Chapter I
Actual scenario of the world from the beginning of the industrial revolution to today.

by
Germain Dufour
Global Civilization
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Note to the reader:
The four chapters of October 2018 Newsletter were based on the articles, letters, reports, research papers, discussions and global dialogues, and messages written by author(s) whose work were published in monthly Newsletters of years mostly 2017 and 2018. All published work can be found in the Global Dialogue Proceedings (check link http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/GIMProceedings/). Scroll down to years 2017 and 2018 and follow the Proceedings sections, and you will find the actual authors lists, with their papers and all references. Global Community Media is a way to communicate workable sound solutions to problems arising in the world. Let us share our problems and workable sound solutions. Sharing information is a necessity to all life and humanity's survival. Our world is changing fast before our eyes, and we must react quickly and hard to protect all life on Earth. No hesitation! Right now and no waiting! Life on the planet is our first priority. We must protect it at all costs. We, global citizens, fight to protect life on Earth for this generation and the next ones. We are the defenders of the environment and the global life-support systems. We know who the beasts are, and how they destroy the living on our planet. We have rallied together all over the world to protect our home, Earth. Just so you all know we don't pay anyone, and we don't pay expenses. We do volunteer work for humanity. We expect volunteers to be responsible and accountable of all their actions. We do soft activism work. We do not have a copyright research expert to do this work. In order to create a harmonious and compassionate Global Civilization, and to protect our planetary environment, the global life-support systems, we want to help you concerning all issues, and you may become a volunteer yourself. Check our volunteer page at: http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/GPA/gpahelpsyou.htm

Table of Contents.

The Biosphere, our world.

American consumers have the largest ecological footprint in the world and is largely a consequence of the global power of TNCs, corporate America.

Climate denialism requires shutting one’s eyes to obvious realities when the truth is that the Earth is warmer than it has been in 120,000 years.

Rising sea levels, coastal cities, and extreme weather.

World's Biggest Cities That Will Be Drowned.

America is the biggest greenhouse gas (GHG) polluter.

Dollar and death calculations of GHG pollution versus global GDP calculation.

The Arctic, health and bunker oil used by container ships.

In coming decades, because of global warming, the Arctic tundra permafrost and Arctic Ocean sea bed will release Methane CH4, a much more deadly GHG than CO2.

Extreme, catastrophic economically and socially disastrous wildfires could increase by up to 40% as the world warms.

Environment, debt, and future generations.

Corporate polluters are the worst offenders.

Americans, Canadians and Australians are making sure to doom the world with unlimited Greenhouse Gas Pollution.

America and world energy.

Unlimited fossil fuel exploitation means a commitment to GHG pollution over 16 times greater than the world’s present remaining Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget that must not be exceeded if we are to have a 75% chance of avoiding a catastrophic 2C temperature rise.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, developed economies have been emitting GHGs which created global warming and today's environmental crisis, and that makes the capitalism system responsible, and we must first change it.

Demographic, Social and Economic Changes Aggravate Threat to Humanity due to Climate Change.

Americans Contributes 20% Of World’s Annual Carbon Debt Increase.

Time left to avert climate catastrophe.

So what should Society do to avoid the worst impacts of climate change?

Industrial farming is not an efficient way to grow food.

Rising Sea levels will remake the coastlines of endangered U.S. States and drown much of other world coastlines.

Because of climate change, dry conditions and extreme heat have led to a proliferating number of intense wildfires, causing massive damage to infrastructure, land and the loss of human life.

To teach the younger generation about climate change.

Global commons, biodiversity debt, and the goal in America must be to overturn our present expansionary system by fostering de-growth.

The 1% as much wealth as half the world's population.

Energy and prosperity.

Why Keystone XL should never get built.

Climate change, an existential threat to humanity and much of nature.

The melting of the Arctic ice will lead to Global Climate catastrophe.

The hidden costs of slow sea-level rise and rapid flooding.

China Plans to Break Petrodollar Stranglehold.

The fundamental contradiction between population/economic growth and protecting the environment.

Chinese production and exports are dominated by US and other foreign corporations, and, like the pollution drifting across the globe, – are not really ‘Chinese’ at all.

Capitalism, and the relationship between work, energy, money and climate change.

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

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

Trump's Budget Deals Massive Blow to Clean Water and Air, Public Lands, Public Health and the Environment.

The Biosphere.

The biosphere is the combination of all ecosystems on our planet. It can also be termed the zone of life on Earth, a closed system, and largely self-regulating. By the most general biophysiological definition, the biosphere is the global ecological system integrating all living beings and their relationships, including their interaction with the elements of the lithosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere.

This 21st century is very crucial for humanity as it will determine our survival or not as a species and, consequently, the survival of the next generations. It is now increasingly evident that only by sharing the world's natural resources more equitably and sustainably will we be able to address both the ecological and social crisis we face as Global Civilization. This does not imply that a section of the world population whose idea of survival is to have many children and Global Community would see that they are given all social services needed for survival. No! There are global laws concerning procreation and everyone is required not to have more than 1.3 children per family in a given population. Global population warfare is not permitted, much like military and economic warfares in the world today. All other life species than human are also part of Global Community and their population will also be controlled for their own survival.

The lives of all lifeforms and plants on our planet deserve protection, preservation, and care. Global Civilization disapproves of the limitless exploitation of the natural foundations of life, the relentless destruction of the biosphere, and the militarization of the space within and above the Earth's atmosphere. Global Civilization vision is about realizing that this new global order will be better, safer, and more realistic after replacing the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the 1985 Scale of Global Rights. The Scale shows social values in order of importance and so helps us understand clearly what are, today, the rights of a community and of its citizens. In this day forward, global citizens have a binding responsibility for the welfare of all humanity and care for all life on Earth.

American consumers have the largest ecological footprint in the world and is largely a consequence of the global power of TNCs, corporate America.

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

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

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CO2 concentration: Mauna Loa curve

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

Global Warming.

Life on Earth depends on energy coming from the sun. About half the light reaching Earth's atmosphere passes through the air and clouds to the surface, where it is absorbed and then radiated upward in the form of infrared heat. Most of this heat is then absorbed by the greenhouse gases and radiated back toward the Earth's surface. A layer of greenhouse gases, in large part water vapor, and including much smaller amounts of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, forms a thermal blanket for the Earth, absorbs heat and warms the surface to a life-supporting average temperature of 59 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius). And that is the main cause of today's global warming, the human expansion of the "greenhouse effect", warming that results when the atmosphere traps heat radiating from Earth toward space. The oceans have absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 700 meters (about 2,300 feet) of ocean showing warming of 0.302 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969.

The consequences of changing the natural atmospheric greenhouse are difficult to predict, but certain effects are very likely. On average, Earth will become warmer. Some areas may welcome warmer temperatures, but others may not. Warmer conditions may lead to more evaporation and precipitation overall, but individual areas will vary, some becoming wetter and others dryer. A stronger greenhouse effect will warm the oceans and partially melt glaciers, increasing sea level. Ocean water also will expand if it warms, contributing further to sea level rise. Melting sea ice, such as the Arctic ice cap, does not change sea level because the ice only displaces its volume. Crops and other plants may respond favorably to increased atmospheric CO₂, growing more vigorously and using water more efficiently. And higher temperatures and shifting climate patterns may change the areas where crops grow best and affect the formation of natural plant communities.

Global warming is affecting sea ice, glaciers and continental ice sheets world wide. Glaciers are retreating almost everywhere around the world — including in the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, Alaska and Africa. The amount of spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has decreased over the past five decades and that the snow is melting earlier. Warming ocean will cause most Antarctic ice shelf mass to melt. Ocean waters melting the undersides of Antarctic ice shelves are responsible for most of the continent's ice shelf mass loss. The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Greenland lost 150 to 250 cubic kilometers (36 to 60 cubic miles) of ice per year between 2002 and 2006, while Antarctica lost about 152 cubic kilometers (36 cubic miles) of ice between 2002 and 2005.

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

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

Overall, volcanoes release about 5 percent of the equivalent amount of CO₂ released by humans. Once every 20 years there is a volcanic eruption that throws out a large amount of particles and gases. These will effectively shield us enough from the sun to lead to a period of global cooling. The particles and gases typically dissipate after about 2 years, but the effect is nearly global.

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Climate change.

Climate change comprises global warming and refers to the broader range of changes that are happening on our planet. These include rising sea levels, shrinking mountain glaciers, accelerating ice melt in Greenland, Antarctica and the Arctic, and shifts in flower/plant blooming times. The Arctic Ocean is expected to become essentially ice free in summer before mid-century. These are all consequences of the warming, which is caused mainly by people burning fossil fuels and putting out heat-trapping gases into the air. Rising sea levels have been observed at a faster rate than over the past 40 years; sea levels rising have disastrous consequences for islands and low-level coastal areas. Soon all large coatal cities will be affected. Weather refers to the more local changes in the climate we see around us, on short timescales from minutes to hours to days to weeks. Examples are: rain, snow, clouds, winds, thunderstorms, heat waves and floods. “Climate” refers to longer-term averages (they may be regional or global), and can be thought of as the weather averaged over several seasons, years or decades. Climate change is harder for us to get a sense of because the timescales involved are much longer, and the impact of climate changes can be long term.

The problem with climate change is that greenhouse gases sent into the atmosphere today lock in big costs later. Almost 1.9 million homes worth $882 billion combined "are at risk of being underwater by 2100. Add relocation costs for those affected and the loss of tourism dollars in coastal communities, and numbers soar into the trillions for just a fraction of the damage that experts fear global warming will cause.

There are many barriers to overcome. People here first must believe that climate change is real. Then they must believe that it's harmful.

Climate change is already affecting life on Earth, despite a global temperature increase of just 1°C. Nearly every ecosystem on the planet is being altered, and plants and animals are being so affected that scientists may soon be forced to intervene. More than 85 percent of ecological systems on Earth, land and sea, have been affected by climate change. Temperature extremes are causing evolutionary adaption in many species, changing them genetically and physically. These responses include changes in tolerances to high temperatures, shifts in sex-ratios, reduced body size, and migration of species. Understanding the extent to which these goods and services have been impacted allows humans to plan and adapt to changing ecosystem conditions. The changes have manifested in some species shifting to higher or lower ground as the planet heats up, while others are becoming smaller, as a higher surface-area-to-body-mass ratio makes it easier to stay cool. 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. Average global temperatures have risen 1°C since the industrial era. These observations have had broad and worrying impacts on natural systems, with accumulating consequences for people. Minimizing the impacts of climate change on core ecological processes must now be a key policy priority for all nations. It is important that governments to follow through on the promises made in the Paris climate agreement, which aims to keep global warming below a 1.5°C threshold, although an increasing amount of scientists are sounding the alarm that even those pledges may be too little, too late. Time is running out for a globally synchronized response to climate change that integrates adequate protection of biodiversity and ecosystem services. It is no longer sensible to consider this as a concern for the future. If we dont act quickly to curb emissions it is likely that every ecosystem across Earth will fundamentally change in our lifetimes.

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Climate change.
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Rising sea levels.

Climate denialism requires shutting one’s eyes to obvious realities when the truth is that the Earth is warmer than it has been in 120,000 years.

Climate breakdown is happening before our eyes at the same time the science on climate change grows stronger and has wider acceptance. Hurricane Harvey, which struck at the center of the petroleum industry – the heart of climate denialism, provided a glimpse of the new normal of climate crisis-induced events. In Asia,climate message was even stronger where at least 1,200 people died and 41 million were impacted. By 2050, one billion people could be displaced by climate crises. Climate disasters demonstrate the immense failure of government at all levels. The world has known about the likely disastrous impacts of climate change for decades. It is not just science that confirms the climate crisis, it is also people’s experience with extreme weather, record breaking temperatures, and deadly heat waves as well as collapsing mountains in Alaska, the shrinking Colorado River and an ice free Arctic as a few examples. People have experienced a series of extreme storms – Hurricanes Harvey, Katrina, Sandy, and Florence being the most notable this century, droughts, fires and other physical evidence that make it hard to deny climate catastrophe. Climate denialism requires shutting one’s eyes to obvious realities when the truth is the Earth is warmer than it has been in 120,000 years. There is no doubt that these storms are made more deadly by climate change. Harvey was a tropical storm until it went over the warm Gulf of Mexico and grew into a hurricane with record rainfall; warmer water resulted in greater moisture being absorbed, more rain and more flooding. Sea level rise added to the greater flooding. The stalling of the storm over Houston was also predicted by climate forecasters because the jet stream pattern has changed. Climate change had the same effects on Hurricane Sandy in New York City. Science is denied because many profit from the dirty energy status quo and denying or even hiding the existence of climate change. There is litigation against oil and gas companies and an SEC investgation because records show they knew their products were causing climate change going back to the 70s but funded research to hide reality. ExxonMobil is being sued by shareholders for misleading investors and faces shareholder challenges. Coastal communities are suing dozens of oil and gas companies for continuing to pollute after they knew the damage they were doing. Former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, now the Secretary of State, used a fake email account to discuss climate change and many of those emails are now missing. Youth suing over the destruction of their environment and climate change are seeking Tillerson’s testimony and emails. There are many climate criminals to point to with the dirty energy companies at the top of the list. There are 100 companies responsible for 71 percent of green house gas emissions. Good government would hold them responsible.Climate protesters outside of White House. The three decade life of the IPCC has coincided with deep corruption of government by the energy industry, sprawl developers and other dirty energy profiteers. The anti-science movement in the United States, which includes government officials, industry and others who deny climate change exists, provides cover for elected officials to do nothing or act inadequately on the urgent reality of climate chaos so that corporations continue to threaten the planet.

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

Federal decisions had local impacts as can be seen in Houston, the fourth largest city. The federal government inadequately regulated superfund sites, pollution from oil refineries and chemical plants in the area. These were all part of “Cancer Alley” or the “Chemical Coast” – names used to describe the petrochemical capital of the United States. When flooding came, so did disaster in these areas. A 1.5 mile radius around one chemical plant had to be evacuated and toxic waste sites flooded. Of course, the environmental racism that led to these dangerous polluters being put in poor neighborhoods, usually communities of color, is now resulting in massive pollution in those areas and will cause health problems. But inadequate response to climate change often includes state and local governments (some states and cities are taking positive steps). Texas is an example of decades of failed government as it has taken no action to adapt to climate change over the last three decades. Bills were introduced to do so but the legislature failed to act. Why? Because the laws included the words “climate change,” e.g. calling for a “climate change vulnerability assessment” and were perceived as a threat to the oil and gas industry. The metropolitan area of Houston contains 6.5 million people over urban sprawl the size of New Jersey. Zoning regulations allowed for unregulated growth, even in areas prone to flooding, creating a large population on a flood plain. The area has had a long relationship with the petrochemical industry which has been able to get its way, but being business friendly to the industry is going to become very costly. The city is sinking at 2.2 inches a year in large part because of oil and water being pumped from under it.

Rising sea levels, coastal cities, and extreme weather.

Mexico City and Sáo Paulo are not coastal cities. But Tokyo, Mumbai, New York, Shanghai, Lagos, Los Angeles, Calcutta and Buenos Aires are coastal cities. Around half of the world's 7.5 billion people live within 60 miles of a coastline, with about 10 percent of the population living in coastal areas that are less than 10 meters (32 feet) above sea level. Coastal migration has been steadily trending upward. In the U.S. alone, coastal county populations increased by 39 percent between 1970 to 2010. As the population skyrockets, from 7.5 billion today to 9.8 billion by 2050, and 11.2 billion by 2100, according to a recent United Nations report, the question for sustainability and development experts is, will the world's coasts bear the burden of all this humanity? But with the rise of both sea levels and extreme weather, perhaps a better question is, will all this humanity bear the burden of living along the world's coasts? Pedestrians wade through water during a heavy rain in Mumbai, India, this summer. Recent floods in South Asia have been the heaviest in a decade. As the "500-year" hurricanes Harvey and Irma (and 2011's Irene) powerfully and tragically demonstrated, living near a coastline is an increasingly dangerous proposition. But for some coastal regions, rising seas and hurricanes aren't the only cause for alarm: the coastal lands in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina are sinking by up to 3mm a year, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of Florida. Could these multiple factors reverse humans' seaward migration? Some research suggests that may be the case. A recent University of Georgia study found that rising sea levels could drive U.S. coastal residents far inland, even to landlocked states like Arizona and Wyoming, which could see significant population surges from coastal migration by 2100. Many of these places are not equipped to deal with sudden population increases. That means sea level rise isn't just a problem for coastal regions. "We typically think about sea-level rise as being a coastal challenge or a coastal issue," said Mathew Hauer, author of the study and head of the Applied Demography program at the University of Georgia. "But if people have to move, Nicknamed the Mile-High City, Denver is the highest major city in the United States. It ranks 11th on the list of American cities with the greatest addition of residents, helping to make Colorado the second fastest growing state in the nation. "We're going to have more people on less land and sooner than we think," said Charles Geisler, professor emeritus of development sociology at Cornell University. “The future rise in global mean sea level probably won't be gradual. Yet few policy makers are taking stock of the significant barriers to entry that coastal climate refugees, like other refugees, will encounter when they migrate to higher ground." Geisler is the lead author of a published in the July issue of the journal Land Use Policy examining responses to climate change by land use planners in Florida and China. He and the study's co-author, Ben Currens, an earth and environmental scientist from the University of Kentucky, make the case for "proactive adaptation strategies extending landward from on global coastlines." By 2060, about 1.4 billion people could be climate change refugees, according to Geisler's study. That number could reach 2 billion by 2100. Not just for the birds: Higher ground. Writing in the Washington Post, Elizabeth Rush, author of "Rising: The Unsettling of the American Shore," suggests that coastal residents should take a lesson from the roseate spoonbill. For most of the past century, this striking pink shorebird has made a habitat in the Florida Keys. But for the past decade, as rising wetland levels have made finding food more difficult, the spoonbills have been steadily abandoning their historic nesting grounds for higher ground on the mainland. She writes:

Adding several centimeters of water into the wetlands where spoonbills traditionally bred (as has occurred over the past 10 years in the Florida Bay, thanks to wetter winters and higher tides) significantly changed the landscape, eliminating the habitats where these gangly waders had long found dinner. When the spoonbills realized it was no longer possible to live on the Florida Keys, they left.

But humans can't move to higher ground and build new homes as easily as the spoonbill. Rush contends that "legal and regulatory conditions don’t make moving away from increasingly dangerous coastal areas easy." She argues that, to avoid loss of life and economic value, governments at local, state and federal levels, as part of climate adaption, must "start now". In New York, some residents impacted by Hurricane Sandy took matters into their own hands, forming grassroots "buyout committees" to raise awareness about the perils of coastal life, even knocking on doors to gauge residents' interest in relocating. Eventually, the relocation activists got the attention and support of Governor Andrew Cuomo: In 2013, he released funds from the federal Hazard Mitigation Grant Program to buy out homes across three Sandy-impacted areas in Staten Island. "Those homes would be knocked down, giving the wetlands a chance to return so they might provide a buffer against storms to come," Rush writes, adding that since Sandy, around 500 residents have applied for government buyouts—now "entire neighborhoods are being demolished along the island’s shore."

One "exit barrier" has to do with a 49-year-old program called the National Flood Insurance Program. Under the current law, homeowners are required to rebuild on their land—even after suffering through multiple floods. "Through the National Flood Insurance Program, we know there are about 30,000 properties that flood repeatedly," said Rob Moore, senior policy analyst for the NRDC's water program. "On average, these properties have flooded about five times." Only around one percent of these properties carry flood insurance, reports NPR, but have been responsible for about 25 percent of the paid claims. Jennifer Bayles, a homeowner in the Houston metro area who was interviewed last week on NPR, paid $83,000 for her house in 1992. After the first flood in 2009, insurance paid her $200,000, then an additional $200,000 following the next flood. Now, post-Harvey, she expects to receive around $300,000. Houston residents use an inflatable swan to move items from a flooded house in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. When a program pays out billions of dollars for just a handful of repeat customers, some argue that rebuilding simply isn't cost-efficient. Rush points to a recent Natural Resources Defense Council study that found, "in most cases, it is less expensive to buy out these homes than it is to cover the cost of repairing and rebuilding after ever-more-common floods." Another problem is a lack of funding. The National Flood Insurance Program is nearly $25 billion in debt due to this season's massive hurricanes. In a recent press briefing, Roy E. Wright, the deputy FEMA administrator in charge of the program, said his agency estimates it will pay Texas policyholders some $11 billion in flood claims for Harvey alone. But NFIP has only $1.08 billion of cash to pay claims. That amount, reported Bradley Keoun of TheStreet.com last week, is "down by a third in less than three weeks—and a $5.8 billion credit limit from the U.S. Treasury Department."

What's unsustainable and perverse is denying the role of climate change, not only in storm activity, but in the rising sea levels that make flooding worse: Hensarling's poor climate voting record garnered him a spot on Vice Motherboard's "Texas Climate Change Deniers" list. As the Sun Herald, a Mississippi Gulf Coast newspaper, recently put it, " Climate change denial and our love of the beach could sink the National Flood Insurance program." Predictably, Donald Trump dismissed the notion that climate change played a role in the frequency and intensity of superstorms like Harvey and Irma. There are certain climate change-related factors that we can, with great confidence, say worsened the flooding. Sea level rise attributable to climate change…is more than half a foot over the past few decades. That means that the storm surge was a half foot higher than it would have been just decades ago, meaning far more This map shows the odds of floods in Florida at least as high as historic once-a-century levels, coming by 2030. Most or all of the rise can be attributed to global warming. There's also the economic impact of losing shorelines. The U.N. estimates that the so-called ocean economy, which includes employment, marine-based ecosystem services and cultural services, is between $3 to $6 trillion per year. Coastal areas within 100 kilometers (62 miles) of the ocean account for more than 60 percent of the world's total gross national production. For the economies of developing nations, these regions are especially crucial. A big part of that coastal production is food. As the sea gobbles up fertile seaside land and river deltas, feeding the rapidly escalating human population is going to get that much more difficult.

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

Like forests, these coastal areas are powerful carbon sinks, safely storing around a quarter of the additional carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. Crucially, they also help protect communities and wildlife near shores from floods and storm surges. As people move inland, natural ecosystems could reclaim shorelines. "Retreat," Rush declares, "is slowly gaining traction as a climate change adaptation strategy." Mangrove forests, like this one on Lake Tabarisia in Indonesia, help reduce storm surges and flood damage while stabilizing shorelines with their extensive root systems. Mangroves have been systematically eliminated worldwide to make room for human development and shrimp aquaculture. Moving people out of flood zones—and rewilding coastlines and bringing wetlands back—could be an area where policymakers and conservationists could find common ground. It also means rethinking the way cities are designed; when it comes to urban planning, city planners have generally not taken natural systems into account.

Rising sea level originates first from by the global warming of our planet which has caused the thermal expansion of the ocean water and the melting of glaciers and ice cover on land. Sea level rises can considerably influence human populations in coastal and island regions and natural environments like marine ecosystems. As carbon dioxide traps more heat on the planet, the oceans get warmer and expand in volume. Second, ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica as well as other glaciers start melting, pouring more water into the oceans.

Because of ongoing and potential loss of their sea ice habitat resulting from global warming, polar bears are an endangered species. The survival and the protection of the polar bear habitat are urgent issues of Global Civilization. If polar bears were to go extinct, the population of walruses, seals, whales, reindeer, rodents and birds would increase and get out of control.

World's Biggest Cities That Will Be Drowned.

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

Japan is already confronting the threat posed by climate change-induced flooding. Image modeling shows that swaths of Osaka – the commercial heart of a region whose GDP is almost as big as that of the Netherlands – would disappear beneath the water in a 3C world, threatening the local economy and almost a third of the wider region’s 19 million residents. Millions of people live in the urban area surrounding Osaka. Sea-level rise will reshape densely and sparsely populated areas. As a result of global sea-level rise, storm surges and other factors, economists project that coastal flooding could put almost $1tn of Osaka’s assets at risk by the 2070s. The costs of protecting cities from rising sea levels and storms are also likely to rise - as are the costs of repairing storm damage. Decisions we make today could have a profound impact on the security and culture of the people of this ancient city.

Like much of Japan, Osaka already has a network of seawalls and other coastal defenses in place to combat tsunami – although their effectiveness was disputed in the aftermath of the 2011 triple disaster. Osaka city authorities are investing in other infrastructure to mitigate the effects of flooding, but public education is also vital, according to Toshikazu Nakaaki of the Osaka municipal government’s environment bureau.

In the past our response was focused on reducing the causes of global warming, but given that climate change is inevitable, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we are now discussing how to respond to the natural disasters that will follow. We anticipate that Osaka will be affected by natural disasters caused by climate change, but we have yet to establish exactly what might happen or how much financial damage they would cause. When it comes to flooding, the coastal city is one of the world’s most vulnerable. Now one of the world’s biggest ports, the former fishing village is bordered by the Yangtze river in the north and divided through the middle by the Huangpu river; the municipality involves several islands, two long coastlines, shipping ports, and miles of canals, rivers, and waterways. Shanghai, China, is the most vulnerable major city in the world to serious flooding, based on factors such as numbers of people living close to the coastline, time needed to recover from flooding, and measures to prevent floodwater. All of the 17.5 million people could be displaced by rising waters if global temperatures increase by 3C. Projections show the vast majority of the city could eventually be submerged in water, including much of the downtown area, landmarks such as the Lujiazui skyline and the historical Bund, both airports, and the entirety of its outlying Chongming Island.

Few other cities in the world have as much to lose from rising sea levels as Miami, USA, and the alarm bells sound ever louder with each successive king tide that overwhelms coastal defenses and sends knee-deep seawater coursing through downtown streets. Locals consider this the “new normal” in the biggest city of Florida’s largest metropolitan area, which would simply cease to exist with a 3C temperature rise. Even at 2C, forecasts show almost the entire bottom third of Florida – the area south of Lake Okeechobee currently home to more than 7 million people - submerged, withgrim projections for the rest of the state in a little more than half a century. In Miami-Dade county alone, almost $15bn of coastal property is at risk of flooding in just the next 15 years.

A sense of urgency is evident at city hall, where commissioners are asking voters to approve a “Miami Forever” bond in the November ballot that includes $192m for upgrading pump stations, improving drainage and raising sea walls. Perhaps designing and building underwater homes would be a better idea.

Sea levels rising with disastrous consequences for islands and low-level coastal areas.

In summary, carbon is present throughout the natural environment in many forms. It is present in the air as carbon dioxide, and contributes to the "Greenhouse Effect" and is causing the global warming of our planet. The global carbon cycle includes an exchange between plant, root, soil and lifeform respiration and photosynthesis, ocean exchange, auto and factory emissions, changing land use through development, and cement manufacture contributes greenhouse gases both directly through the production of carbon dioxide when calcium carbonate is thermally decomposed, producing lime and carbon dioxide, and also through the use of energy, particularly from the combustion of fossil fuels. Human respiration and activities such as mining, industrialization, and automobile use are the most important causes of the global warming of our planet.

America's biggest greenhouse gas (GHG) polluter.

Up close, the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the U.S. isn't as big as you'd expect it to be. From most angles, you can't even see it until you're right on top of it. But hit the right gap in the rolling hills of north-central Alabama, and the James H. Miller Jr. Electric Generating Plant looms large even from miles away. Nestled on about 800 acres on the Locust Fork of the Black Warrior River, the plant is one of Alabama Power's coal-burning workhorses, putting out enough electricity to power about a million homes. It virtually never stops running—and never stops producing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. From certain angles, the plant is a pollution-belching monster harming both the environment and the health of communities. Change your perspective a bit, and Miller is a source of good-paying jobs, a means to raise a family in an area where economic opportunities are thin. Paul Dollar, 75, who has lived just a few hundred yards from the plant property for more than 30 years, sees Miller both ways. On one hand, there's dust and noise: "This thing I believe is getting my health and it's bothering me." On the other, Dollar and his daughter Tammy can name a dozen friends, relatives and neighbors who work for the plant, its contractors, or in one of the related service industries. "To their credit, Alabama Power is a good corporate citizen. They provide good jobs. They do a lot in the community for charity and such," said Scotty Colson, a lawyer in Birmingham, 16 miles southeast of the plant. But "you don't get the impression that [pollution] is a high priority. They're pretty much OK with shifting the cost onto people who have a problem with what their byproduct is." Alabama Power is a subsidiary of the Southern Company, which owns 11 utilities in nine states. Southern has spent nearly $12 billion on pollution controls at its plants since 1990 and "is committed to comply with all environmental laws and regulations," spokesman Terrell McCollum wrote in a statement for this article. But Colson, a clean-air advocate, said those costs have been passed on to customers—both directly on their utility bills and indirectly through impacts on health and climate. "They start putting the onus on everybody else," he said, "when in fact they have spent quite a lot with lobbying to fight regulations and delay regulations." Southern spent more than all but a dozen other U.S. companies on federal lobbying during the 2016 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics—nearly $14 million. Colson has lived in the Birmingham area for all of his 58 years and fought asthma for most of them. Miller's discharges of greenhouse gases and noxious substances have taken a toll, he said, not only on the environment but also on his lungs. "You rationalize it by saying, 'I'm taking care of my family first,'" he said. "You rationalize it by saying, 'Oh, it really doesn't do any harm.' That's your basic climate denial and science denial, which is epidemic in some areas here." But the science doesn't lie. Researchers around the world have repeatedly offered proof that climate change is happening and that humans are causing it. Colson, at least, has no doubts. "You can question the science," he said, "but you can't question the reality of my lungs."

In 2016, average global temperatures hit record highs for the third year in a row, according to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Most of the warming since the late 19th century has happened since the early 1980s, the agencies said. Miller was the nation's biggest emitter of planet-warming gases in 2015, releasing more than 19 million metric tons—the equivalent of about four million passenger vehicles driven for a year. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data show that Miller has been one of the top three greenhouse gas-producing U.S. facilities—not just power plants—since federal tracking began in 2010. But that doesn't seem to bother its owner. "That's kind of old news," Alabama Power spokesman Michael Sznajderman said. "It's jostled for that No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 spot for years." Southern CEO Tom Fanning told CNBC there wasn't proof that carbon dioxide is the key driver of climate change—contradicting the overwhelming scientific evidence. Birmingham attorney Scotty Colson, who has asthma, said Alabama Power provides good jobs—but also air pollutants that affect the climate and, he said, his lungs. "Is climate change happening? Certainly. It's been happening for millennia. That's not the issue, OK?" he said. Birmingham attorney Scotty Colson, who has asthma, said Alabama Power provides good jobs—but also air pollutants that affect the climate and, he said, his lungs. Though the Miller plant tops the greenhouse-gas list, many large facilities in the U.S.—particularly coal-fired power plants—are also outsize emitters. The 100 industrial sites giving off the most climate-altering gases together make up hardly more than one percent of the facilities reporting to the EPA, but account for nearly a third of those discharges. Toxic air emissions are also heavily concentrated. Miller, for its part, halved toxic releases from its stacks between 2010 and 2015, following many years of far higher levels, EPA data show. The steep plunge came after Alabama Power installed pollution controls to comply with federal regulations. These technologies, like scrubbers and ozone-combating machinery, reduce sulfur dioxide, fine particles and other contaminants associated with coal-burning, Sznajderman said. Still, some of Miller's remaining emissions can damage the lungs and, research suggests, increase the risk of heart attack and stroke. The nitrogen oxides coming from Miller, tracked separately by the EPA, are a key ingredient in ground-level ozone, or smog, that's particularly hard on some people. This county, Jefferson, received an "F" grade from the American Lung Association for its ozone levels. It used to be the steel mills, pumping out brownish "air you could chew," that cost him days at school and basketball games with his friends. As the mills cleaned up or closed and the sky turned blue again, Colson still noticed a burning sensation when he would breathe. Miller, he believes, is the primary culprit. The plant was fouling the air all those years, he said, "but you basically didn't notice that because it was part of an even worse pollution problem. Data analysis shows that Southern is one of the biggest greenhouse-gas emitters in the country—its plants collectively pumped out more than 100 million metric tons in 2015, EPA data show. Companywide, greenhouse-gas emissions in 2015 were about 25 percent lower than they were a decade earlier, according to Southern spokesman McCollum. "This reduction was achieved without federal mandates, while delivering to customers the benefits of a more diverse generating fleet," he wrote. The problem with climate change is that greenhouse gases sent into the atmosphere today lock in big costs later. Almost 1.9 million homes worth $882 billion combined "are at risk of being underwater by 2100. Add relocation costs for those affected and the loss of tourism dollars in coastal communities, and numbers soar into the trillions—for just a fraction of the damage that experts fear global warming will cause. Alabama Power's Sznajderman said Southern is "certainly cognizant of climate change and those carbon issues, and we're doing some of the leading research in that area." Indeed, it operates the National Carbon Capture Center—a complex near Wilsonville, Alabama, aimed at finding ways to sequester carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants—for the U.S. Department of Energy. But none of the technologies is ready for deployment at Miller, Sznajderman said. Southern's Kemper plant in Mississippi, an effort to gasify coal and capture about two-thirds of the carbon, is more than $4 billion over budget. Southern also is over budget on a project in Georgia, an expansion of the Alvin W. Vogtle nuclear plant that the company is promoting as a solution for moving away from carbon-based "dirty" energy sources like coal. Two new power generating units were originally scheduled to be completed by 2016 and 2017, at a cost of $14 billion, but more recent estimates put the project about three years behind with a final price tag of $21 billion. Construction is only about 43 percent complete, and David McKinney, Georgia Power's vice president of nuclear development, has said the company is assessing the costs of abandoning the project altogether. Georgians are angry about having to foot the bill. The Miller power plant is a key employer in a rural area. For now, the federal government doesn't pose a threat to Miller's place atop the greenhouse-gas list. Clean Power Plan, an Obama administration carbon-cutting initiative. America's withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement.

Trump's promises to decrease regulations and support the coal industry play well here. He didn't win Jefferson County, home of Birmingham, but in three of the counties near the plant, more than 80 percent of voters chose him. In February 2016, while Barack Obama was president, representatives of Southern decried the Clean Power Plan as an example of the EPA's overreaching mandates." The U.S. Supreme Court's stay on the rule that month was "the right decision for customers" and went a long way toward "preserving states' authority," Southern said. Alabama Power took an active role in the fight, joining those suing to stop the plan. Alabama's then-attorney general, Luther Strange, called the stay a tremendous victory over "an unprecedented and illegal EPA rule. … The Obama administration's EPA rule would shutter coal-fired power plants around the country, including in Alabama, while killing jobs and raising power bills for hard-working families." The state did not join the EPA in its years-long legal battle, largely during the George W. Bush administration, to get Alabama Power to add environmental controls to power plants. The federal agency and the company settled claims related to the Miller plant in 2006." 'Biggest employer around' Miller represents a steady source of jobs in the rural swath of northwestern Jefferson County. "Alabama Power is the biggest employer around," Tammy Dollar said. "Everybody needs a job, and there's so many down there." Day in and day out, the parking lot is packed with cars, and the Dollars can rattle off a host of relatives who earn a living there: an in-law who drove a coal train, a distant cousin who works as a security guard, a first cousin who's "way up there now."

According to Alabama Power, salaries at the plant range from around $36,000 to about $120,000 a year, or about $74,000 on average. The company's Sznajderman said Miller employs around 365 people but can have as many as 1,500 contractors on site during planned maintenance outages. The plant pays about $12 million a year in property taxes. It's not an easy place to live beside—Paul Dollar isn't the only neighbor to say that. "I've called them. I've tried to ask them to buy me out," he said. "They say, 'Oh, we'll let you know. We're gonna let you know.' And I said, 'Are you waiting on me to die?'" Sznajderman said Alabama Power has no record of an inquiry from Dollar but "we plan to follow up with him." His complaints aside, Dollar said the plant's benefits are important—worth the coal dust on his car and racket that sometimes makes it impossible to sleep. "Even if I could, I wouldn't shut it down because that's jobs for people," he said. "I'm not trying to put people out of business. I don't want to stop progress or people living, you know. If I had anything to do with that, if I had the power to shut it down: No, huh uh, I'd build more. I would let the plant go on giving people jobs and let it keep moving."

Nationally, however, the outlook isn't good. Pressured by low natural gas prices, coal lost its spot as the top fuel for electricity generation in 2016, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Coal's share fell from about 42 percent in 2011 to 30 percent last year, the EIA reported. Virtue and vice There's a stubbornness ingrained in the Scots-Irish ancestry of many of the people in this area, Colson said. This translates into fierce loyalty to the community and the Miller plant. "That loyalty is a virtue," Colson said, "but that loyalty, in the face of reality, becomes a vice." The plant is a mainstay, its benefits obvious. Climate change can seem nebulous and far off, even though some of its effects are already manifesting. Nearly 70 percent of the people in Jefferson County believe in climate change, a 2016 Yale University study found, but only half believe it's caused mostly by human activities. Around 65 percent think global warming will "harm future generations" at least a moderate amount, but only 39 percent believe it will "harm me personally" to that extent.

There are many barriers to overcome. People here first must believe that climate change is real. Then they must believe that it's harmful, that Miller is contributing to it and that they can do something about it. That is, as Colson put it, one "tough row to hoe." In the case of Paul and Tammy Dollar, it's not that they're unconcerned about the plant's contribution to climate change—it's that the consequences seem too far down the road. Ask them about global warming and they'll launch into a story about coal dust on their cars or a neighbor who's ill. That's real. It's there, to be touched and smelled and inhaled. Paul Dollar, 75, has lived just a few hundred yards from the plant for over 30 years. The unhealthy gases, chemicals and metals Miller pumps into the air are on the decline. But its greenhouse-gas emissions haven't fallen nearly as much. It puts out about one million more metric tons of greenhouse gases than the No. 2 facility in the nation, the Scherer power plant in Georgia, owned partly by Southern. What lies ahead for power production in the South remains a question, particularly in Miller's corner of Alabama. People don't even realize the force of greenhouse gases around them. We're going to need all the help we can get here. But Colson has hope. Page 12 7 Crazy Things That Are Going To Happen As Sea Levels Rise Sea levels are rising and it certainly is changing the face of the earth. Although it’s happening at a much slower rate, the long term effects will be incredibly devastating. From 1880 - 2009, the global sea level rose approximately 8 inches. That means that allthe oceans are now approximately 8 inches higher now than they were 150 years ago. Even more frightening, the average annual rate of the global rise dramatically increased from 1993 - 2008, up 65 - 90 percent over the previous years. The waters are rising faster, with the U.S. East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico increasing the fastest.

But why is this happening? As humans have increased greenhouse gases as well as cut down the world’s forests, the overall temperature has risen about 1.4 degrees since 1880. This rise in temperature has caused the ocean waters to get warmer, which in turn causes them to expand. Expanding waters leads to higher levels. Additionally, the warming waters are causing the ice caps, glaciers, and ice sheets of the world to melt, which is then funneling water into the oceans. As more and more ice melts, the seas will continue to rise. How much are the seas going to continue rising? It’s an inexact science since so many variables are at play, but general estimates can be made. Even if all contributors immediately stopped, it’s likely that the oceans will rise between 1.2-2.6 feet by 2100. If things continue at their current pace, sea levels could rise as much as 6.6 feet. The main factor determining the sea levels will be how quickly the world’s ice continues to melt.National Geographic puts it this way "Oceans will likely continue to rise as well, but predicting the degree to which they will rise is an inexact science. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we can expect the oceans to rise between 11 and 38 inches (28 to 98 centimeters) by 2100, enough to swamp many of the cities along the U.S. East Coast. More dire estimates, including a complete meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet, place sea level rise to 23 feet (7 meters), enough to submerge London. What’s going to happen as sea levels rise? Bad things.

#1 - It’s Going To Screw Up Our Farming

What do plants need to survive? Water. Fresh, clean water. When you pour a cup of coffee on an office plant, you kill it. When you pour polluted water on a plant, you suck the life out of it. AND, when you pour saltwater on a plant, you destroy it. As sea levels rise, we can expect the groundwater to become more salty, meaning that plants are going to be guzzling increasing amounts of saltwater. This isn’t good. What happens when plants suck up saltwater? It stunts their growth and sometimes kills them

#2 - It’s Going To Pollute Our Drinking Water

You can’t drink seawater. Anyone who has watched a lost at sea movie knows that the moment you drink saltwater, you start dehydrating. As our sea levels rise and the water comes further ashore, it’s going to start sinking into our freshwater sources in the ground. Coastal areas rely on these sources for freshwater, and their pollution could be catastrophic. This is why numerous communities are already working to install desalinization plants which will transform saltwater into freshwater. As levels continues to rise, this kind of project will become increasingly pressing.

#3 - The Economy Will Suffer

Hundreds of coastal communities rely on the ocean to sustain their economies. As sea levels rise, those economies will take an enormous hit, and entire industries may be destroyed. Oceanfront properties will be ruined and recreational areas will be washed away. Historical landmarks will be erased and beaches themselves will be totally altered. Tourists will find these areas far less appealing, dramatically reducing income from real estate and tourist activities.

#4 - It Will Significantly Alter Plant Life

City of Mumbai. As saltwater works its way higher and higher up the coast, it’s going to alter the composition of the soil. When this happens, plant life is going to have to adapt. Some plants will vanish, unable to live in the salty soil. Other, new plants may emerge and thrive. Trees in particular will struggle as it’s difficult for them to extract water from salty soil. Their growth may be stunted and some species may disappear altogether.

#5 - The Wildlife Will Suffer

Hundreds of thousands of animals make their home along the coast. As the ocean levels rise, their homes will be disrupted, altered, and even destroyed. Birds, turtles, and all manner of wildlife will either die off or be forced to dramatically adapt. As plant life is changed and destroyed, wildlife food sources will become increasingly scarce. Flooding will destroy nests and endangered animals like turtles will find it more difficult to survive.

#6 - Flooding Will Get Worse

Currently, tidal increases occur twice each month during full and new moons. The combined gravitational pull of the sun and moon cause the tide to rise a bit higher along the coast. Usually these tidal increases don’t cause problems, although occasionally flooding can occur depending on water levels, storms, and winds. As sea levels increase, tidal flooding events will become significantly worse. Already, some coastal areas are seeing flooding happen at a 400% greater rate since 1970.

An analysis of 52 different locations showed that things will be particularly bad by the year 2045. By 2045, many coastal communities are expected to see roughly one foot of sea level rise. The resulting increases in tidal flooding will be substantial and nearly universal in the 52 communities analyzed. One-third of the 52 locations would face tidal flooding more than 180 times per year. Nine locations, including Atlantic City and Cape May, New Jersey could see tidal flooding 240 times or more per year. This flooding will have massive effects on these locations, destroying property and completely disrupting communities.

New York City. As sea levels rise, many properties along the coast will become unusable. Property magnates like Donald Trump will find themselves losing valuable buildings and acreages due to increased flooding. South Florida in particular, where “Trump Hollywood” is located, is often called the ground zero of the rising tides. New Yorker reports: Of all the world’s cities, Miami ranks second in terms of assets vulnerable to rising seas—No. 1 is Guangzhou—and in terms of population it ranks fourth, after Guangzhou, Mumbai, and Shanghai. A recent report on storm surges in the United States listed four Florida cities among the eight most at risk. (On that list, Tampa came in at No. 1.) For the past several years, the daily high-water mark in the Miami area has been racing up at the rate of almost an inch a year, nearly ten times the rate of average global sea-level rise. This doesn’t bode well for Trump and other property owners in the region. Who knows how long it will be until entire portions of the coast are submerged?

The green technologies of future can have a potential solution to address climate change. But does an economic system driven by cultural values determined by profit motive, take it to a scale and make it available for the masses. Will the green technologies be accessible to all? When even agricultural technologies and gas cylinder hasn’t been able to reach the masses and the producers, how can the greener technologies reach the masses? Similar to acceptance of the earth’s capacities to support modern unsustainable lifestyles are to be agreed upon, similarly limits of the economic system driven by profit motive to make shift to sustainable future needs to be questioned.

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

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

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

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. Average global temperatures have risen 1°C since the industrial era, and 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.

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

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

For heat waves, our options are now between bad or terrible. Many people around the world are already paying the ultimate price of heat waves, and while models suggest that this is likely to continue, it could be much worse if emissions are not considerably reduced. The human body can only function within a narrow range of core body temperatures around 37°C. Heat waves pose a considerable risk to human life because hot weather, aggravated with high humidity, can raise body temperature, leading to life-threatening conditions.

By 2019 climate would change inexorably in at least some regions of the globe. More recently he and colleagues calculated that the relentless increase in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could limit the growing season and pose a threat to world food security. History has yet to deliver a verdict on either prediction.

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

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

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

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

America’s main competitors get the point and have already planned to phase out coal. On April 21, the United Kingdom met its energy needs without burning any coal at all — for the first time since the Industrial Revolution. And the country’s last coal-burning power station will close within the next decade.

Meanwhile, a majority of energy companies in the European Union have promised to stop investing in new coal plants by 2020. China is also fast reducing its reliance on coal. It recently canceled over 100 planned new coal-fired power plants, as well as slashing production at state-controlled coal mines. China has pledged to reduce coal production by 800 million tons per year by 2020, more than the entire annual output of all U.S. mines combined. Instead of trying to revive the mining sector, in short, we should be planning for its replacement. Initiatives like the Empower Kentucky project are trying to do just that. They’re promoting jobs in energy efficiency and renewable energy while helping the coal miners who’ve been hung out to dry — not by the EPA, but by bankrupt coal companies intent on protecting their bosses’ benefits.

States are increasingly stepping up to plan for these transitions while the federal government pursues the myth of coal, as a new Institute for Policy Studies report points out. For example, Oregon plans to phase out coal completely by 2030 and expects half of all its electricity to come from renewables by 2040. Expanding renewable energy is good for jobs, too. “Green jobs” in energy efficiency, public transportation, and renewables already outnumber those employed by oil, gas, and coal companies, according to figures from the Department of Energy. The contrast between coal and solar power is even stronger. Coal now employs just 160,000 Americans, a third of whom are miners. Solar energy, by contrast, now employs over 370,000 people and is one of the fastest growing parts of our economy. The figures don’t tell the whole story, of course, with most new solar jobs in California while some coal states lag far behind. But the key lesson here is that the state legislatures promoting renewable energy most heavily are reaping the rewards. Instead of pretending that coal jobs could return, politicians should be promoting renewable energy as a way to create work that former coal employees can be proud of while protecting our air and climate. There’s little chance of the Trump administration getting out of its coal hole, but that’s all the more reason for local leaders to step up to the plate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All considered, the best course of action, unless one is incredibly affluent, is to run for the hills -- almost quite literally so. Under the circumstance, it could be sensible to find a quiet niche somewhere in which there's already a community in place whose members have the appropriate skills sets, constructive understandings and a supportive intact surrounding environment so as to be able to create a largely self-reliant way of life. Even though such a change could be hard, the option of doing nothing different could become increasingly problematic in light of the further social and ecological breakdown that's assuredly on the way.

Dollar and death calculations of GHG pollution versus global GDP calculation.

We need to urgently cut carbon emissions and eventually cease greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution in coming decades. Ignored by mainstream media is the need to drawdown atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) from the present day dangerous and damaging 430 parts per million CO2 (430 ppm CO2) to a safe and sustainable 300 ppm CO2 i.e. negative GHG emissions. Scientists and science-informed activists argue that a target of about 300 ppm CO2 is required for a safe and sustainable environment for all peoples and all species, noting that before the Industrial Revolution the atmospheric CO2 had not exceeded 280 ppm CO2 in the last 800,000 years. Even though a large-scale mechanisms for doing this is expensive, otherwise we will be leaving future generations with an inescapable present Carbon Debt of about $130 trillion that is remorselessly increasing at about $10 trillion per year. Global Community has been aware since the 1980s of the actual global warming impact of atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) like carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). Atmospheric CO2 has been monitored at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, since 1958 and has now reached a record today 430 ppm CO2 and was increasing at a maximum rate of 3 ppm CO2 per year in recent years. The highest annual average atmospheric CO2 each year (it increases in the Northern winter and decreases in the Northern summer) has increased at an ever-increasing rate from 320 ppm CO2 in 1960 (increasing at 0.5 ppm CO2 per year) to 408 ppm CO2 in 2016 (increasing at 3.0 ppm CO2 per year). In 2017 the maximum CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory was 410 ppm CO2, and now in 2018 it is 430 ppm CO2.

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

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

CO2 is presently about 0.041% by volume of the atmosphere (equal to 410 parts per million CO2 or 400 ppm CO2) which corresponds to approximately 3,200 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO2 (the molecular weight of CO2 is 44 and the atomic weight of C is 12, and thus the atmospheric C = 3,200 Gt CO2 x (12 Gt C/44 Gt CO2) = 873 Gt of carbon (C)). Each part per million by volume (ppm) of CO2 in the atmosphere thus represents 3,200 Gt CO2/410 ppm CO2 = 7.8 Gt CO2 (2.13 Gt C). Lowering the atmospheric CO2 from the present 410 ppm CO2 to a requisite 300 ppm CO2 would mean removing 110 ppm CO2 x 7.8 Gt CO2 per ppm CO2 = 858 Gt CO2 i.e. a Carbon Debt of 858 Gt CO2. Assuming a damage-related Carbon Price of US$200 per tonne CO2-equivalent, this corresponds to a Carbon Debt of $172 trillion. With atmospheric CO2 increasing at 3 ppm CO2 per year, the annual increase in Carbon Debt is 3 ppm CO2 x 7.8 Gt CO2 per ppm CO2 = 23.4 Gt CO2 or $4.7 trillion per year. However it gets worse. World Bank analysts have revised annual GHG pollution by considering the contribution of methanogenic livestock production and attendant land use together with a Global Warming Potential of methane (CH4) that is 72 times that of CO2 on a horribly pertinent 20 year time frame as compared to 21 on a 100 year time scale (CH4 has a half-life in the atmosphere of 8 years as compared to 100 years for CO2). The World Bank revised estimate increases the annual GHG pollution from 41.8 Gt CO2-equivalent (CO2-e) to 63.8 Gt CO2-e, this latter figure corresponding to an annual increase in Carbon Debt of 63.8 Gt CO2-e x $200 per t CO2-e = $12.8 trillion or $1,701 each for every one of the present 7.5 billion human beings. One notes that the world average GDP per capita is presently about $10,000. Further, the annual increase in global Carbon Debt of $12.8 trillion may be an under-estimate because the Global Warming Potential of CH4 on a 20 year time frame is 105 if atmospheric aerosol impacts are considered.

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

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

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

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

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

The Arctic, health and bunker oil used by container ships.

There is a serious threat lurking in the Arctic that has largely escaped attention from the public and the media. Ships just started traveling through the icy Arctic even in the depths of winter. New shipping routes and increasing ship traffic due to ice melt bring greater environmental hazards. One of the most critical risks facing the Arctic, aside from climate change, is the use of heavy fuel oil which is basically heated tar. Heavy fuel oil, also known as residual fuel or bunker oil, is the tar-like sludge that is left over from the crude oil refining process. It’s essentially the bottom of the barrel and is so viscous it has to be heated to allow it to flow before it can be used by ships. The only denser oils are those used in asphalt and roof sealing. It is the fuel of choice for ships in the Arctic because it is the cheapest fuel. The International Maritime Organization, an agency of the United Nations, has already banned heavy fuel oil in Antarctic waters, yet it is still the most commonly used fuel in the Arctic. More than 1,300 ships sail through the Arctic every year, and 75% of the total mass of fuel on board is heavy fuel oil.

Ships using HFO emit sulfur, nitrogen oxides and black carbon. Also known as soot, black carbon is deposited by passing ships onto ice and snow, causing the affected area to absorb more radiation from the sun instead of reflecting it away back into space. It covers the land in soot. This leads to more warming and more melting, creating a vicious cycle. Black carbon emissions are expected to increase, possibly as much as 46%, as Arctic shipping traffic continues to increase every year. Heavy fuel oil can cause asthma, lung cancer and birth defects. Black carbon is also a major threat to human health. Its fine particles are small enough to be inhaled into our lungs and cause respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and birth defects. This puts four million people from eight Arctic nations at risk of severe medical conditions.

Heavy fuel oil is virtually impossible to clean up after a spill. It is cheaper than other crude oil, but is several times more expensive to clean up after a spill. The chilly Arctic waters prevent this oil from dispersing or degrading naturally, and it tends to sink rather than float on the surface. During warmer months, sunken heavy fuel oil can rise back to the surface and pollute shores that were already considered to be clean. A heavy fuel oil spill would devastate Arctic wildlife like whales, seals, walrus and seabirds.

Heavy fuel oil could destroy Arctic ecosystems. Heavy fuel oil is toxic to fish; seabirds and marine mammals that are covered by the oil are at risk of hypothermia or death. This isn’t speculation: In 2003, a tanker ship collided with another vessel in Russia’s White Sea, spilling 54 tons of heavy fuel oil into prime beluga whale calving habitat. Only 16 percent of the oil was ever recovered, and the area is still 22 times the permissible contamination level set by the Russian government. Multiple beluga carcasses were found in the area, and the whales have been forced to seek other areas in which to give birth.

Heavy fuel oil could devastate Arctic communities. A spill would be disastrous for hundreds of indigenous communities that depend on ocean life for subsistence, as well as commercial fisheries that in many areas serve as economic foundations. In 2004, a cargo vessel lost power and ran aground outside of Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, spilling 338,000 gallons of fuel. This forced a portion of the tanner crab season to be canceled. Fishermen operating out of the harbor lost an estimated $500,000 in revenue.

Global Community wants U.N.’s International Maritime Organization and country delegations to get heavy fuel oil out of the Arctic and make sure that ships navigating in the Arctic use clean energy.

In coming decades, because of global warming, the Arctic tundra permafrost and Arctic Ocean sea bed will release Methane CH4, a much more deadly GHG than CO2.

The global warming trajectory gets even worse still if one considers the Methane Bomb of the Arctic tundra and Arctic Ocean sea bed. The Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CH4 is 21 times that of CO2 on a 100 year time frame but is 105 times greater than that of CO2 on a 20 year time frame and taking atmospheric aerosol impacts into account. Huge stores of CH4 as water-methane (H2O-CH4) clathrates in the Arctic tundra permafrost and on the Arctic Ocean sea bed may be released in coming decades due to global warming, with this release involving a disastrous positive feedback loop in which global warming causes CH4 release, thence more global warming and consequently even more CH4 release. Atmospheric CH4 increased in 1983-1998 by up to 13 ppb (parts per billion) per year, increased much more slowly in the period 1999-2006 (up to 3 ppb per year, the 2001-2005 average being 0.5 ppb/year), and has increased more rapidly from 2007 onwards, reaching 12.5 ppb per year in 2014. Atmospheric CH4 increased to 1,843 ppb CH4 in December 2015 as compared to a pre-Industrial Revolution level of 700 ppb CH4.

As the amount of Arctic sea ice declines at an unprecedented rate, the thawing of offshore permafrost releases methane. A 50-gigatonne (Gt) reservoir of methane, stored in the form of hydrates, exists on the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. It is likely to be emitted as the seabed warms, either steadily over 50 years or suddenly. However the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CH4 on a 20 year time frame and with aerosol impacts considered is 105 times that of CO2. No more than a terminal carbon pollution budget of 600 billion tonnes of CO2 can be emitted between 2010 and zero emissions in 2050 if the world is to have a 75% chance of avoiding a catastrophic 2C temperature rise. That Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget has now effectively been exceeded. Indeed climate criminal Australia’s commitment to fossil fuel exploitation means that Australia is set to exceed the world’s 2009 Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget by a factor of 3. However the 50 Gt (billion tonnes) CH4 in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is thus equivalent to 50 billion tonnes CH4 x 105 tonnes CO2-equivalent/tonne CH4 = 5,250 billion tonnes CO2-e or about nine (9) times more than the world’s remaining Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget in 2009. We are doomed unless we can stop this Arctic CH4 release.

As the temperatures rise, heat and humidity will threaten most people on Earth by Century's end. By 2100, if nations continue to burn fossil fuels at the current rates, three out of four people will be at risk from lethal heat waves. And even if governments of the world act on promises they made in 2015 and drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, almost one in two could face the risk of sickness and death by intolerable heat. That is because, as the temperatures rise, heat and humidity begin to challenge human physiology. Humans are adapted to body temperatures of around 37°C. If humidity, the levels of water vapour in the air, go up with the thermometer, then people caught in a zone of extreme heat cannot adjust body temperatures by perspiration. And with every 1°C rise in temperatures, the capacity of the air to hold moisture goes up by 7 percent. People with no access to air conditioning or a cool breeze become at high risk. It happened in Europe in 2003, when an estimated 70,000 died. A heat wave in Moscow in 2010 killed around 10,000. And researchers warned years ago that under global warming predictions, more such extremes of heat would become inevitable by 2020. For heat waves, our options are now between bad or terrible. Many people around the world are already paying the ultimate price of heat waves, and while models suggest that this is likely to continue, it could be much worse if emissions are not considerably reduced. The human body can only function within a narrow range of core body temperatures around 37°C. Heat waves pose a considerable risk to human life because hot weather, aggravated with high humidity, can raise body temperature, leading to life-threatening conditions.

The relentless increase in GHG levels in the atmosphere could limit the growing season and pose a threat to world food security. History has yet to deliver a verdict on either prediction. But the warning about heat waves starts from facts already available. There is a link, evidence on a global scale between extremes of heat, climate change and mass death. The humidity and temperature hazards measurements have shown that at least in one climate zone, the Gulf between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, could become murderously hot by the century’s end. They began with 30,000 relevant publications and identified 911 scientific papers with data on 1,949 case studies of cities or regions where deaths were associated with high temperatures. From this mass of information they found 783 lethal heat waves in 164 cities across 36 countries, with most cases recorded in developed countries at mid-latitudes since 1980: in cities such as New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, London, Beijing, Tokyo, Sydney and São Paulo. Right now, one human in three lives in a climate zone in which death by extreme heat is or could be possible. The area in which such conditions are liable to happen on at least 20 days a year is predicted to grow. By 2100 New York could have around 50 days in which conditions could be potentially lethal. In Sydney, Australia the number of such deadly days could be 20, for Los Angeles 30. For Orlando, Florida, and Houston, Texas, the entire summer could exceed the thresholds at which people have been known to die. If nations act in a concerted way to reduce fossil fuel emissions, an estimated 48 percent of the human population could be at risk of summer extremes. And if they do not, this hazard rises to 74 percent. Climate change has put humanity on a path that will become increasingly dangerous and difficult to reverse if greenhouse gas emissions are not taken much more seriously. Action like the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement is a step in the wrong direction that will inevitably delay fixing a problem for which there is simply no time to waste.

Extreme, catastrophic economically and socially disastrous wildfires could increase by up to 40% as the world warms.

The conditions for extreme and catastrophic wildfires could increase by 20% to 50% as the world warms and the climate changes, according to new research. An analysis of 23 million wildfires between 2002 and 2013 has identified 478 of the worst, scientists call them extreme wildfire events. Extreme fire events are a global and natural phenomenon, particularly in forested areas that have pronounced dry seasons. They are extreme fire events that were concentrated in regions where humans have built into flammable forested landscapes, such as areas surrounding cities in southern Australia and western North America. Global temperatures rise in response to the ever greater levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, as a consequence of the increasing combustion of fossil fuels. Fire poses a threat to the entire warming world. US authorities spent more than $2 bn suppressing wildfires in 2015, but greater conflagrations are expected in the US west, and wildfire damage could eventually double. But the hazard is not confined to the Americas. In more than nine out of 10 cases, anomalous weather conditions made the hazard worse. These could be high winds, high temperatures and drought, and, in desert regions, unusually high rainfall the preceding season that triggers greater growth and more fuel for the next fire. Climate change is causing fire seasons to start earlier and finish later, with an associated trend towards more extreme wildfire events in terms of their geographic extent and duration, intensity, severity, associated suppression costs, and loss of life and property. The sharpest increases will be on Australia’s east coast and in the Mediterranean basin, in particular Portugal, Spain, France, Greece and Turkey. Some of these landscapes are naturally adapted to fire. But in the US, a higher proportion of all fires became disasters for precisely identified reasons. What makes a fire event a disaster in the US is when key factors combine, low-density housing amidst dense forests, the right climatic conditions and a lack of fire preparedness on the part of humans.

Environment, debt, and future generations.

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

Corporate polluters are the worst offenders.

Are countries like China and India the “worst offenders” in terms of contributing to global air pollution and other environmental ills? The blame should instead be placed where it belongs – with transnational corporations and their highly-profitable global trade networks. A recent study of air pollution in the western United States made a startling finding: despite a 50 percent drop over the past 25 years in US emissions of smog-producing chemicals like nitrogen oxides (NOx), smog actually increased during that period in the rural US West – even in such ‘pristine’ environments as Yellowstone National Park. Most of this increase was traced to “the influx of pollution from Asian countries, including China, North and South Korea, Japan, India, and other South Asian countries.” That’s because over the same period that NOx emissions declined in the US, they tripled in Asia as a whole. In media reports of the study, China and India are described as the “worst offenders” of this fugitive “Asian pollution”. Left only with these findings, a reasonable conclusion would be that the US has become more environmentally enlightened in recent decades, while Asia – particularly ‘developing’ Asia – is a veritable eco-reprobate, sacrificing not only its own but global airsheds to choking pollution. The new, anti-environmental EPA director, Scott Pruitt, recently expressed this view in explaining why the US should exit the Paris Climate Accord: “China and India] are polluting far more than we are. What’s missing? A similar study of global air pollution drift in 2014, focusing on China and the US, made comparable findings, but included an important factor missing from the more recent study: production for export. Among other things, the scholars of the older study asked how much of the Chinese air pollution drifting to the Western US was occasioned specifically in the production of exports for world markets (including the top destination for Chinese manufactures, the US.) The answer? In 2006, up to 24% of sulfate concentrations over the western United States were generated in the Chinese production of goods for export to the US. Applying these findings to the more recent study, it’s likely that a significant percentage of the Asian nitrogen oxides now choking the US West were also emitted in the production of goods destined for the US. In other words, it’s meaningless to speak of “Asian pollution” in this context. Though the pollution was emitted in Asia, it properly belongs to the country/ies on whose behalf and at whose behest it was produced. Even more accurately, the pollution finally belongs to the transnational corporations (TNCs) who are the real drivers and beneficiaries not only of offshoring, but also of insatiable consumerism through marketing and obsolescence. Economic globalization has enabled the manic scouring of the world by TNCs for the most ‘liberal’ (read: unregulated) environments in which to locate production facilities – the places where expenses can be minimized and profits maximized. Since the biggest drags on corporate profiteering come from taxes, environmental regulations, and decent labor protections and wages, the global relocations of TNCs have largely been towards countries where those costs are lowest, or absent altogether. By increasing their economic power, globalization has also given TNCs the ability to capture governments, which then collude in further reshaping of the world through ‘free’ trade treaties, supra-national institutions like the IMF, WTO and World Bank, and subsidies and hand-outs to attract and retain big businesses.

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

Americans, Canadians and Australians are making sure to doom the world with unlimited Greenhouse Gas Pollution.

US President Donald Trump, Trumpist Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull and pro-oil sands Canadian PM Justin Trudeau are acutely threatening the world with unlimited greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution from unlimited fossil fuel exploitation. For the United States, Canada and Australia, full exploitation of presently recoverable fossil fuel reserves would generate GHG pollution vastly exceeding (37-fold) the whole world’s remaining Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget that must not be exceeded for a 75% chance of avoiding a catastrophic 2C temperature rise. This climate criminality invites urgent global action through Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and Green Tariffs. Donald Trump has the virtue of explicitly stating what he thinks in very few words, and just prior to being elected promised: “On the first day of my term of office… I will begin taking the following seven actions to protect American workers… Fifth, I will lift the restrictions on the production of $50 trillion dollars’ worth of job-producing American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal. Sixth, lift the Obama-Clinton roadblocks and allow vital energy infrastructure projects, like the Keystone Pipeline, to move forward. Seventh, cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs and use the money to fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure”.

Immediately on being elected, Trump clearly and succinctly enunciated his policy on unlimited fossil fuel exploitation and “clean coal” (2016): “On energy I will cancel job killing restrictions on the production of shale energy and clean coal, creating many millions of high-paying jobs”. (Note that “shale energy” means non-conventional gas from “fracking” of gas-rich shale deposits and non-conventional oil extracted from shale rock). Trumpist Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull and pro-oil sands, neo-Trumpist Canadian PM Justin Trudeau have made similar commitments to massive GHG pollution from unrestrained exploitation of fossil fuel reserves. It is crucially important to attempt to quantitate the greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution consequences of the pro-fossil fuel policies of climate change denier Trump and his effective climate change denialist (climate skeptic) Australian and Canadian lackeys. A powerful way of doing this is to relate the expected gigantic Trumpist GHG pollution to the Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget of the world that must not be exceeded if we are to avoid a catastrophic plus 2 degree Centigrade (2C) temperature rise.

The 2009 Report of the German Scientific Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU, Wissenshaftlicher Beirat der Bundesregierung Globale Umweltveränderungen) entitled “Solving the climate dilemma: the budget approach” crucially stated: “The budget of CO2 emissions still available worldwide could be derived from the 2 degree C guard rail. By the middle of the 21st century a maximum of approximately 750 Gt CO2 (billion metric tons) may be released into the Earth’s atmosphere if the guard rail is to be adhered to with a probability of 67%. If we raise the probability to 75%, the cumulative emissions within this period would even have to remain below 600 Gt CO2. In any case, only a small amount of CO2 may be emitted worldwide after 2050. Thus, the era of an economy driven by fossil fuels will definitely have to come to an end within the first half of this century”. World Bank analysts have revised annual greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution upwards by 50% to 64 billion tonnes CO2-e (CO2-equivalent, this including contributions from other greenhouse gases, notably methane, CH4) by properly accounting for methanogenic livestock and land use for animal husbandry. A key element of their analysis was to use a Global Warming Potential (GWP) of methane (CH4) relative to that of carbon dioxide (CO2) of 72 in a 20-year time frame rather than the 25 on a 100 year time frame used by the FAO. Indeed the World Bank analysis evidently still understates the GHG pollution because NASA scientists have re-evaluated the GWP of CH4 as 105 in a 20 year time frame with aerosol impacts considered. The same approach has been used to properly re-calculate annual per capita GHG pollution for all countries, and hence the best targets for global Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) to save the planet). One notes, however, that in scoring climate criminal countries for relative culpability, a fairer measure is annual per capita GHG pollution weighted for annual per capita income. In the last 8 years (mid-2009- mid-2017) GHG pollution has totalled 8 years x 64 billion tonnes CO2-e per year = 512 tonnes CO2-e and thus the whole world’s Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget is down to 600 – 512 = 88 billion tonnes CO2-e as of mid-2017 i.e. the whole world has only about 1 year left before it uses up the last of its Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget for a 75% chance of avoiding a catastrophic 2 degree Centigrade temperature rise. Let us now consider the Trump, Turnbull and Trudeau GHG pollution promises in detail.

America and world energy.

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

The Institute for Energy Research (IER) estimates for the US that “the total technically recoverable oil shale resource estimate [is] 2.6 trillion barrels”. On combustion this 2,600 billion barrels of oil would yield 2,600 billion barrels x 0.433 tonnes CO2/ barrel of oil = 1,126 billion tonnes CO2, this being 1,126/88 = 12.8 or about 13 times greater than the world’s present remaining Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget.

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

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

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

Pro-fossil fuels Trumpist Australia.

Climate criminal Australia ignores the German climate change scientists who estimated in 2009 that the world must emit no more than 600 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) before 2050 if it is to have a 75% chance of avoiding a catastrophic 2 degree Centigrade temperature rise. Australia’s annual domestic plus exported greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution is so high that it exceeded its “fair share” of this terminal GHG pollution budget by mid-2011 and since then has been stealing the entitlement of all other nations. Australia ‘s commitment to unlimited gas, coal and iron ore exports (supported by both the extreme Right governing Coalition and the Right-dominated Labor Opposition) means that it is committed to polluting the atmosphere with over 3 times the world’s total Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget as of mid-2009 (600 billion tonnes CO2-e) or 20 times the whole world’s Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget of 88 billion tonnes CO2-e as of mid-2017.

Recent revised estimates taking land use into account indicate that Australia ‘s annual Domestic per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution (52.9 tonnes CO2-e per person per year ) is about 20 times greater than the annual per capita GHG pollution of acutely climate change-threatened Bangladesh (2.7 tonnes CO2-e per person per year). However, Australia ‘s annual Domestic plus Exported per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution (116 tonnes CO2-e per person per year ) is about 43 times greater than the annual per capita GHG pollution of acutely climate change-threatened Bangladesh (2.7 tonnes CO2-e per person per year). Look-the-other-way, climate criminal Australia remorselessly excludes from public discussion its huge Exported GHG pollution (1511 Mt CO2-e Exported GHG pollution in 2015 as compared to 600 Mt CO2-e Domestic GHG pollution).

Neo-Trumpist Trudeau Canada.

An assertedly progressive, politically correct and “nice” politician but actually a two-faced, climate criminal, Trump-lite, neo-Trumpist, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau has alarmed climate activists by welcoming Trump’s approval of the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline and approving 2 further pipelines to carry oil from Alberta tar sands to global markets. Trudeau recently back-tracked on comments about phasing out tar sands oil , declaring that he had “misspoken” and really meant that Canada would not be using fossil fuels in 100 years’ time.

Back in 2012 Professor James Hansen commented thus on the Keystone XL pipeline: “Global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.” If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate. Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk”.

Fortunately, according to Wikipedia, only 178 billion or about 10% of the 1,700 billion barrels of oil in the Canadian tar sands is presently economically recoverable. The 178 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the Alberta tar sands corresponds to 178 billion barrels x 0.433 tonnes CO2/ barrel of oil = 78 billion tonnes CO2 or about 89% of the whole world’s remaining Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget of 88 billion tonnes CO2-e as of 2017. Game over for the climate.

However where there’s a will there’s a way, as well illustrated by the present Gadarene Canadian exploitation of tar sands oil. If neoliberal greed ensures that all the Canadian tars sands oil is exploited then the GHG pollution (ignoring that from purifying the oil) would be 1,700 billion barrels x 0.433 tonnes CO2/ barrel of oil = 736 billion tonnes CO2 or 736/88 = 8.4 or over 8 times more than the whole world’s remaining Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget of 88 billion tonnes CO2-e as of 2017. Game well and truly over.

Unlimited fossil fuel exploitation means a commitment to GHG pollution over 16 times greater than the world’s present remaining Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget that must not be exceeded if we are to have a 75% chance of avoiding a catastrophic 2C temperature rise.

Trump’s commitment tounlimited fossil fuel exploitation means a commitment to GHG pollution over 16 times greater than the world’s present remaining Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget (88 billion tonnes CO2-e) that must not be exceeded of we are to have a 75% chance of avoiding a catastrophic 2C temperature rise. Climate criminal Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull, with the support of the Labor Party Opposition, is resolutely committed to unlimited fossil fuel and related exports that would see Australia exceed by 20-fold the whole world’s remaining Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget. Trudeau Canada’s commitment to exploitation of its huge oil sands deposits will use up 89% of the whole world’s remaining Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget. Indeed if the enterprising Canadians found a way of economically exploiting all the tar sands oil then this would generate GHG pollution over 8 times greater than the whole world’s remaining Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget.

The greed and exceptionalism of climate criminal Trump America, Trumpist Australia and neo-Trumpist Canada is further evidenced by revised annual per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution (in tonnes per person per year) of 52.9 for Australia ( 116 if including its huge GHG-generating exports), 50.1 for Canada, and 41.0 for the United States as compared to an average of 8.9 for the world, 7.4 for China, 2.7 for Bangladesh, 2.6 for Egypt, 2.5 for Pakistan and 2.1 for India.

The 2015 Paris Climate Conference goal of ideally no more than 1.5C will be exceeded in 4-10 years and it is now too late to avoid a catastrophic 2 degree Centigrade temperature rise. Thus, for example, in 2017 UK scholar Dr Andrew Simms (co-director of the New Weather Institute, author of “Cancel the Apocalypse” and a research fellow on rapid transition at the University of Sussex) asked a number of leading climate scientists and analysts for their views on whether we could avoid a 2C temperature rise: “In short, not a single one of the scientists polled thought the 2C target likely to be met. Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, is most emphatic. “My personal view,” he says, “is that there is not a cat in hell’s chance”.

Global CO2 pollution is increasing at a record rate of 3 ppm CO2 per year and atmospheric CO2 is at a record level of about 406 ppm CO2. The evident failure to tackle climate change is contributing to a worsening climate genocide in which 10 billion people may perish this century if global warming is not requisitely addressed. Already 7.5 million people die each year from air pollution (7 million) or climate change (0.5 million). However the latter figure may be an under-estimate because 17 million people presently die avoidably each year from deprivation in Developing Countries that already disproportionately impacted by climate change. Saleemul Huq (director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh) (2017): “The consequences of failing to keep the temperature below 1.5C will be to wilfully condemn hundreds of millions of the poorest citizens of Earth to certain deaths from the severe impacts of climate change”.

Professor Michael E. Mann (Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Pennsylvania State University) has stated (2014): “If we are to limit global warming to below two degrees C forever … we would have to limit CO2 to below roughly 405 ppm… To avoid breaching the 405-ppm threshold [already breached in 2016], fossil-fuel burning would essentially have to cease immediately”.

Yet the anti-science, anti-Humanity, neoliberal and effective climate change denialist Trumpist leaderships of the US, Australia and Canada are wilfully committed to unlimited fossil fuel exploitation and huge, terracidal GHG pollution. Indeed US President Trump and Australian PM Turnbull have decorated their climate criminality with the false, moronic and oxymoronic assertion of “clean coal” – yet “clean coal” is akin to “consensual rape”. The deadly, immoral and unlimited GHG pollution by the US, Australia and Canada invites urgent global retaliation through Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and Green Tariffs.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, developed economies have been emitting GHGs which created global warming and today's environmental crisis, and that makes the capitalism system responsible, and we must first change it.

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

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

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

Yet a universal guaranteed income in recognition of biodiversity debt should not be a replacement for existing conservation programs. Instead, such a measure should be seen as an effort to inject an awareness of environmental and climate justice into debates around the extinction crisis. Biodiversity debt would thus augment existing conservation programs while militating against the creation of conservation refugees.

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

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

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

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

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

80% of us live by doing manual labour. In the interest of human survival and the survival of the remaining plants and animals, we must refuse to work on machines running on commercial energy, whether such machines are computers or car assembly robots let alone weapons of war. We must unite to overthrow the system which gives overwhelming priority to the growth of private property of capitalists and focus on the social, cultural, material means to do peaceful physical work on the land.

The best kind of physical work involves building up soil, growing food, and supporting the natural cycle of carbon sequestration and release in natural forests and other natural ecosystems of which we are a part. It involves, for example, swimming in the oceans and catching fish. Whether you call it the landscape approach, as biodiversity conservationists do, or land redistribution like landless labourers, or de-growth, or revolution, it all amounts to the same thing. We must overthrow capitalism, which may or may not be possible now. We must, however, at the very least put it under strict social control; if we don’t most human beings except for those in very favourable ecological niches with old cultures will most likely be wiped out along with most other fauna and flora.

The evidence of this can be seen every day as the oil and gas industry pushes hard, stomps on people, intimidates and threatens landowners, steals the land and destroy our environment to build the pipelines, compressor stations and export terminals. These pipelines crisscross our nation through old-growth forests, indigenous sacred lands and through rural communities that provide food for American families. The export terminals jeopardize Americans shorelines and marine life all just so they can sell gas overseas and make profits for a few. Farmers, ranchers and rural families were lied to, and in some cases called traitors or terrorists when they fought against this destructive industry. Communities and innocent families were told if they did not sell the rights to their land, the government will take it through eminent domain. ‘Our country’s national security is a public benefit which allows us to use eminent domain,’ they said. All of this was corporate and government propaganda. What Big Oil and Gas Really Want Today, the price of natural gas has dropped over 42 percent because of our new energy stockpile. That translates into more affordable energy for American households, but also fewer profits for the large corporations. So what oil and gas industries want now is to build pipelines and terminals to export as much of this energy as they possibly can, to once again make huge profits. Asia has already contracted to purchase gas from the new export terminal in Cove Point, Maryland.

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

An environmental catastrophe cannot be averted if a major international effort is not begun immediately. This is the conclusion reported in the 6,000-pages-long, the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the UN), compiled by 800 of the world’s top scientists and other experts and published in 2014. In order to avoid a 2°C increase in temperature, the level above which catastrophic damage will occur, global emissions must be reduced to half their current level by 2050. Unless all countries make a strong commitment to reduce carbon emissions immediately, the world’s environment will pass the tipping point and suffer the irredeemable consequences of doing too little too late. If no major global effort to reduce carbon emissions is made in the very near future, at least 177 million people, mostly in Asia (about 50 million of them in China), will experience frequent floods by the end of this century. This is in addition to the large number of people living in low-lying countries and in island nations, such as the Netherlands, Bangladesh and the Maldives, which are already seeing increasingly frequent flooding. But flooding is occurring in other countries as well, such as in the UK and along the Mississippi River in the US.

Flooding not only endangers lives but also has very high economic costs. For example, a group of Harvard scholars estimated that “rising seas could put American property worth 66 to 106 billion dollars literally under water by 2050” and noted that “If the numbers are any guide, the real damage would be greater still.” And, as an increasing number of news reports make us aware, droughts have been becoming longer and more severe worldwide in recent decades. These droughts are imposing an increasing economic cost and endangering the lives of more and more people because they reduce the water available for drinking, agriculture and many other uses and increase the frequency of large-scale forest fires.

Noting these developments, Antonio Guterres, the former UN High Commissioner of Refugees, stressed that all the world’s countries must be concerned with “the case of entire populations forced to migrate due to the lack of access to clean water, productive land or the occurrence of natural disasters.” He went on to say:

Climate change further exacerbates this issue through drought and desertification, two of the major factors contributing to food insecurity because they render land unsuitable for agriculture. Without productive lands, farmers cannot grow crops and are forced to leave their land plots in search of more fertile territories, which often cross national boundaries. Currently, over 1.5 billion people depend on degrading land and more than 1 billion are experiencing droughts. Climate change will exacerbate these issues, and most likely increase the number of environmental refugees, presently surpassing 36 million worldwide.

Despite Guterres’ assessment and the data and findings of the IPCC, the developed economies continue to do far less than is necessary to try to avert a catastrophe. To be sure, many governments have adopted numerous policies because those who are working towards doing more to sustain the environment have won some victories in policymaking arenas and in the courts. A good example is the US Supreme Court case in which in June 2014 the Environmental Protection Agency won the right to regulate greenhouse gases emitted by modified utility plants. However, the victory, won on a 7 to 2 decision, was restrained in that, in a separate 5 to 4 vote, the Court rejected the Agency’s broad assertion of regulatory power under one section of the Clean Air Act. As the continuing climate warming demonstrates, such victories in the developed economies have been too few to reverse the tide, despite the fact that in the battle against the looming environmental tipping point the developed economies must take a lion’s share of the responsibility. This is because today’s developed economies are the economies that have been emitting greenhouse gases and polluting the air since they began to industrialize.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per person measured in tons in 2012 were: 16.4 for the US; 10.4 for Japan; 9.7 for Germany; 7.7 for the UK; 7.1 for China; and 1.6 for India, according to estimates made in 2013 by the European Commission. In short, the developed economies are responsible for the environmental crisis we are facing today.

Effective policies on emissions

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

None of the results of scientific research to date has convincingly demonstrated that human actions have been responsible for climate warming and other environment degradation. Rather, this is a natural phenomenon out of our control. Thus there is little reason to allocