently there are plenty of those who want to undermine the authority and practical steps by John Kerry.”

According to Reuters, “the Syrian Foreign Ministry said it would now accept no truce in Aleppo, should any outside parties try to negotiate one.” Meanwhile,  “Russia and China vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution on Monday calling for a week-long ceasefire.” Simply put, this is the end of the line for the US-backed terrorists that have laid to waste much of the battered country and killed more than 400,000 people. And while Aleppo may not be the decisive turning point in the ongoing conflict, it does put all of the main population centers and industrial hubs back under regime control.

More important, the recapturing of Aleppo is a major setback for Washington and its jihadist-breeding allies. (US, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar) US plans for redrawing the map of the Middle East to meet its economic and geopolitical objectives has been defeated by a courageous and determined coalition (Syria, Iran, Russia and Hezbollah) that has methodically routed or exterminated the foreign-backed opposition and reestablished both state security and the sovereign authority of the elected government to control its own affairs.

On Tuesday morning, AMN News reported that the Syrian Army had captured 85 percent of East Aleppo. Dozens of insurgents have been killed in sporadic fighting while hundreds more have surrendered.  It appears that the battle of Aleppo is about to end and the Syrian Army is on the “verge of total victory.”

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.

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.

Lionel Anet is a member of Sydney U3A University of the Third Age, of 20 years standing and now a life member

Climate change is already affecting life on Earth, despite a global temperature increase of just 1°C, according to a new study published in the journal Science on Friday.

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 study, titled The Broad Footprint of Climate Change from Genes to Biomes to People, found.

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.”

Co-author and professor John Pandolfi of the University of Queensland said, “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,” he said.

Dr. James Watson, associate professor of planning and environmental management at UQ’s School of Geography, added, “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.”

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,” the Independent reported. The outlet wrote:

For example, six species of woodland salamander in the Appalachian Mountains have undergone an average eight per cent reduction in body size over the past 50 years.

Slightly smaller lizards might not sound like something to overly concern humans, but there is evidence this response is also affecting important sources of food.

“These multi-level biological impacts of climate change will affect humans. Increasing disease outbreaks, inconsistent crop yields, and reduced fisheries productivity all threaten our food security,” said co-author Dr. Tom Bridge.

Average global temperatures have risen 1°C since the industrial era. The study states that this has “already 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.”

The study called on 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 betoo little, too late.

“Time is running out for a globally synchronized response to climate change that integrates adequate protection of biodiversity and ecosystem services,” the study continued.

“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,” said Dr. Watson.

As a theoretical physicist based in Cambridge, I have lived my life in an extraordinarily privileged bubble. Cambridge is an unusual town, centered around one of the world’s great universities. Within that town, the scientific community which I became part of in my twenties is even more rarefied. And within that scientific community, the small group of international theoretical physicists with whom I have spent my working life might sometimes be tempted to regard themselves as the pinnacle. Add to this, the celebrity that has come with my books, and the isolation imposed by my illness, I feel as though my ivory tower is getting taller.

So the recent apparent rejection of the elite in both America and Britain is surely aimed at me, as much as anyone. Whatever we might think about the decision by the British electorate to reject membership of the European Union, and by the American public to embrace Donald Trump as their next President, there is no doubt in the minds of commentators that this was a cry of anger by people who felt that they had been abandoned by their leaders. It was, everyone seems to agree, the moment that the forgotten spoke, finding their voice to reject the advice and guidance of experts and the elite everywhere.

I am no exception to this rule. I warned before the Brexit vote that it would damage scientific research in Britain, that a vote to leave would be a step backward, and the electorate, or at least a sufficiently significant proportion of it, took no more notice of me than any of the other political leaders, trade unionists, artists, scientists, businessmen and celebrities who all gave the same unheeded advice to the rest of the country.

What matters now however, far more than the choices made by these two electorates, is how the elites react. Should we, in turn, reject these votes as outpourings of crude populism that fail to take account of the facts, and attempt to circumvent or circumscribe the choices that they represent? I would argue that this would be a terrible mistake.

The concerns underlying these votes about the economic consequences of globalisation and accelerating technological change are absolutely understandable. The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, the rise of AI is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.

This in turn will accelerate the already widening economic inequality around the world. The internet and the platforms which it makes possible allow very small groups of individuals to make enormous profits while employing very few people. This is inevitable, it is progress, but it is also socially destructive.

We need to put this alongside the financial crash, which brought home to people that a very few individuals working in the financial sector can accrue huge rewards and that the rest of us underwrite that success and pick up the bill when their greed leads us astray. So taken together we are living in a world of widening, not diminishing, financial inequality, in which many people can see not just their standard of living, but their ability to earn a living at all, disappearing. It is no wonder then that they are searching for a new deal, which Trump and Brexit might have appeared to represent.

It is also the case that another unintended consequence of the global spread of the internet and social media is that the stark nature of these inequalities are far more apparent than they have been in the past. For me, the ability to use technology to communicate has been a liberating and positive experience. Without it, I would not have been able to continue working these many years past. But it also means that the lives of the richest people in the most prosperous parts of the world are agonisingly visible to anyone, however poor and who has access to a phone.  And since there are now more people with a telephone than access to clean water in Sub-Saharan Africa, this will shortly mean nearly everyone on our increasingly crowded planet will not be able to escape the inequality.

The consequences of this are plain to see; the rural poor flock to cities, to shanty towns, driven by hope. And then often, finding that the Instagram nirvana is not available there, they seek it overseas, joining the ever greater numbers of economic migrants in search of a better life. These migrants in turn place new demands on the infrastructures and economies of the countries in which they arrive, undermining tolerance and further fuelling political populism.

For me, the really concerning aspect of this, is that now, more than at any time in our history, our species needs to work together. We face awesome environmental challenges. Climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans. Together, they are a reminder that we are at the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity. We now have the technology to destroy the planet on which we live, but have not yet developed the ability to escape it. Perhaps in a few hundred years, we will have established human colonies amidst the stars, but right now we only have one planet, and we need to work together to protect it.

To do that, we need to break down not build up barriers within and between nations. If we are to stand a chance of doing that, the world’s leaders need to acknowledge that they have failed and are failing the many. With resources increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, we are going to have to learn to share far more than at present. With not only jobs but entire industries disappearing, we must help people to re-train for a new world and support them financially while they do so. If communities and economies cannot cope with current levels of migration, we must do more to encourage global development, as that is the only way that the migratory millions will be persuaded to seek their future at home.

We can do this, I am an enormous optimist for my species, but it will require the elites, from London to Harvard, from Cambridge to Hollywood, to learn the lessons of the past month. To learn above all a measure of humility.

Stephen  Hawking is an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, author and Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge

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. It concludes that carbon emissions will never fall at a sufficient rate in a growth economy. Unfortunately, the EU operates a climate policy framework, the EU Emissions Trading System, that was designed by BP and it doesn’t work. Policies that might work were the political will there are described. However, the fossil fuel industry still has a stranglehold on policy.

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

Decoupling – relative and absolute

Central to the alternative approach is a focus upon what is called “de-coupling”, also sometimes described as “de-materialisation”. 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 and that “relative decoupling” can occur. What they do not believe is that absolute decoupling can be made to work – and certainly not on the scale necessary to avert the danger of runaway climate change.

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. The figures show clearly that for decades, carbon emissions and economic activity fluctuate together in lockstep. This is a key concept already discussed in the chapters on production and technology but, to refresh the point, here are two graphs compiled by Gail Tverberg, drawing on GNP calculations by Angus Maddison, energy calculations by Vaclav Smil, supplemented by information from BP, EIEA and USDA. (Tverberg, 2012)

The graphs show 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.

At this point, a reminder is necessary. 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. However, Japanese technologists claim to have been able to do it and might be able to turn this into a commercial venture. (Reuters, 2013)

The description of the situation at this point in the analysis is to use what is called the Kaya identity after a Japanese energy economist Yoichi Kaya, who proposed a way of breaking down the different components to explain the growth (or reduction) in total emissions. These components 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)

At this point, the distinction needs to be drawn out between relative decoupling and absolute decoupling. Relative decoupling means that for every unit of output less carbon emissions are generated. Another way of saying this is that the “carbon intensity of output falls”.

In his book Prosperity without Growth, Tim Jackson gives figures which show that the global carbon intensity declined by almost a quarter from just over 1 kilogram of CO2 per one US dollar output in 1980 to 770grams of carbon dioxide per US dollar in 2006. (Jackson, 2009, pp. 48-50) The fall in CO2 intensity per unit of economic output did not mean, however, that the absolute volume of carbon emissions fell. Because growth of production per capita and population grew even faster, the total amount of carbon emissions went up – even though, due to “relative decoupling”, carbon dioxide emissions rose at a slower rate than GDP. To sum up, this was relative decoupling but not absolute decoupling. (Jackson, 2009, pp. 50-53).

As a rule of thumb, absolute decoupling will only start to occur when the rate of relative decoupling is greater than the rates of increase of population and income combined. Thus, 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? As Jackson computes the figures, carbon intensity has only been improving at 0.7% per annum. Thus, emissions have been increasing at 2% per annum.

Since Jackson’s book was published, more up to date figures published by the IPCC’s Working Group 3 for the 5th Assessment Report shows that the situation has deteriorated. This is not only because of growth in population and per capita growth, but also because the emission intensity of energy has increased. ( IPCC. WG3. Final Draft AR5 Presentation 2014 )

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).

The scale of the challenge – the necessary rates of emissions reduction

These figures should be compared with what a team of climate scientists have calculated is the necessary rate of reduction.

“Keeping global climate close to the Holocene range, we will conclude, requires a long-term atmospheric CO2 level of about 350 ppm or less, with other climate forcings similar to today’s levels. 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.” (Hansen, Kharecha, Sato, Masson-Delmotte, Ackerman, et al. 2013)

Another climate scientist, Kevin Anderson, argues that to stand an outside chance of not rising more than 2 degrees C, global emissions will have to stop rising at the latest by 2020 and will then have to fall by 10% per annum thereafter. (Kevin Anderson, “Pick a card – any card… How in funding targets to meet politically palatable goals, climate scientists undermine issues of equity and fairness”, Presentation to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, March 2013 and available at http://kevinanderson.info )

The graph below shows Anderson’s presentation of the options – the continuation of business as usual trends would mean a 4 to 6 degree C increase.

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. (Anderson K. 2013)

Such a fall seems inconceivable in a growth scenario so that Kevin Anderson and his colleague Alice Bows had already in 2008 taken the view that:

“… 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.”(Anderson & Bows, 2010)

The climate crisis is still on…

In his March 2013 presentation to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Anderson has moved on with the recognition that the necessary reductions barely affect a very large proportion of the world’s population. The austerity has to be carried by the elite. 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.

So how can this be done – and as part of a larger societal response to the limits to economic growth?

• Try to calculate (with a very safe margin for error) the small amount of additional carbon that can be emitted to stay well back from the runaway tipping point
• Only permit that very limited amount of carbon to be released – and let the market set a price for that amount of carbon
• Do this in a way that affects everyone but hits the richest the most because they are responsible for most of the emissions

Of course, saying this begs the political question of how such a policy can be brought about, but we will park that question at this point and come back to it later. 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

Effective cap and ineffective caps – how the Eu operates a policy designed by BP that doesn’t work

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.
Taking the question of the cap first. At the time of writing, 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. The problem is the power of the fossil fuel lobby that has made a nonsense of its practical implementation. If a carbon tax was used instead of a cap, the very same problem would still be there. The fossil fuel industry would do everything in their power to undermine an effective tax too if it hit their profits and power, which an effective tax would. This is the fatal weakness in the ideas of James Hansen and others, including economist Jeffrey Sachs, who call for a carbon tax, as a solution.

It should not surprise that the cap and trade policy in Europe has failed. As we have seen repeatedly in this book, 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. Recognising that some policy was inevitable, companies like BP in Britain moved to take over the policy making process and thus, turned it to their own advantage. BP first experimented with an internal emissions trading scheme which was started in 1999. In 2002, the BP model was scaled up with the support of the UK government’s Department of the Environment and 34 other voluntarily participating companies. This UK scheme, in turn, became a model for the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme. This was despite the fact that, from very early on, it was evident that the BP scheme was ineffectual. The supposed “cap” that it used did not really restrain emissions. Some of the later problems of the EU’s
ETS were already visible in the earlier BP/UK government experiment. However, such was the lobbying power of BP and its corporate allies, that their format was adopted anyway.

“Two years into the UK scheme, it was examined by the House of Commons Select Committee on Public Accounts. Labour MP Gerry Steinberg described the scheme as a “mockery” and an “outrageous waste of [public] money”. BP was one of a number of UK companies which had lobbied so successfully for a generous emissions allowance that it massively over-complied in the first year of the scheme, leaving the company free to profit from the sale of its surplus allowances. The fact that emissions were already limited by the government’s Climate Change agreements led Edward Leigh, the Conservative chair of the Public Accounts Committee, to observe that the scheme seemed to be “paying these companies 111£ million for keeping emissions down to levels they had already achieved before they joined”. Leigh also observed that “half the point of this was to try and encourage Europe to do a similar scheme”.

“The committee’s enquiry revealed that the scheme’s success was not in reducing greenhouse gas emissions but in turning the atmosphere into “a commodity market like any other” and that far from being a side effect, this had been the intention of the scheme.” (Corporate European Observatory and PLATFORM, 2009, pp. 4-5)

In the circumstances, it is not surprising that “caps” have got a bad name. If a solution for the problem of corporate lobby power in the political process could be found, a cap would be the simplest and most direct approach.

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) (Carbon Trust, 2013)
(Matthews, 2012)

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.

You could do it like this. 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. It might also be necessary to do more to help the high carbon poor in countries like the USA but that is a detail that I will not go into here.

This will achieve what Kevin Anderson wants to see, that is, a scheme that cuts 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.

In the book Sharing for Survival, Laurence Matthews illustrates this graphically with a very simple example for an imaginary country consisting of only 10 people with CO2 emissions as shown (in units of tonnes of CO2). The total of all emissions is 15 tonnes and so the average is 1.5 tonnes. (Matthews, Cap and Share in pictures, 2012, p. 52)

Laurence Matthews comments:

“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 like this 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. They are described in greater length in the final chapter and in this chapter are “parked” for now.

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”. Something that this diagram, again devised by Laurence Matthews, is intended to illustrate:

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.

This is illustrated in this diagram:

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. (Though been taken to court over this by an environmental NGO, ClientEarth).

The Earth’s atmosphere as a common Pool resource that ought to be managed as a global commons

What is at stake as regards who gets the carbon permit revenue is the question of who owns the right to use the earth’s atmosphere. The implication of allowing companies to capture the market value of the permits is that the right to use the earth’s atmosphere belongs to them. The implication of auctioning and revenues going to governments is that the right belongs to states. The idea that the earth’s atmosphere might “belong” to all of us – and that all of us have a responsibility for it – does not appear to have ever occurred to economists, corporate lobbyists, officials or politicians. Nevertheless, there have been more astute commentators who have grasped what is going on. It’s another enclosure process. For example, at the time the ETS was being designed, two authors associated with a German environmental think tank, the Wuppertal Institute commented:

Parcelling out shares of the global atmospheric commons to be exchanged among trading partners appears to be strikingly similar to the enclosure of the communal forests in 18th century Europe. Just as the enclosures put in place both property rights and forest protection, denying access to the common people, the assignment of emissions permits ensures protection by granting property rights, eliminating unregulated use by any player involved. (Ott & Sachs, 2000)

In the USA too, economist Peter Barnes described the atmosphere as a common pool resource and wrote a book titledWho Owns the Sky?. In his book, he argues that use of the atmosphere should be managed by a trust with a fiduciary duty to protect it by limiting its use and that the carbon revenue arising from the renting of these rights should be paid to everyone (in a US scheme) equally. (This is called “cap and dividend”). (Barnes, Who Owns the Sky? , 2003)

Policy is not made on a level playing field and the ETS, with all its weaknesses, is what we have ended up with. It has been complemented within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol with a scheme called the “Clean Development Mechanism”.

The clean Development mechanism

The “Clean Development Mechanism” is particularly interesting for the way that it throws light on policy mechanisms which are supposed to work by “incentivising” change. As already explained, neoclassical economists assume that one can manipulate means-ends relationships in order to make environmentally benign behaviour pay in money terms. What is supposed to happen is that good environmental/climate ends are achieved by means of incentive schemes which make them financially worthwhile. What the experience of the CDM shows, however, and very clearly, is that what are incentivised are not changes in environmental behaviour but ways of “gaming policies” to cynically make as much money from them as possible.

The clean development mechanism (CDM) was supposed to be about supporting “clean” projects in “developing” countries so that they can claim carbon credits for “certified emission reductions” (CERs) which can be sold into the permit schemes operating in “developed countries”. In practice, this has mainly meant into the European Union’s Emission Trading System.

The idea was to encourage “developing” country projects in renewable energy, energy efficiency and fuel switching which would not have otherwise taken place. What was supposed to happen was that “emissions reductions” in “developing” countries would entitle projects to credits. The number of credits were to be calculated by comparing actual emissions by the project concerned to a baseline of what would have otherwise have happened if the project had made no efforts to reduce its emissions.

But how are projects supposed to establish “what would otherwise have happened”? This way of setting up the policy has been a recipe for fraud and for gaming. Many participants have created an inflated base line by increasing actual or stated emissions in the short term before the CDM project was established. Or they set up “projects” in order to close them down. The scams have been particularly profitable in projects that appear to “abate” the production of hydroflurocarbons which are very powerful greenhouse gases as well as gases which destroy the earth’s ozone layer. Given the magnitude of the profits generated from CDM credits, it was profitable to build whole new facilities involving hydroflurocarbons just for the value of destroying the by-product. (SourceWatchWiki, 2009) The recognition that this is a problem finally led to a revision of the CDM crediting rules for the issuance of CERs, which were made more stringent in 2011.

“Yet it is still not stringent enough and still threatens to undermine the goals of the Montreal Protocol and the protection of the Ozone layer. The revised rules also do not apply until projects have to renew their crediting period. This means from 2012 until the end of the first crediting periods (seven years after a project started), well over 24… (Industrial Gases (HFC-23 & N2O), 2012) 2012) As of 1 June 2013, the CDM had issued 505,125 CERs, or 38% of all CERs issued, to 23 HFC- 23 destruction projects (Wikipedia, Clean Development Mechanism, 2013)

Another scam has involved dams. Barbara Haye calculated that more than a third of all hydro-projects recognized as a CDM-project “were already completed at the time of registration and almost all were already under construction” (Haya, 2007). Several years later, despite intensive lobbying by NGOs the need for reform was recognised but governments were again dragging their feet, with many controversial and environmentally damaging hydroprojects still in the pipeline. (Yan, 2012)

The CDM shows clearly what is wrong with current climate policy. It has been infested by crooks. This statement is not meant as rhetorical overstatement for effect – but literally.

Brian Davey trained as an economist but, aside for a brief spell working in eastern Germany showing how to do community development work, has spent most of his life working in the community and voluntary sector in Nottingham particularly in the health promotion, mental health and environmental fields. He helped develop Ecoworks, a community garden and environmental project for people with mental health problems. He is a member of the Feasta Energy and Climate Working Group and the Co-ordinator of Cap and Share UK. His life-long interest is why and how people and systems break down. He lives in Nottingham.

On the day that you read this article, 200 species of life on Earth (plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects, reptiles) will cease to exist. Tomorrow, another 200 species will vanish forever.

The human onslaught to destroy life on Earth is unprecedented in Earth’s history. Planet Earth is now experiencing its sixth mass extinction event and Homo sapiens sapiens is the cause. Moreover, this mass extinction event is accelerating and is so comprehensive in its impact that the piecemeal measures being taken by the United Nations, international agencies and governments constitute a tokenism that is breathtaking in the extreme.

And it is no longer the case that mainly ‘invisible’ species are vanishing: those insects, amphibians and small animals about which you had never even heard, assuming they have been identified and given a name by humans.

You and I are on the brink of driving to extinction some of the most iconic species alive today. For a photo gallery of threatened species, some of which are ‘critically endangered’, see ‘World’s wildlife being pushed to the edge by humans – in pictures’

If you want to read more about some aspects of the extinction threat, you can do so in these recent reports: ‘World Wildlife Crime Report: Trafficking in protected species’ and ‘2016 Living Planet Report’ which includes these words: ‘The main statistic from the report … shows a 58% decline between 1970 and 2012. This means that, on average, animal populations are roughly half the size they were 42 years ago.’

And if you want to read just one aspect of what is happening in the world’s oceans, this recent UN report will give you something to ponder: ‘New UN report finds marine debris harming more than 800 species, costing countries millions’.

Of course, some of what is happening is related to the ongoing climate catastrophe and there isn’t any good news on that front. See ‘What’s Happening in the Arctic is Astonishing’.

But not everything that is going badly wrong is well known either. Did you know that we are destroying the Earth’s soil? See ‘Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues’.

And did you realise that even nitrogen is now a huge problem too? See ‘Scientists shine a spotlight on the overlooked menace of nitrogen’.

Of course, military violence has devastating consequences on the Earth’s ecosystems too, destroying land, water and atmosphere (not to mention killing human beings) in the fight over resources. You will get no joy from the article ‘Iraq’s oil inferno – government inaction in the face of eco-terrorism’ or the website of the Toxic Remnants of War Project. But every single aspect of military spending is ultimately used to destroy. It has no other function.

While 2.5 billion human beings do not have enough to eat. See ‘One in three people suffers malnutrition at global cost of $3.5 trillion a year’.

As you read all this, you might say ‘Not me’! But you are wrong. You don’t have to be an impoverished African driven to killing elephants for their tusks so that you can survive yourself. You don’t have to be a farmer who is destroying the soil with synthetic poisons. You don’t have to be a soldier who kills and destroys or a person who works for a corporation that, one way to another, forces peasants off their land.

You just have to be an ‘ordinary’ person who pays your military taxes and consumes more than your share of world resources while participating without challenge in the global system of violence and exploitation managed by the global elite.

‘Why is this?’ you might ask.

This is because the primary driver of the human-induced mass extinction is not such things as some people hunting a particular lifeform to extinction, horrendous though this is. In fact, just two things drive most species over the edge: our systematic destruction of land habitat – forests, grasslands, wetlands, peatlands, mangroves… – in our endless effort to capture more of the Earth’s wild places for human use (whether it be residential, commercial, mining, farming or military) and our destruction of waterways and the ocean habitat by dumping into them radioactive contaminants, carbon dioxide, a multitude of poisons and chemical pollutants, and even plastic.

And do you know what drives this destruction of land and water habitats? Your demand for consumer products, all of which are produced by using land and water habitats, and the resources derived from them, often far from where you live. The most basic products, such as food and clothing, are produced on agricultural land, sometimes created by destroying rainforests, or taken from the ocean (where overfishing has savagely depleted global fish stocks). But in using these resources, we have ignored the needs of the land, oceans and the waterways for adequate regenerative inputs and recovery time.

We also participate, almost invariably without question or challenge, in the inequitable distribution of resources that compels some impoverished people to take desperate measures to survive through such means as farming marginal land or killing endangered wildlife.

So don’t sit back waiting for some miracle by the United Nations, international agencies or governments to solve this problem. It cannot happen for the simple reason that these organizations are all taking action within the existing paradigm that prioritizes corporate profit and military violence over human equity and ecological sustainability.

Despite any rhetoric to the contrary, they are encouraging overconsumption by industrialized populations and facilitating the inequitable distribution of income and wealth precisely because this benefits those who control these organizations, agencies and governments: the insane corporate elites who are devoid of the capacity to see any value beyond the ‘bottom line’. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane’.

If you want action on the greatest challenge human beings have ever faced – to avert our own extinction by learning to live in harmony with our biosphere and equity with our fellow humans – then I encourage you to take personal responsibility.

If you do, you need to act. At the simplest level, you can make some difficult but valuable personal choices. Like becoming a vegan or vegetarian, buying/growing organic/biodynamic food, and resolutely refusing to use any form of poison or to drive a car or take an airline flight.

But if you want to take an integrated approach, the most powerful way you can do this is to systematically reduce your own personal consumption while increasing your self-reliance. Anita McKone and I have mapped out a fifteen-year strategy for doing this in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. < You might also consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’which obviously includes nonviolence towards our fellow species.

One of the hidden tragedies of modern human existence is that we have been terrorized into believing that we are not personally responsible. See ‘The Delusion “I Am Not Responsible”‘. For a fuller explanation, see ‘Why Violence?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’. It isn’t true but few people feel powerful enough to make a difference.

And every time you decide to do nothing and to leave it to someone else, you demonstrate why no-one else should do anything either.

Extinction beckons. What will you do?

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

If you have any doubts that the phenomenon of Donald Trump was a long time a’coming, you have only to read a piece that Gore Vidal wrote for Esquire magazine in July 1961, when the conservative movement was just beginning and even Barry Goldwater was hardly a glint in Republicans’ eyes.

Vidal’s target was Paul Ryan’s idol, and the idol of so many modern conservatives: the trash novelist and crackpot philosopher Ayn Rand, whom Vidal quotes thusly:

“It was the morality of altruism that undercut America and is now destroying her.

“Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. Today, the conflict has reached its ultimate climax; the choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequence of freedom… or the primordial morality of altruism with its consequences of slavery, etc.

“To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men.

“The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral…”

In most quarters, in 1961, this stuff would have been regarded as nearly sociopathic nonsense, but, as Vidal noted, Rand was already gaining adherents: “She has a great attraction for simple people who are puzzled by organized society, who object to paying taxes, who hate the ‘welfare state,’ who feel guilt at the thought of the suffering of others but who would like to harden their hearts.”

Because he was writing at a time when there was still such a thing as right-wing guilt, Vidal couldn’t possibly have foreseen what would happen: Ayn Rand became the guiding spirit of the governing party of the United States. Her values are the values of that party. Vidal couldn’t have foreseen it because he still saw Christianity as a kind of ineluctable force in America, particularly among small-town conservatives, and because Rand’s “philosophy” couldn’t have been more anti-Christian. But, then, Vidal couldn’t have thought so many Christians would abandon Jesus’ teachings so quickly for Rand’s. Hearts hardened.

The transformation and corruption of America’s moral values didn’t happen in the shadows. It happened in plain sight. The Republican Party has been the party of selfishness and the party of punishment for decades now, trashing the basic precepts not only of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but also of humanity generally.

Vidal again: “That it is right to help someone less fortunate is an idea that has figured in most systems of conduct since the beginning of the race.” It is, one could argue, what makes us human. The opposing idea, Rand’s idea, that the less fortunate should be left to suffer, is what endangers our humanity now. I have previously written in this space how conservatism dismantled the concept of truth so it could fill the void with untruth. I called it an epistemological revolution. But conservatism also has dismantled traditional morality so it could fill that void. I call that a moral revolution.

That the draining of kindness from huge swaths of the country occurred with so little resistance is, in large measure, the fault of the media. The media have long prided themselves on being value neutral. It was Dragnet journalism: “Just the facts, ma’am.” Or: “We report, you decide” — a slogan coopted by the right-wing Fox News, ironically to underscore that they weren’t biased, at least not liberally biased.

Of course, not even the most scrupulous journalists were ever really value neutral. Underneath their ostensible objectivity there was a value default — an unstated moral consensus, which is the one Vidal cited and the one to which most Americans subscribed throughout most of our history. But it took a lot to activate those values in the press. The mainstream white media moved ever so slowly to report on the evils of segregation. Yet when they finally did, they didn’t behave as if African-Americans marching for their rights and Sheriff Bull Connor siccing dogs on them were moral equals. Value neutrality had its limits. The reporting of the movement was one of journalism’s proudest moments, and you can read about it in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Race Beat by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanonff. It is a story worth telling and remembering in these frightening days — a story that shows how the press can serve us.

However long it took for them to grow a conscience, those journalists who covered the civil rights movement didn’t think they were violating their professional code of objectivity by exposing the heinous conduct of the Southern authorities, because they knew what they were upholding wasn’t subject to debate. The morality was stark. (I have a suspicion from the way the Black Lives Matter movement is covered that it wouldn’t be so stark today.)

Taking sides against the KKK and redneck sheriffs, however, was one thing, as was taking sides against lunatic fringe right-wingers like the John Birch Society who hated government. But what happens when those extremists who advocate a bizarre morality that elevates selfishness and deplores altruism commandeer one of our two major political parties? What do you do then?

We know the answer. You do nothing.

The media sat by idly while American values were transmogrified. Even the so-called “good” conservatives — David Brooks, David Frum, Michael Gerson, Jennifer Rubin, et al. — refused to speak the language of kindness, preferring the language of free markets. As far right conservatives took over the Republican Party — the very same conservatives who just a few years earlier were considered crazies — the media dared not question Republican opposition to anything that assisted the disempowered and dispossessed, which is how a value-neutral media wound up serving the cause of conservatism and Republicanism and how the moral consensus was allowed to be turned upside down.

Read those Ayn Rand quotes to your children as moral instruction, and you will see how far we have fallen. This is Republican morality. This is Trump morality. And the media, loath to defend traditional American values in an increasingly hostile conservative environment, let it happen. That is what value neutrality will get you.

Of course I realize there are those who believe a value-neutral press is actually a bulwark against excess, in part because they have seen the alternative. Right-wing and even left-wing media have their own values, and they have no qualms about disregarding fact or truth in pursuing their agendas. Seen this way, values don’t inform journalism; they distort it. Moreover, skeptics will say that everyone has his/her own values and that a journalism that pretends otherwise threatens to create informational and even moral chaos. As my late father, an accountant, used to say, “Figures don’t lie, but liars do figure.” Do we really want to trust the media to figure?

It is true that we don’t all share the exact same values, though in the past I think our fundamental values were pretty close to one another’s. But even if values differ, all values are not created equal. Some are better than others. Most of us do know what is right. Most of us do know that we have moral obligations to others. Most of us understand kindness. It is just that we have been encouraged to forget it. That was Ayn Rand’s mission. Trump is proof of how well she and her acolytes, like Paul Ryan, succeeded.

This election turned on many things, but one that both the public and the press have been hesitant to acknowledge is the election as a moral referendum: the old morality against the new Randian one Republicans had advanced for years and Trump fully legitimized. There is no kindness in him. We prefer the idea that Trump voters were economic casualties, that they were frustrated with the system, that they felt marginalized and misunderstood. It lets us avoid seeming condescending.

Perhaps. But I think it behooves us to recognize that many of those voters bristled under the old morality and turned to Trump because he removed the guilt Vidal had cited when we tried to harden our hearts. Shame helped keep the old morality in force. Trump made shamelessness acceptable. We are reaping that whirlwind every day.

I don’t know whether a great society can survive without kindness. Unfortunately, we shall have a chance to see. In the meantime, those of us who believe in traditional morality must mount what I would call a “kindness offensive.” We must redouble our kindness in our daily lives, fight for it, promote it and eventually build a political movement around it.

“There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness and truth,” Tolstoy said. Going forward, that could be the basis for a politics. And we must press our media to understand that they can only restore the values they once took for granted by doing what the best of them did during the civil rights era: observe events through a moral lens. Appealing to our worst selves is usually a winning strategy, as it was for Trump. The media must remind us of what it means to be our best selves. This should be their new mission: a media in opposition. It should be unrelenting, regardless of the right-wing blowback.

America is in moral crisis. Many Americans seem far more interested in making sure that those they consider undeserving — basically, the poor — get nothing than in making sure that they themselves get something. A friend recently told me a joke told him by a Hungarian acquaintance, who intended it as an example of Hungarian schadenfreude, but I have modified it because I think it is a harrowing parable for contemporary America and its strange moral turnabout. This is Trump’s America:

There were three farmers: a German, a Hungarian and an American. Each had a cow. One day, misfortune befell them, and their cows died. Each remonstrated against God, saying God had failed him, and each lost faith. God realized he had to do something to make amends. So he came to Earth and approached the German.

“What can I do to restore your faith?” He asked. And the German answered, “God, I lost my cow. Please give me another cow.” And God did so.

“What can I do to restore your faith?” He asked the Hungarian. And the Hungarian answered, “God, I lost my cow. Please give me that cow and another to compensate.” And God did so.

And finally God came to the American, and He asked, “What can I do to restore your faith?” And the American answered, “God, I lost my cow. Shoot my neighbor’s cow.”

Republicans brought us here with the assistance of a passive media. Whether we can bring ourselves back is the new existential question. Until then, we are shooting our neighbor’s cow.

Neal Gabler is the author of five books and the recipient of two LA TImes Book Prizes, Time magazine's non-fiction book of the year, and USA Today's biography of the year. He is a senior fellow at the Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society.

During the U.S. presidential debates, there was not one single question devoted to the topic of climate change. And it appears that the results from the election have only amplified the silence that Americans seem to have on the subject of the environment.

In a stunning turn of events, US voters elected conservative businessman Donald Trump as the next President of the United States. Trump will now become the only world leader to actively deny that climate change is real, which means that the environment is about to suffer an enormous blow.

And that’s not speculation — that is exactly what Donald Trump told Americans just days before the general election.

As Think Progress reported, Trump told supporters on October 26th that he would end the “wasteful” spending on climate action:

“I will also cancel all wasteful climate change spending from Obama-Clinton, including all global warming payments to the United Nations. These steps will save $100 billion over 8 years, and this money will be used to help rebuild the vital infrastructure, including water systems, in America’s inner cities.”

Technically, eliminating this $100 billion will never happen because the United States does not actually spend that much on climate actions or “payments to the UN,” but when combined with spending on renewable energy projects, the 8-year total would actually be roughly $100 billion.

This implies that Donald Trump is willing and ready to deprive these essential renewable projects of funding in order to double down on fossil fuels. His statement also shows that he will likely strip every penny of funding away from vital actions to protect our environment and help to save American citizens from the increasingly dangerous effects of climate change.

This recent proposal by Trump echoes the energy platform that his campaign put out in late May. These are some of the items that the campaign laid out for the future, as I wrote at the time:

• Increased coal production, as Trump promised to put out-of-work coal miners back to work, blaming the decline on the industry on President Obama rather than a global decrease in demand.
• The Keystone Pipeline will become a reality.
• Oil drilling and fracking will be given the go-ahead to increase activities both onshore and off.
• Remove any and all safety regulations that are in place to protect sensitive environmental areas and human health, and possibly dismantling the entire Environmental Protection Agency.
• Repeal bans on selling oil to overseas countries.
• Increase offshore energy exploitation.

In short, his proposals read like the talking points of every other fossil fuel-funded politician that has been in this position long before Donald Trump. More drilling, more fracking, fewer safety regulations, and less regard for the environment.

Also during his campaign, Trump promised to create half a million jobs in the dirty energy sector by opening up offshore oil drilling and tapping onshore reserves of shale, oil, natural gas, and coal.

But Donald Trump will not be operating by himself, and that’s why things are actually scarier than they appear. The majority of Republicans who will be serving in the House and Senate when the new Congress convenes in January 2017 deny climate change, and that means that the Republican Party’s 2016 platform will set the guidelines for what these Republicans attempt to accomplish now that they will control both the Legislative and Executive branches of government.

Here are a few items from the Republican Party platform that are likely to become a reality in the new administration, from Steven Rosenfeld at Alternet:

Start repealing environmental laws: “We call for a comprehensive review of federal regulations, especially those dealing with the environment, that make it harder  and  more costly for Americans to rent, buy, or sell homes.”

Open America’s shores to more oil and gas drilling: “We support the opening of public lands and the outer continental shelf to exploration and responsible production, even if these resources will not be immediately developed.”

Build the Keystone XL Pipeline: “The Keystone Pipeline has become a symbol of everything wrong with the current Administration’s ideological approach.  After years of delay, the President killed it to satisfy environmental extremists. We intend to finish that pipeline and others as part of our commitment to North American energy security.”

Expand fracking and burying nuclear waste: “A federal judge has struck down the BLM’s rule on hydraulic fracturing and we support upholding this decision.  We respect the states’ proven ability to regulate the use of hydraulic fracturing, methane emissions, and horizontal drilling, and we will end the Administration’s disregard of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act with respect to the long-term storage of nuclear waste.”

No tax on carbon products: “We oppose any carbon tax… We urge the private sector to focus its resources on the development of carbon capture and sequestration technology still in its early stages here and overseas. “

Ignore global climate change agreements: “The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a political mechanism, not an unbiased scientific institution.  Its unreliability is reflected in its intolerance toward scientists and others who dissent from its orthodoxy.  We will evaluate its recommendations accordingly.  We reject the agendas of both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, which represent only the personal commitments   of their signatories; no such agreement can be binding upon the United States until it is submitted to and ratified by the Senate.”

The oil and gas industries gave a staggering $88 million to politicians during the 2016 election cycle, with 88% of that money going to Republicans.

That investment has paid off tremendously for fossil fuel interests, and they are poised to get every item on their anti-environmental, anti-regulatory wishlists checked off in short order.

Meanwhile, the environment is going to take some massive hits at a time when the evidence of climate change is right before our eyes.

Farron Cousins is the executive editor of The Trial Lawyer magazine, and his writings have appeared in publications such as California's Information Press and Pensacola's Independent Weekly.  He has also worked for the Ring of Fire radio program with hosts Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Mike Papantonio since August 2004, and is currently the producer of the program, in charge of guest booking, research, and scripting the week's show.  Farron also runs Mike Papantonio's publishing company - Seville Publishing. Farron received his bachelor's degree in Political Science from the University of West Florida in 2005 and became a member of American MENSA in 2009.  Follow him on Twitter @farronbalanced.

After years of failing to produce a climate agreement backed by all of the world’s major greenhouse gas emitters, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) produced a historic success in Paris in December 2015. The Paris Agreement, backed by a consensus of all of the UNFCCC’s members and entering into force on November 4, 2016, has been widely hailed as a turning point in combating global climatic disruption. It enjoys broader and deeper political support for the agreement than for any of its predecessors, especially from the world’s two largest emitters, which have generally been reluctant participants in past international climate negotiations: the United States and China.

The Paris Agreement could garner so much support in large part because of its flexibility and openended nature: Every country was asked to define its own Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC), thereby setting its own commitment to emissions reduction relative to business-as-usual. Rather than aspiring to make these commitments binding through an international legal enforcement mechanism (of the sort that has often inspired opposition by those countries most jealous of their sovereignty), the delegates to Paris contented themselves with setting up a regime of transparent and honest reporting such that commitments can be reputationally enforced.

This means that as we look ahead to the question of whether the Paris Agreement can live up to its supporters’ hopes for it, the decisive factor will be whether countries are ready, willing and able to deliver on their promises. The ambitiousness of these promises is often questioned: although, as part of the proceedings in Paris, the UNFCCC committed itself to try to keep total warming under 2°C, current modeling suggests that countries’ INDCs would not jointly do nearly enough to achieve that goal. To achieve that more ambitious goal, the world’s countries will have to create a virtuous cycle of emissions reductions achieved followed by pledges to do even more. NOVEMBER 2016 Effective Public Management Are the US and China ready, willing, and able to achieve their Paris Agreement goals? 2 In the U.S., the Republican party’s consistent unwillingness to act on climate presents a significant obstacle to sustaining necessary political will over time.

How should we think about whether this will happen—or even whether countries are likely to deliver on their initial INDCs? A great deal of speculation makes the outcome of particular elections pivotal. If democratic nations’ elected leaders are committed to the Paris Agreement, the virtuous cycle can take off; if not, it might never get off the ground. But this focus on who will make decisions is less illuminating than trying to think about why they would make them. That means asking when and why the benefits of meeting INDCs will outweigh the costs of doing so.

My paper provides a framework for thinking through domestic political benefits and costs for the U.S. and China. That does not get us all the way to a prediction about how these leading emitters will ultimately orient themselves toward their initial Paris commitments, because it is too soon to tell what kind of international diplomatic dynamics will form around the Paris Agreement—in other words, just how strong will the reputational benefits of meeting commitments, and the reputational costs of reneging on them, be? But thinking through what domestic factors will affect each country’s likelihood of delivering on its commitments nevertheless takes us a long way toward a realistic understanding of where things currently stand.

I argue that in both the U.S. and China, national leaders’ enthusiastic support for the Paris Agreement is significantly complicated by widely dispersed domestic opposition to ambitious climate action. In the U.S., the Republican party’s consistent unwillingness to act on climate presents a significant obstacle to sustaining necessary political will over time. Even if Democrats keep control of the White House and push forward with administrative action on behalf of climate mitigation, Republican resistance at the state level will need to be confronted head on, with real political costs. In China, top-level support for aggressive climate action is unlikely to be shared by provincial officials, who may feel themselves politically unable to sacrifice any amount of economic growth on behalf of climate goals, and who will also face daunting technical challenges. In both countries, the divergence between the willingness to pay and the incidence of costs create thorny political problems that will hang over climate policy for many years to come. Leaders should think about how to constructively address these problems directly rather than hoping they will naturally dissipate over time.

Read the full paper here.

Philip A. Wallach is a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. Follow him on Twitter @PhillipWallach.

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”). Analysis by the Carbon Tracker Initiative has played a key role in highlighting that 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.

Our new paper, Driving Low-Carbon Growth Through Business and Investor Action, argues that 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.

Read/download the full paper here.

Eliot Whittington is the Program Director of Policy at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership at the University of Cambridge.

The Gwich'in people of Alaska and Northern Canada have fought for three decades to protect the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling and other threats. The outdoor apparel company Patagonia and non-profit conservation group Alaska Wilderness League have recently released The Refuge, a 15-minute film telling the story of two Gwich'in women who are fighting for their ancestral home and the survival of the wild animals that bring them life. In conjunction with the film, Patagonia has partnered with Care2, the world’s largest social media site for good, to launch a Care2 petition asking Congress to pledge to protect the Refuge's Coastal Plain as wilderness.

"Patagonia has supported the Gwich'in Steering Committee and Alaska Wilderness League through our Environmental Grants Program since the early 2000s," notes Rose Marcario, Patagonia’s Chief Executive Officer. "We stand in solidarity with the Gwich’in community today to ask Congress to designate the Coastal Plain as wilderness and protect the Gwich’in way of life forever."

To the Gwich'in, the Refuge’s pristine Coastal Plain where caribou calve their young is "the Sacred Place Where Life Begins." The coastal plain, although a true national treasure, lacks protection as wilderness and has become a target for drilling by the oil industry and its allies. It's now under more threat than ever—with pro-oil forces stating they will work quickly to push for drilling in the Refuge. Drilling in this Arctic nursery would likely drive the Porcupine Caribou from their calving grounds, endangering the survival of the herd and the Gwich'in way of life. The Gwich’in have depended on the Porcupine Caribou Herd for millennia. But their connection to the caribou goes far deeper than traditional subsistence hunting: the Gwich’in believe that they are guardians of the herd, and that the fates of their people and the caribou are forever entwined.

For decades the Coastal Plain, known as the Refuge's biological heart, has been in political limbo, at best, and nearly at the tip of a drill bit, at worst. But the Obama administration has given us all hope that the Arctic Refuge will be taken off the table forever. In January 2015, President Obama took an important step to recommend wilderness for the Refuge and its Coastal Plain. The president and his administration have done more than any other in the last two decades to protect the Arctic Refuge. Now, it’s time for Congress to act.

"For us, this is a matter of physical, spiritual and cultural survival," said Gwich’in spokesperson Bernadette Demientieff. "It is our basic human right to continue to feed our families on our ancestral lands and practice our subsistence way of life. We ask that Congress take the next step to protect the Coastal Plain by designating it as wilderness."

Sign the petition here.

Watch the video:

Four decades of American narcissism and greed and exceptionalism have allowed the super-rich to dictate the future path of our nation. We're paying the price now, with environmental disasters, nonexistent savings for half of our families, Americans dying because of expensive health care, and a growing fear of blowback from desperate victims of our foreign wars.

Environment Be Damned 

Almost all reputable sources agree that human-caused climate change is killing people, with up to 400,000 annual deaths "due to hunger and communicable diseases that affect above all children in developing countries," and up to 7 million deaths -- over a half-million of them children under the age of five -- caused by air pollution. 

The richest people in the world create most of the pollution, yet are the least likely to feel guilty about the effects of their behavior, and the least likely to suffer from the impending environmental damage. This could lead to terror-filled years for the generations to follow us. Even the CHANCE of such misery for their grandchildren should motivate the super-rich to address the root causes of global warming. Instead, they have plans to retreat to impregnable "safe rooms" with food and water, oxygen, medical supplies, and all the amenities for a year or more of underground living. 

Disdain for the Taxes that Support Society 

Charles Koch said, "I believe my business and non-profit investments are much more beneficial to societal well-being than sending more money to Washington." 

Beneficial to society? Where is the incentive for Charles Koch, or any other billionaire beneficiary of decades of tax subsidies, to support the needs of average people? 

The breakdown in taxes began in the 1970s, when University of Chicago economist Arthur Laffer convinced Dick Cheney and other Republican officials that lowering taxes on the rich would generate more revenue. Conservatives have contorted this economic theory into the belief that all tax reductions are beneficial. It was proved wrong from the start. Several economic studies have concluded that the revenue-maximizing top income tax rate is anywhere from 50% to 75%. Yet our next president wants to cut taxes on the rich. 

There's little doubt that the perverse level of inequality caused by the Koch-like attitude led to the rebellion by once-middle-class white voters that swept a narcissistic misogynist into office. It could easily get worse, with our infrastructure crumbling and AI technology taking over mid-level jobs. Our grandchildren will face the economic terror trickling down from the greedy top. 

Profiting from Our Health Problems 

Instead of focusing on the likely risks of their product to human health, the sugar industry spent five decades blaming saturated fats rather than sugar for obesity, even paying handpicked Harvard scientists to support their view, while steering Americans to the low-fat, high-sugar diet that now seems much to blame for our health problems. The weight of the average American man has gone from 166 to 196 in the past fifty years. From 140 to 166 for women. The World Health Organization reports on the "unequivocal evidence" that childhood obesity is related in part to the intake of sugar. 

Meanwhile, other deadly substances have been pushed on us. In the 1990s the pharmaceutical industry began a massive campaign to convince Americans that opioid medications were effective for chronic pain. Today more people use prescription opioids than use tobacco. Nearly half of men without jobs are hooked on pain medication, much of it deemed unnecessary by the Annals of Surgery. About 75% of heroin addicts used prescription opioids before turning to heroin. Deaths related to heroin have nearly quadrupled in the past decade, and a dramatic surge in overdoses has occurred even among children. 

These children, our own children and grandchildren, are facing the terrors of drug addiction and obesity-related diseases because of the self-serving corporate demand for profit over human need. 

Blowback from Our Wars 

Yemeni resident Baraa Shiban writes: "On December 12 a bride and groom traveled to their wedding in al-Baitha province, Yemen...A U.S. drone fired at the wedding procession, destroying five vehicles and killing most of their occupants." 

The weapons we sell to Saudi Arabia are destroying villages in Yemen, killing entire families and leveling their homes, and bombingschools and hospitals and even funeral processions. Food lines are blocked at the Yemeni borders, hospitals have run out of medicine, and hundreds of thousands of children are at risk of starving to death. At least 10,000 civilians have been killed or wounded, and more than 400,000 families have lost their homes. 

Shiban concludes: "Wronged and angry men are just the sort extreme groups like al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula find easiest to recruit." 

Every American should contemplate the levels of shock and sorrow and anger that WE WOULD FEEL if another nation bombed a wedding procession in the United States. Instead, with little reflection, we tolerate the ongoing slaughter of Middle East civilians, and we disregard the prospect of terror-filled years for our grandchildren. Only the cold hearts of war-profiteering capitalists seem immune to the pain and the danger. 

Paul Buchheit is an advocate for social and economic justice. His essays, videos, and poems can be found at YouDeserveFacts.org.

People don’t usually think about the destruction of rainforests while washing their hands, applying lipstick, or doing laundry. But thanks to high demand for products containing palm oil, which is derived from the fruit of the oil palm tree, consumers are inadvertently contributing to deforestation.

Companies in countries such as Indonesia burn or chop down forests to make way for palm oil plantations. The result is severe habitat loss for orangutans and other endangered creatures. Land loss to meet the high demand for palm oil also threatens indigenous tribes because of reduced hunting area. How ubiquitous is palm oil? Here are seven everyday items that contain it.

1. Hand soap.

The bubbles and lather produced when you wash your hands with a bar of soap make you feel like you’re getting clean, but the foaming effect is actually a result of palm oil. Palm oil produces sodium lauryl sulfate, which creates the mass of small bubbles often produced by soap.

2. Toothpaste.

Similar to the lather of soap, the foam produced when you brush your teeth with toothpaste is from the palm oil derivative sodium lauryl sulfate. As you brush, the friction causes the chemical’s molecules to rub up against and cleanse your teeth.

3. Cosmetics.

Palm oil acts as a natural emulsifier that prevents the separation of oil and water in moisturizers and cosmetic products such as foundation, lipstick, and mascara. 

4. Laundry detergent.

Manufacturers use palm oil, commonly labeled as sodium sulfate, to create a uniform density in the detergent. Want to know if your detergent contains palm oil? Look for a label marked “palm oil free” to find out.

5. Processed food.

Almost half of all packaged food products—including cookies, instant noodles, and pizza—contain palm oil. Used to add a creamy taste and a consistent texture, palm oil can be found on ingredient lists as vitamin A palmitate and palm kernel oil. In the United States, palm oil is required to be included on food labels regardless of whether it is blended with other oils. Countries such as Australia and China allow “vegetable oil” as a label substitute.

6. Body wash and shampoo.

Palm oil contains tocotrienol, a member of the vitamin E family. Rich in antioxidants, it removes dirt and oil from skin, making it a common ingredient in body wash and shampoo. A majority of shampoos also contain palm oil as a moisturizer. Conscientious shoppers should avoid products containing ingredients such as sodium lauryl sulfate and palmolein.

7. Margarine.

The debate over whether butter or margarine is worse for your health has raged for decades, but spreading processed imitation butter may not be the smartest decision if you’re trying to avoid palm oil. Palm oil is solid at room temperature and naturally free of trans fats, making it a common ingredient in margarine. Its cheap cost has led to its increased use in developing countries such as India and China.

This article was originally published by TakePart. Reprinted with permission.

Sophia Lepore is an editorial intern at TakePart and a junior at Long Beach State University. She is the public relations chairwoman for her sorority and has written for The Daily49er.

The following essay was published in the book Patterns of Commoning, edited by David Bollier and Silke Helfrich (Levellers Press, 2015)

A feeling of joy and achievement runs through the group of ten people gathered in Robert’s kitchen. After three years of planning, they have come to celebrate: Ingrid and Fabien will soon be able to settle down and develop their farming business. The farm is theirs!

In this small, pastoral village of the French Pre-Alps, establishing young farmers is an act of will. Everywhere, small mountain farms are closing down; work is hard and the business not deemed profitable enough. When aging farmers retire, they do not find a successor. The best land is sometimes sold off to one of the few more or less industrialized farms that remain. Overall, villages are progressively abandoned or become havens of secondary residences.

In Saint Dizier, a small village of thirty-five inhabitants, local people have decided differently. Municipality members, local residents and farmers have decided to preserve agriculture as a component of local economic activity and lifestyle. They also view farmers as young, permanent residents for the village. So they keep an eye on land put for sale, and have contacted farmers and landowners to learn their plans for the future. The municipal council has sought public subsidies to acquire farmland and rent it to young farmers, but with no success.

In 2006, villagers started to work with Terre de Liens, a recently established civil society organization focused on securing land access for agroecological farmers. Everywhere in France, high land prices and intense competition for farmland and buildings have become a major obstacle for young farmers. Obstacles are even higher for those doing organic agriculture, direct sales or other “alternative” forms of agriculture, which usually are not deemed profitable enough by banks or worthy of public policy support.

So when a farm goes for sale in Saint Dizier, everyone is ready. In just a few months, the small group approaches the owners and all relevant institutions with a stake in the transaction. Above all, they start raising money among local residents, family and friends. And it works. Through word-of-mouth, public events and fairs, they soon manage to raise €50,000 ($54,000) locally. Then, Terre de Liens, through its national network of supporters, raises another €100,000 ($107,000). People choose to invest in the project because they want to promote organic agriculture, to preserve mountain farming, to protect the environment, or to give young farmers a chance. Soon, Ingrid and Fabian start to graze a herd of 160 ewe and to produce cheese; they also develop a microbrewery, work on an agrotourism project and lease part of the land to a fruit grower.

The group continues to meet regularly. They discuss the terms of the lease and the protection of the environmental assets of the farm; they plan for the repair work needed on farm buildings; they support Ìngrid and Fabian in developing direct sales; and they facilitate exchange of equipment and services between local farmers. When another farm goes for sale, they repeat the operation and, after two more years of mobilization, they are met with success. In just over five years, this small village of thirty-five inhabitants has gained three new farm businesses. Four new families with children have settled permanently.

Throughout France, Terre de Liens fosters similar dynamics for preserving agricultural land and supporting a new generation of farmers. Participants are driven by the conviction that agriculture is everybody’s business. They recognize that the way land is used and distributed is key to improving the quality of local food production, not to mention ecological forms of farming and livelier rural areas.

The fundamental premise of Terre de Liens is that the value of farmland lies in its contribution to food production, lasting ecosystems and human life. So when people invest in the group’s farmland, they choose not to make a profit. Technically, they are shareholders of a private company, but practically, they know that the land will not be sold back as long as Terre de Liens continues to exist.

Terre de Liens in numbers

• 12,000 citizens mobilized
• 120 farms acquired
• 2400 hectares in organic, peasant farming
• 200 future farmers supported every year
• 1 ethical company, 1 foundation, 19 regional and 1 national association
• €35 million ($38 million) in ethical investment and 5 million euros in donations
• Share = €103 ($111)
• Tens of partnerships with local authorities

In any case, they will receive no financial dividends. At best, they may have an inflation-based re-evaluation of the value of their shares at some point, and may qualify for income tax rebate, on a limited scale. The benefits that investors seek are nonfinancial ones: direct connection to a farm, good local food, fertile soils and biodiversity, preservation of a local activity and a sense of belonging. They also enjoy partaking in new forms of experimentation and social bonding around food and agriculture.

Terre de Liens is still a recent movement facing many challenges: improving the monitoring and management of farms and buildings, reaching beyond its first circle of supporters, consolidating its financial resources, etc. To date, it has saved 120 farms, recruited 12,000 supporters and forged tens of partnerships with local authorities. These achievements, while modest in the larger context of French agriculture, are a strong sign that, if given a chance, large numbers of citizens want to promote more intelligent land planning, agro­ecological forms of farming and more robust rural areas.

Terre de Liens is advancing this agenda by liberating land from the commodity system. For the moment, it is done via “capitalist” instruments such as private property and finance. But the organization and its supporters believe that developing a “solidarity-based economy” can nourish the idea of treating farmland as a commons, with eventual support by law.

Today, there is an urge to grow and connect the Terre de Liens initiative with similar alternatives elsewhere in Europe and in the world. The decline of smallholder farming is a fact of contemporary life. So are the disastrous consequences of conventional farming for the environment and public health, and the desertification of rural areas. There is resistance, however, especially among a new, emerging generation of farmers who are eager to integrate farming with its social surrounding, and to produce food for local and regional markets. In this sense, Terre de Liens is part of a much broader transition aimed at restoring living, community-connected ways of farming and rural life.

Véronique Rioufol is Terre de Liens’ European Relations Coordinator. She has a background in international relations and political studies and has worked in human rights organizations. She joined Terre de Liens in 2010 because she views it as a successful experiment for social change. She has contributed to setting up the European Network on Access to Land, of which Terre de Liens is a member.

The U.S. Navy has been conducting war-game exercises in US waters for decades, and in the process, it has left behind tons of bombs, heavy metals, missiles, sonar buoys, high explosives and depleted uranium munitions that are extremely harmful to both humans and marine life.

Truthout recently reported that the Navy has admitted to releasing chemicals into the oceans that are known to injure infants' brains, as well as having left large amounts of depleted uranium in US coastal waters. Now, the Navy's own documents reveal that it also plans to use 20,000 tons of heavy metals, plastics and other highly toxic compounds over the next two decades in the oceans where it conducts its war games.

According to the Navy's 2015 Northwest Training and Testing environmental impact statement (EIS), in the thousands of warfare "testing and training events" it conducts each year, 200,000 "stressors" from the use of missiles, torpedoes, guns and other explosive firings in U.S. waters happen biennially. These "stressors," along with drones, vessels, aircraft, shells, batteries, electronic components and anti-corrosion compounds that coat external metal surfaces are the vehicles by which the Navy will be introducing heavy metals and highly toxic compounds into the environment.

Just some of the dangerous compounds the Navy will be injecting into the environment during their exercises are: ammonium perchlorate, picric acid, nitrobenzene, lithium from sonobuoy batteries, lead, manganese, phosphorus, sulfur, copper, nickel, tungsten, chromium, molybdenum, vanadium, trinitrotoluene (TNT), RDX [Royal Demolition eXplosive] and HMX  [High Melting eXplosive], among many others.

"None of these belong in the ocean's food web, upon which we all depend," Karen Sullivan, a retired endangered species biologist who cofounded West Coast Action Alliance, which acts as a watchdog of Naval activities in the Pacific Northwest, told Truthout. "Nor will the Navy be willing to clean it up, or even contribute to medical tests for people whose health may suffer."

To see more stories like this, visit "Planet or Profit?"

A worrying example of that fact: In August of this year, a lawmaker in Pennsylvania urged 70,000 residents across three counties whose drinking water was contaminated by the Navy to sue them, just to get funding to pay for blood tests to see how sick they had become.

Other examples of U.S. citizens being treated as collateral damage abound. Just this October, the BBC reported on an Air Force Base leaking toxic chemicals into the sewer system, and the port of San Diego filed a federal lawsuit against the Navy for injecting an underground plume of toxic chemicals that threatens to contaminate the entire bay.

But stories like these are only the tip of an impending iceberg.

Experts Truthout spoke with warn that if the Navy gets its way, the next 20 years will see them causing far more environmental degradation and destruction up and down US coastal areas by way of widespread chemical and toxic contamination.

Insidious Contamination

The Navy is, like all the other branches of the US military, ridiculously well-funded. Recent history shows that US military spending dwarfs the rest of the planet's military spending.

"For the last half-century, U.S. military spending has purchased the annihilation of millions throughout Southeast Asia, the Arab world, and Central Asia," Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, an environmental toxicologist and winner of the 2015 Rachel Carson prize for her work on depleted uranium (DU) and heavy metal contamination, told Truthout. "Accompanying that human annihilation has been environmental devastation and birth defects, from Vietnam to Iraq."

Her strong words are backed by clear, cold facts that come from even mainstream media sources in the U.S., like Newsweek magazine, which in a 2014 article titled "The US Department of Defense Is One of the World's Biggest Polluters" stated:

The U.S. Department of Defence [sic] is one of the world's worst polluters. Its footprint dwarfs that of any corporation: 4,127 installations spread across 19 million acres of American soil. Maureen Sullivan, who heads the Pentagon's environmental programs, says her office contends with 39,000 contaminated sites.

Even as far back as 1990, the U.S. Department of Defense had already admitted to creating more than 14,000 suspected contamination sites across the planet.

The U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act defines "contaminant" as: " ... any physical, chemical, biological or radiological substance or matter in water. Drinking water may reasonably be expected to contain at least small amounts of some contaminants. Some contaminants may be harmful if consumed at certain levels in drinking water. The presence of contaminants does not necessarily indicate that the water poses a health risk."

Thus, contamination being a matter of scale, the government creates a "not-to-exceed" level based on what it knows about each contaminant, in order to minimize human exposure to each item on its massive list of contaminants.

However, the contamination guidelines don't account for the kind of pollution perpetrated by the U.S. Navy.

"What do you do when it's massive quantities of contaminants in the ocean, and not your drinking water?" asked Sullivan, who worked at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for more than 15 years and is an expert in the bureaucratic procedures the Navy is supposed to be following.

She pointed out how "contamination," or water pollution, is defined as "environmental degradation that occurs when pollutants are directly or indirectly discharged into water bodies without adequate treatment to remove harmful compounds."

On that point she said, "None of the dangerous compounds being dumped into our waters by the Navy have ever been treated or removed, which leads to hearing this false choice: The cost of cleanup or removal would be exorbitant. Therefore, we should continue dumping as always, in perpetuity."

Navy spokesperson Sheila Murray told Truthout that depleted uranium on the seafloor was no more harmful than any other metal, a statement that flies in the face of numerous scientific studies that have proven otherwise. Sullivan believes that, by making that statement, the Navy "has disavowed responsibility for all of this toxic ocean pollution."

Savabieasfahani said that while the Navy may be content to add depleted uranium to the environment that already has high levels of man-made pollutants, we should not share its complacency.

"A cluster of worsening environmental phenomena go hand-in-hand with that accumulation of pollutants," she told Truthout. "Global warming, mass extinctions, ecosystem collapse, food-web modification, physical and biological changes in organisms, endocrine disruption, and a pandemic of neurodevelopmental disorders in children accompany those rising background pollution levels. Peer-reviewed research is already showing steep declines in the biodiversity of ecosystems."

How Much Contamination?

According to Sullivan, who studied the EIS, the Navy plans to introduce 20,000 tons of contaminants into the environment, which is the equivalent of dumping a load of toxins the size of a Yorktown-class aircraft carrier scattered throughout the seas and sounds of coastal Washington, Oregon and Northern California.

As staggering as that amount is, it does not even include contaminants that have been released over the last six decades of Naval exercises in oceans around the globe (the plans mentioned in these documents are limited to Pacific Northwest waters).

The aforementioned list of toxic compounds the Navy has, is and is planning to release into the environment via its exercises are documented in EPA Superfund site lists as known hazards and all of them are highly toxic at both acute and chronic levels.

For example, perchlorates are highly soluble in water and according to the EPA, "generally have high mobility in soils." They have been found in breast milk, target the thyroid gland and affect children and fetuses more than they affect adults.

Lithium causes behavioral changes that, in large animals and humans, can be fatal. Ingestion of merely one to two grams of picric acid would cause severe poisoning. TNT remains active underwater, can bioaccumulate in fish, including salmon, and can cause developmental and physiological problems, according to scientific studies. HMX and RDX explosives are both well documented to be extremely toxic and dangerous.

Sullivan says all of this raises questions about why there are no regulations preventing the creation of Superfund sites (polluted locations that require intensive clean-up) in the ocean. "We depend on salmon, yet the Navy is creating massive ecosystem-wide pollution right under our noses," Sullivan said. "How can they not see that it will be generations from now who reap the bitter harvest?"

Savabieasfahani agreed and took it a step further, issuing a dire warning.

"Toxic metals, such as lead and uranium, are biomagnified," she explained."'Biomagnification' means that toxins get more concentrated in an organism which ingests plants or animals containing that toxin. For example, contaminated fish can pass on large doses of toxin to their human consumers."

The 20,000 tons of contaminants the Navy plans to release into the ocean in the coming years do not include the additional 4.7 to 14 tons of "metals with potential toxicity" that will be "released" annually in the inland waters of both Puget Sound and Hood Canal, according to Naval documents. Given that those numbers are for one year only, in 20 years, between 94 and 280 tons of heavy metals will be released inland (in addition to what will be released in the open ocean).

It is also worth noting that two actual Superfund sites along Washington's inland shorelines are both on Naval property.

"In addition to the toxic contaminants deliberately dumped, what happens to their land-based toxic brews when torrential rains like we had in October overwhelm storm water runoff systems?" Sullivan asked, then provided the answer. "They end up in Puget Sound and Hood Canal."

Devils in the Details

Naval documentation also reveals that over the next 20 years, the weights of the various contaminants include 6,739 tons of unrecoverable sonobuoys (including their animal-entangling parachutes and batteries which leach lithium for 55 years), and 396 tons of small-caliber rounds, the latter comprising only 2 percent of the total weight of "expended materials."

The Navy's flares, which weigh between 12 and 30 pounds apiece, are used 824 times annually, adding up to 16,480 flares weighing between 200,000 and 500,000 pounds over 20 years. The Navy admits that the flares leave toxic residues whenever they are used, saying, "Solid flare and pyrotechnic residues may contain, depending on their purpose and color, an average weight of up to 0.85 pounds of aluminum, magnesium, zinc, strontium, barium, cadmium, nickel, and perchlorates."

Meaning, at a minimum, seven tons of toxic pyrotechnic residues are to be introduced into Pacific Northwest waters in the next 20 years.

Looking at explosives for training alone, the Navy plans to use 29,024 pounds annually, amounting to 290 tons over the next two decades.

Another issue is unexploded ordnance, or, as it's commonly known, "duds."

At current Navy rates for duds only, we would see an additional nine tons of dangerous residual explosive material fired into Pacific Northwest waters every 20 years, sitting on the ocean floor, leaching dangerous toxics.

Moreover, not all contaminants immediately sink and bind to or get encapsulated by sediments. Some materials can be transported by ocean currents. Because the Navy's EIS uses ocean dispersal and chemical degradation as its rationale for claiming no adverse impacts on species or habitats -- anywhere, ever -- it should be noted that the expended material from local warfare exercises may not tell the whole story. In other words, perhaps all of the contaminants in question should be added together to get an idea of the full impact.

For example, every other year, according to the Navy, they are authorized to dump up to 352,000 pounds of expended military materials, by way of them being shot, dropped and exploded, into the Gulf of Alaska. This includes up to 10,500 pounds of hazardous materials, such as cyanide, chromium, lead, tungsten, nickel, cadmium, barium chromate, chlorides, phosphorus, titanium compounds, lead oxide, potassium perchlorate, lead chromate, ammonium perchlorate, fulminate of mercury and lead azide. The Navy is dumping much of it into Essential Fish Habitat in the Gulf of Alaska at peak times of fishery and marine mammal presence, impacting and harming a multitude of species. They are also carrying out a similar dumping process in Pacific Northwest waters.

Naval Obfuscation

In the Navy's 2015 Northwest Training and Testing EIS, it quotes several studies, saying, "contamination of the marine environment by munitions constituents is not well documented." This is often the Navy's claim, used to show its actions are not deleterious to the environment, when "not well documented" actually means that it has not looked for or measured its impacts on the environment. Regardless, the need for more data does not mean it is scientifically sound to assume there has been no damage.

In the section of the 2015 EIS on Cumulative Impacts, the Navy says, "Long-term exposure to pollutants poses potential risks to the health of marine mammals, although for the most part, the impacts are just starting to be understood." The impacts include " ... organ anomalies and impaired reproduction and immune function." There are multiple other examples of such doublespeak within the Navy's own documents.

Another example is in the EIS section on Sediments and Water Quality, where the Navy claims that "slow but significant removal" of two types of explosive material (RDX and HMX) happens through a chemical reaction whose speed is dictated by the pH [acidity] of seawater. Adequate proof is not provided by the Navy, yet risks to human health from these toxins has been extremely well documented.

It could be argued that the Navy's gross negligence of its environmental impacts amounts to a federal agency passing off wishful thinking as science. The toxic legacy of this negligence will be passed down to generations far beyond our own.

This article was originally published on Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books, 2009, and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from Iraq for more than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last ten years, and has won the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism, among other awards.

Clean air, water and soil to grow food are necessities of life. So are diverse plant and animal populations. But as the human population continues to increase, animal numbers are falling. There’s a strong correlation. A comprehensive report from the World Wildlife Federation and the Zoological Society of London found that wild animal populations dropped by 58 percent between 1970 and 2012, and will likely reach a 67 percent drop by 2020 if nothing is done to prevent the decline.

The report points to human activity as the main cause. Habitat degradation and destruction, hunting and overfishing, the illegal wildlife trade, invasive species, disease, pollution and climate change are causing an extinction crisis unlike any since dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago. Animals worldwide are affected, from African elephants to European dolphins to Asian vultures to amphibians everywhere.

Humans will feel the impacts, the study notes: “Living systems keep the air breathable and water drinkable, and provide nutritious food. To continue to perform these vital services they need to retain their complexity, diversity and resilience.”

Although the study, "Living Planet Report 2016: Risk and Resilience in a New Era," paints a bleak picture, it offers hope, many solutions and examples of successful transitions. In the introduction, WWF International director general Marco Lambertini writes, “We are entering a new era in Earth’s history: the Anthropocene. An era in which humans rather than natural forces are the primary drivers of planetary change. But we can also redefine our relationship with our planet, from a wasteful, unsustainable and predatory one, to one where people and nature can coexist in harmony.”

For the study, researchers measured “biodiversity abundance levels based on 14,152 monitored populations of 3,706 vertebrate species.”

The report points out that, beyond the crisis’ immediate and direct causes, our mindsets and systems are at the root of the problem. The outdated notions of gross domestic product and unlimited growth on a finite planet, short-term political and business thinking, externalization of social and ecological costs, rampant consumerism, and a failure to understand the connections between actions and consequences and between living systems have put us on an unsustainable course, pushing planetary processes beyond safe boundaries.

To address this, we must find ways to live sustainably, especially regarding energy and food. Rapid renewable energy development and shifting from fossil fuels to clean sources are crucial. So are consuming less animal protein — especially in high-income countries — and reducing waste along the food chain. “Furthermore, optimizing agricultural productivity within ecosystem boundaries, replacing chemical and fossil inputs by mimicking natural processes, and stimulating beneficial interactions between different agricultural systems, are key to strengthening the resilience of landscapes, natural systems and biodiversity — and the livelihoods of those who depend on them.”

To a large extent, conserving energy and consuming less of everything will determine whether we succeed or not. And while overconsumption, especially among the world’s most well-off, is a key factor in the breakdown of natural systems, overpopulation can’t be ignored. The best ways to address the population problem are to improve women’s rights and provide greater access to birth control and education.

Slowing or stopping species extinctions and other human-caused crises are monumental challenges. But we’ve risen to meet major challenges before. Humanity has progressed in many ways, changing outdated practices and economic systems when they no longer suited our purposes or when they were found to be destructive — from the abolition of slavery in ostensibly democratic countries like the U.S. to expanded rights for women and minorities in many nations. International agencies and agreements have made the world smaller, with greater opportunities for co-operation. Better education, especially in areas like critical thinking and Indigenous knowledge, will help us progress even further.

The challenges may be huge, but a better world is possible. The alternative is to watch as animals and plants go extinct, water becomes scarce, weather hits more extremes, conflicts over land and resources increase, and life becomes more difficult for people everywhere. As we’ve seen numerous times, once we start to tackle the challenges, we’ll see many benefits emerge, from greater equity to better health and more balanced ways of living within planetary limits. Then we can all enjoy the many gifts Earth provides.

This article was originally published by the David Suzuki Foundation.

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author, and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. 

Climate change has been steadily shifting the planetary environment in myriad ways, from receding glaciers and melting sea ice to longer and more intense heat waves, droughts and storms. The changing environment has pushed many plant and animal species out of their normal habitats. And one dramatic effect is going to force humans to relocate: the rise in sea level.

The rising seas are caused by the additional water coming from melting land ice, as well as the expansion of seawater, which happens when it warms. Since reliable record keeping began in 1880, the global sea level has risen by approximately 8 inches. Scientists project that by 2100, the ocean may rise an additional 1 to 4 feet. And it won't stop there, says NASA, "because the oceans take a very long time to respond to warmer conditions at the Earth’s surface."

Making matters worse, storm surges from an increase in extreme weather—again, a product of manmade climate change—will likely increase flooding in regions already impacted by sea level rise. In many areas, these surges could push sea levels to at least 4 feet above high tide by 2030. By 2050, threatened areas hit by serious storms could experience surges up to 5 feet higher than high tide.

And that’s not all. Almost unbelievably, the Greenland and Arctic ice sheets are so massive that they actually exert a gravitational pull on the ocean, causing even higher sea levels for nearby coastlines to deal with.

According to Climate Central, an independent environment nonprofit, "Carbon emissions causing 4°C of warming—what business-as-usual points toward today—could lock in enough sea level rise to submerge land currently home to 470 to 760 million people, with unstoppable rise unfolding over centuries."

That’s because even if humanity were to stop emitting carbon altogether right now, the carbon we’ve already put into the atmosphere will continue to heat up the planet for hundreds of years to come.

This NASA chart tracks the change in sea level since 1993 as observed by satellites. The rate of change has been 3.4mm per year. (image: NASA)

For some island nations, the rising sea has already claimed several landmass victims. The Solomon Islands has experienced annual sea levels rise as much as 10mm over the past two decades, according to an Australian study published in May in the online journal Environmental Research Letters. Earlier this year, the ocean swallowed up five of the archipelago's islands—a breathtaking event that is believed to be the first scientific confirmation of the climate change impact on Pacific coastlines. The scientists say their study "confirms the numerous anecdotal accounts from across the Pacific of the dramatic impacts of climate change on coastlines and people."

The islands, which were uninhabited, ranged in area from 2.5 to 12.4 acres. However, large tracts of land across six different inhabitated islands had large swaths of land washed into the sea. On two of those, entire villages were destroyed and people forced to relocate. "The sea has started to come inland, it forced us to move up to the hilltop and rebuild our village there away from the sea," said Sirilo Sutaroti, the 94-year-old leader of the Paurata tribe on Nararo Island.

But tiny Pacific islands aren't the only places that will be severely impacted by rising seas. Here in the United States, coastal areas have already felt the impact and many cities are making preparations for the future. From New York to Sacramento, Jacksonville to Virginia Beach and even remote Alaskan fishing villages, millions of Americans in more than 400 municipalities live within just four feet of the current high tide line. According to a 2015 study conducted by American and German researchers, it's already too late for many of those cities—including Miami and New Orleans—which are on track to be overcome by the rising sea.

A 2012 study by the U.S. Geological Survey found that portions of the U.S. Atlantic coast are experiencing rates of sea-level rise that are three to four times faster than global rates over the past quarter century. "Since about 1990, sea-level rise in the 600-mile stretch of coastal zone from Cape Hatteras, N.C. to north of Boston, Mass.—coined a 'hotspot' by scientists—has increased 2 - 3.7 millimeters per year; the global increase over the same period was 0.6 - 1.0 millimeter per year," USGS said.

"New York has experienced at least a foot of sea-level rise since 1900, mostly due to expansion of warming ocean water," according to the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, noting that by 2100, current projections have the city's sea level as much as 50 inches higher than it is today.

This NASA chart, derived from coastal tide gauge data, shows how much sea level changed from about 1870 to 2000. (image: NASA)

In 2007, New York's lawmakers created a statewide Sea Level Rise Task Force to review the projections and prepare for the future. In its 2011 final report, the task force concluded that, "while the extent of the impacts to coastal communities from a rising sea are not fully known, even the most conservative projections make clear that there will be dramatic changes in this century." They warned that every single New York tidal coastal community would be impacted by sea-level rise. That includes, of course, New York City, America's most populated urban center.

The task force made several recommendations, including providing financial support for adaptation-planning, post-storm recovery and redevelopment.

"Climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing our city, our country and our planet," said New York Mayor Bill de Blasio in April, as he announced the Raised Shorelines project to help low-lying neighborhoods mitigate impacts of sea-level rise, part of the city's $20 billion climate resiliency program. "For a coastal city like ours, rising sea levels mean rising risk for our neighborhoods, infrastructure and economy," de Blasio said.

But mitigation can only go so far. Under the worst-case scenario, New York could be unlivable by the year 2085.

While scientists are sure that the seas will continue to rise, what’s unclear is how fast they will rise, and which regions will be the most impacted. "This is the burning question," said Andrea Dutton, an assistant professor of geology at University of Florida. "How quickly will the sea levels rise, and by how much?"

This animated timeline maps, year by year, how the total number of locked-in cities could climb to more than 1,500, if pollution continues unchecked through the end of the century. (infographic: Climate Central)

While Dutton's university is safely inland (for now), Florida is viewed by researchers as ground-zero for disastrous sea-level rise. The Miami chapter of the Southeastern Florida Compact—a local climate-change coalition whose members include city officials, scientists and concerned citizens—is only planning in five-year cycles. "Nobody knows what things are going to look like in 50 to 100 years," said Nicole Hefty, chief of the Office of Sustainability at Miami-Dade County. "We can speak for smaller years and adapt in that way."

"Florida is in the crosshairs of climate change," writes Ben Strauss, a vice president at Climate Central, which spent two years analyzing the specific threat to the Sunshine State. "Rising seas, a population crowded along the coast, porous bedrock, and the relatively common occurrence of tropical storms put more real estate and people at risk from storm surges aggravated by sea-level rise in Florida, than any other state by far."

Florida - 1 meter sea level rise. (image: Maitri/Flickr CC)

Strauss points out that in Florida, around 2.4 million people live within just 4 feet of the local high tide line. That’s almost half the national risk right there. In Miami-Dade and Broward counties alone, there are "more people below 4 feet than any state, except Florida itself and Louisiana," he adds. After the Sunshine State, the next three states that will most likely be overcome by rising ocean water are California, Louisiana and New York.

Andrew Freeman, the science editor at Mashable, writes that in New York City, "the contrast between the high emissions scenario and low emissions scenario would mean the difference between submerging all of newly trendy Red Hook and Cobble Hill neighborhoods in Brooklyn, New York, as well as the new Brooklyn Bridge Park and a swath of prized real estate in southwest Manhattan, versus keeping those areas dry."

Taking action on climate change now—particularly to avoid the "business-as-usual" 4°C global surface temperature increase—could mean the difference for countless communities across the world. That action is in the works: on November 4, the Paris climate agreement went into effect. The deal seeks to limit global warming to "well below" 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures. But the accord isn’t bound by law; there are no penalties imposed on nations that fail to meet their carbon reduction targets.

The fact that the agreement is non-binding has been a source of ridicule among many environmentalists. But that doesn't render it meaningless, argues Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. "International agreements operate under good faith," he said. "Whether a country is an upstanding member of the international community is what's at stake."

In the coming decades, humanity's energy choices are critical—particularly in China and the U.S., which together account for nearly 40 percent of worldwide emissions. The choices we make today will determine whether or not future generations will be living in a low-emissions scenario or the current business-as-usual trajectory.

The infographic above was produced by Eco2greetings.com.

The following excerpt is from Ashley Dawson's new book, Extinction: A Radical History (OR Books, 2016)

The philosophy of ‘in the long run we are all dead’ has guided economic development in the First and Third Worlds, in both socialist and capitalist countries. These processes of development have brought, in some areas and for some people, a genuine and substantial increase in human welfare. But they have also been marked by a profound insensitivity to the environment, a callous disregard for the needs of generations to come… It is what we know as the ‘global green movement’ that has most insistently moved people and governments beyond this crippling shortsightedness, by struggling for a world where the tiger shall still roam the forests of the Sunderbans and the lion stalk majestically across the African plain, where the harvest of nature may be more justly distributed across the members of the human species, where our children might more freely drink the water of our rivers and breathe the air of our cities. --Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History

If mainstream environmentalism has been coopted by such neoliberal policies, what would a radical anti-capitalist conservation movement look like? It would begin from the understanding that the extinction crisis is at once 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. Forums for enclosure such as the UNFCCC’s Business and Biodiversity Initiative must be recognized for what they are and shut down. 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.

Even well-meaning efforts to address extinction such as rewilding need to be challenged if they are not founded on considerations of globally redistributive climate justice. All too often rewilding schemes focus exclusively on wealthy areas of the planet. For instance, George Monbiot’s “Manifesto for Rewilding the World” speaks exclusively of European rewilding schemes, and concludes by asking why Europe should not have a Serengeti or two. This begs the question of what responsibility Europe has for Tanzania’s Serengeti Park itself, as well as other wilderness areas in the global South. The record in this regard is deplorable. In 2013, for instance, Ecuador abandoned its Yasuni-ITT Initiative, which would the South? Moreover, if rewilding is seen as a way of saving charismatic African megafauna like the elephant from destruction by importing them to the badlands of Western Europe or North America, it will all too easily become a latterday form of imperial ecology, creating glorified zoos stocked with purloined African and Asian wildlife. Finally, rewilding makes strong arguments about the pivotal role of keystone species, but, in so doing, tends to reproduce the traditional bias in Western conservation efforts towards the large, the beautiful, and the charismatic. It is not a solution for the vast majority of flora and fauna threatened with extinction today.

An anti-capitalist conservation movement must not only be aware of histories of colonial expropriation of flora and fauna, but should focus on ways of fighting such forms of exploitation today. Wildlife in parks such as the Serengeti was revived following centuries of European colonial big-game hunting of native animals. Today, well-armed poachers again threaten megafauna in the world’s remaining biodiversity hotspots. While the poachers tend to send their culls of elephant tusks and rhino horns mainly to foreign markets, in most cases their weapons come from decades of proxy battles during the Cold War. Moreover, African states are often unable to challenge these poachers as a result of IMF and World Bank-administered structural adjustment policies that have left countries in the global South on the brink of collapse. Efforts to deal with the extinction crisis cannot focus on rewilding the global North alone, nor should they focus exclusively on interdiction of the global traffic in wildlife. An anti-capitalist movement against extinction must also address the fundamental economic and political inequalities that drive the slaughter of megafauna. The extinction crisis should be framed in the context of a new wave of extractivism that is denuding many poor nations, shunting their minerals, flora, and fauna to consumer markets in industrialized nations. This new extractivism should be seen for what it is: a fresh wave of imperialism that is decimating poorer nations by removing the biological foundation of their collective future.

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 charted in this book. 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? As REDD demonstrates, states in the global South cannot always be counted on to disburse funds received from the North in a just manner; indeed, at present they collude all too often with resource exploiting corporations by displacing genuine land stewards such as indigenous and forest-dwelling peoples. 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, according to E.O. Wilson, 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. As Andrew Sayer has argued, the 1% 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 the kind proposed by James Tobin. Such a Robin Hood 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. In addition, rewilding and de-extinction, despite their significant flaws, may have a place in an anti-capitalist conservation movement, but only if they are reframed in terms of the history of ecocide. Rewilding, for instance, should not be undertaken in the global North without a commensurate pledge of economic assistance for conservation and rewilding of areas in the global South, whose present depleted state is often a direct product of the North’s extractive industries, from plantation slavery to the latest round of land grabs. Similarly, de-extinction may be employed judiciously, for example to reintroduce extinct versions of genes into species that have lost a dangerous amount of genetic diversity. Such efforts should, however, be designed to conserve existing biodiversity, particularly in endangered hotspots, rather than to resurrect extinct charismatic megafauna from the grave.

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 the Global Commons Institute. 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.130  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.

Feel helpless to stop Donald Trump from quitting the Paris Climate Agreement?

You aren’t powerless. You can help stop him in his tracks this very minute. Without getting up from your chair or spending a dime.

It will be delivered to leaders of the European Union, United Nations, and several of the 112 countries who support the Paris Agreement. They have the power— economic, political, and legal—to stop him. But they need to know that a lot of Americans will support them.

French presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy threatened a carbon tax on U.S. goods if Trump reneges on America’s commitment to the Paris Agreement.

“A carbon tariff against the United States is an option for us,” Rodolfo Lacy Tamayo, Mexico’s undersecretary for environmental policy and planning, told the New York Times. “We will apply any kind of policy necessary to defend the quality of life for our people, to protect our environment and to protect our industries.”

The New York Times explained how other countries could use the World Trade Organization to stop Trump:

“Countries imposing costs on their own industries to control carbon emissions could tell the World Trade Organization that United States industries are operating under an unfair trade advantage by avoiding any cost for their pollution. The tax would be calculated based on the amount of carbon pollution associated with the manufacturing of each product. That would impose a painful cost on the heaviest industrial polluters, particularly on exporters of products containing steel and cement.”

Donald Trump and his climate change denier allies will control the U.S. Government come January 2017. But they won’t control the rest of the world, which fears the devastation of unrestrained climate change as much as we do.

Consider this a phone call to an International 911 line. Or a bugle call to bring in the cavalry.

Whatever you call it, sign the petition and share it on Facebook with your friends. We need thousands of signatures to show these leaders that the American people will support them.

Jeff Fox is a former deputy editor of Consumer Reports and a software author. His blog, StateoftheNet.net, covers online privacy and security from a consumer perspective.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) recently released a report, “Cattle, Cleared Forests, and Climate Change: Scoring America’s Top Brands on Their Deforestation-Free Beef Commitments and Practices.” The publication highlights how beef production is the primary contributor to tropical deforestation worldwide, predominantly occurring in South America. According to the report, consumer goods companies “have the power to help stop this destruction,” yet none of the 13 United States companies studied for sourcing South American beef had strong deforestation-free policies or procedures in place. The report advises that companies should work together with meatpackers, ranchers, and government to develop a comprehensive plan to end deforestation practices within the beef industry.

According to the report, one challenge to overcome is the structure of the beef supply chain. Meatpackers receive cattle through direct supplying ranches, only some of which are monitored for deforestation practices. The larger problem arises when cattle are shifted from ranch to ranch through various stages of production, allowing indirect supplying ranches to go unmonitored for deforestation. Without a system in place to track indirect supplying ranches, or the cattle who may pass through them, the meatpackers and the consumer goods companies cannot guarantee that the beef they receive is deforestation-free through the entire supply chain. Authors Asha R. Sharma and Lael K. Goodman see potential for change if major players in the industry band together, “These companies have a responsibility to work with their South American supplying meatpackers, which have enormous influence over the beef supply chain, to adopt robust deforestation-free policies and practices.” The authors also acknowledge consumer responsibility and power to effect change, noting previous success with zero-deforestation palm oil initiatives.

In 2009, the four largest meatpackers in Brazil signed the Minimum Criteria for Industrial Scale Cattle Operations in the Brazilian Amazon Biome agreement (also known as the G4 Agreement or the Cattle Agreement). This pact required the signatories to determine and report that their supplying ranches were not linked to deforestation, marking a “historic step toward corporate actors taking responsibility for their role in driving deforestation.” Acknowledging that this agreement was a step in the right direction toward deforestation-free beef, Sharma and Goodman argue that the agreement falls short in several ways: it is limited to the Amazon and to the signatories, and the meatpackers have so far delayed in implementing monitoring for all supplying ranches.

Because efforts to curtail deforestation largely focus on the Amazon, the authors advise that companies should develop deforestation-free policies that are global in scope. The authors also state that companies should, with the cooperation of meatpackers, monitor all supplying ranches and the cattle that pass through them, ensure the protection of human rights along the supply chain, and support ranchers in improved pastureland management.

The 13 companies in UCS’s study were evaluated in five areas: ambition of deforestation-free commitment; time-bound implementation plan; compliance; transparency; and traceability, monitoring, and verification. The study found that none of the 13 consumer goods companies scored high enough to receive a strong deforestation-free beef policies and procedures rating, and none could guarantee that the beef obtained was from a deforestation-free source. Mars, McDonald’s and Walmart garnered the most points—though still receiving a limited designation; while Nestle, Hormel, Wendy’s, Jack Links, Subway, Burger King, ConAgra, Kroger and Pizza Hut all received very limited designations (the last four all scoring zero).

Read the full report 

Stacey McFadin is a health coach and attorney. She runs Healthy News Bites, a news digest for wellness practitioners. Follow her on Twitter @StaceyMcFadin.

After previously dubbing climate change "a hoax," President-elect Donald Trump seemed to finally admit two weeks after the election that the globally accepted phenomenon is caused by humans.

But Trump is still wavering on whether to pull out of the Paris climate deal, signed by nearly 200 nations after having vowed to rip up the deal on the campaign trail. 

“The president-elect is going to have to make his decision,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters in Marakesh on November 16. “What I will do is speak to the assembly about our efforts and what we’re engaged in and why we’re engaged in it, and our deep commitment as the American people to this effort.”

But delegates from the almost 200 nations are uneasy weeks after Kerry's announcement.

"All the signatures were already made by presidents, heads of governments," lamented Rebecca Harms in an interview with France 24 on President-elect Trump's potentially disastrous effect on global relations. 

Harms is a German Member of the European Parliament, co-president of the Group of the Greens in the EU Parliament and strong supporter of Angela Merkel's bid for a fourth term. 

"Fingers crossed that the United States, not again, [shifts from being] a driver of the international strategy to fight global warming to a burden, We saw it in former periods," Harms added. "But nobody can predict [it] right now."

She also called Trump "a question mark as such, as a person, to many things we have achieved and find important." 

We’re going to be dealing with an onslaught of daily emergencies during the Trump years. Already it’s begun — if there’s nothing going on (or in some cases when there is), our leader often begins the day with a tweet to stir the pot, and suddenly we’re debating whether burning the flag should lose you your citizenship.

These crises will get worse once he has power — from day to day we’ll have to try and protect vulnerable immigrants, or deal with the latest outrage from the white supremacist “alt-reich,” or confront the latest self-dealing scandal in the upper reaches of the Tower. It will be a game (though not a fun one), for 48 months, of trying to preserve as many people and as much of the Constitution as possible.

And if we’re very lucky, at the end of those four years, we might be able to go back to something that resembles normal life. Much damage will have been done in the meantime, but perhaps not irreparable damage. Obamacare will be gone, but something like it — maybe even something better — will be resurrectable. The suffering in the meantime will be real, but it won’t make the problem harder to solve, assuming reason someday returns. That’s, I guess, the good news: that someday normal life may resume.

But even that slight good news doesn’t apply to the question of climate change. It’s very likely that by the time Trump is done we’ll have missed whatever opening still remains for slowing down the trajectory of global warming — we’ll have crossed thresholds from which there’s no return. In this case, the damage he’s promising will be permanent, for two reasons.

The first is the most obvious: The adversary here is ultimately physics, which plays by its own rules. As we continue to heat the planet, we see that planet changing in ways that turn into feedback loops. If you make it hot enough to melt Arctic ice (and so far we’ve lost about half of our supply) then one of the side effects is removing a nice white mirror from the top of the planet. Instead of that mirror reflecting 80 percent of the sun’s rays out to space, you’ve now got blue water that absorbs most of the incoming rays of the sun, amping up the heat. Oh, and as that water warms, the methane frozen in its depths eventually begins to melt — and methane is a potent greenhouse gas. Even if, someday, we get a president back in power who’s willing to try and turn down the coal, gas and oil burning, there will be nothing we can do about that melting methane. Some things are forever, or at least for geologic time.

There’s another reason too, however, and that’s that the international political mechanisms Trump wants to smash can’t easily be assembled again, even with lots of future good will. It took immense diplomatic efforts to reach the Paris climate accords — 25 years of negotiating with endless setbacks. The agreement itself is a jury-rigged kludge, but at least it provides a mechanism for action. It depends on each country voluntarily doing its part, though, and if the biggest historic source of the planet’s carbon decides not to play, it’s easy to guess that an awful lot of other leaders will decide that they’d just as soon give in to their fossil fuel interests too.

So Trump is preparing to make a massive bet: a bet that the scientific consensus about climate change is wrong, and that the other 191 nations of the world are wrong as well. It’s a bet based on literally nothing — when the New York Times asked him about global warming, he started mumbling about a physicist uncle of his who died in 1985. The job — and it may not be a possible job — is for the rest of us to figure out how to make the inevitable loss of this bet as painless as possible.

It demands fierce resistance to his silliness — clearly his people are going to kill Obama’s Clean Power Plan, but perhaps they can be shamed into simply ignoring but not formally abrogating the Paris accords. This is work not just for activists, but for the elites that Trump actually listens to. Here’s where we need what’s left of the establishment to be weighing in: Fortune 500 executives, Wall Streeters — anyone who knows how stupid a bet this is.

But we also need to be working hard on other levels. The fossil fuel industry is celebrating Trump’s election, and rightly so — but we can continue to make their lives at least a little difficult, through campaigns like fossil fuel divestment and through fighting every pipeline and every coal port. The federal battles will obviously be harder, and we may lose even victories like Keystone. But there are many levers of power, and the ones closer to home are often easier to pull.

We also have to work at state and local levels to support what we want. The last election, terrible as it was, showed that renewable energy is popular even in red states — Florida utilities lost their bid to sideline solar energy, for instance. The hope is that we can keep the buildout of sun and wind, which is beginning to acquire real momentum, on track; if so, costs will keep falling to the point where simple economics may overrule even Trumpish ideology.

And of course we have to keep communicating, all the time, about the crisis — using the constant stream of signals from the natural world to help people understand the folly of our stance. As I write this, the Smoky Mountain town of Gatlinburg is on fire, with big hotels turned to ash at the end of a devastating drought. Mother Nature will provide us an endless string of teachable moments, and some of them will break through — it’s worth remembering that the Bush administration fell from favor as much because of Katrina as Iraq.

None of these efforts will prevent massive, and perhaps fatal, damage to the effort to constrain climate change. It’s quite possible, as many scientists said the day after the election, that we’ve lost our best chance. But we don’t know precisely how the physics will play out, and every ton of carbon we keep out of the atmosphere will help.

And amidst this long ongoing emergency, as I said at the beginning, we’ve got to help with all the daily crises. This winter may find climate activists spending as much time trying to block deportations as pipelines; we may have to live in a hot world, but we don’t have to live in a jackbooted one, and the more community we can preserve, the more resilient our communities will be. It’s hard not to despair — but then, it wasn’t all that easy to be realistically hopeful about our climate even before Trump. This has always been a battle against great odds. They’re just steeper now.

Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, the founder of 350.org, an international climate campaign, and the winner of the 2014 Right Livelihood Award.

The U.S. election was a chilling illustration of the atrocious state of public discourse. It doesn’t bode well for a country once admired for leadership in education and science.

As public relations expert and former David Suzuki Foundation board chair James Hoggan writes in I’m Right and You’re an Idiot, “polluted public discourse is an enormous obstacle to change.” How, he asks, do we “create the space for higher quality public debates where passionate opposition and science shape constructive, mind-changing conversations”?

If those vying to be president of the most powerful country in the world couldn’t do it, what hope is there? For his book, co-written with Grania Litwin, Hoggan interviewed a range of thinkers, from linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff to the Dalai Lama. Whether or not their insights can raise the level of political discourse among politicians who think name-calling, logical fallacies and lies constitute legitimate debate remains to be seen, but the book offers advice for anyone who wants to improve conversations and create positive change in this age of online bickering, propaganda and entrenched positions.

Social psychologist Carol Tavris says part of the problem relates to “cognitive dissonance.” Unlike scientists, who revise their positions in response to testing and challenging hypotheses, most people resist changing their minds, especially if they feel it would threaten them or their real or imagined privileges.

Yale Law School psychology and law professor Dan Kahan says confirmation bias and motivated reasoning also come into play. Confirmation bias is people’s tendency to seek and select information that confirms their beliefs. Motivated reasoning is the unconscious habit of processing information to suit an end or goal that doesn’t necessarily conform to accurate beliefs.

Climate change is a good case in point. Although evidence for human-caused global warming is backed by mountains of research compiled over decades by scientists from around the world, and its impacts are observable, many people refuse to accept it, promoting debunked ideas and fossil fuel industry talking points, because they feel profits or their way of life will be negatively affected by addressing it. “When you have a combination of economic, ideological and psychological biases all in play, it’s very difficult for human beings to easily accept large-scale social and economic change,” Tavris observes.

So how do we overcome these stumbling blocks, especially when climate change deniers hold power in the U.S.? In looking at changing perceptions and habits around things like seatbelts, smoking and environmental protection, Tavris argues that dialogue and changing people’s hearts isn’t enough, that “you have to first change the laws, change public notions of what is acceptable or unacceptable behavior and change the economic consequences of practices you want to alter.” That’s more than a challenge in the current political atmosphere.

But we have to start somewhere. And improving the ways we communicate with each other is essential. Much of current discussion around the U.S. election result centers on politicians not listening to those left behind as global trade and technology outpaced antiquated economic systems. Many say the Democrats failed in part because they abandoned those who lost livelihoods in coal mines or factories as technologies changed and corporate leaders shifted production to parts of the world with lower labor costs and standards. Although the president-elect’s choices of appointments and advisers show he’s deep in the pockets of corporate America, especially the fossil fuel industry, he succeeded in tapping into the disillusionment.

We must listen to those who are suffering. We should also consider the difference between debate and dialogue. As social scientists Steve Rosell and Daniel Yankelovich tell Hoggan, “debate is about seeing weaknesses in other people’s positions, while dialogue is about searching for strength and value in our opponents’ concerns.”

Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh says, “Speak the truth, but not to punish.” While facts and reason are important, Hoggan points out, they’re not enough to change people’s minds. “Research coming from cognitive and brain science tells us if we want to be persuasive we must appeal to people’s values and speak from a moral position, rather than layering on more data and statistics.”

The world is in a precarious position. Hoggan’s book offers a path to the kind of discourse necessary to resolving our collective problems.

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author, and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation.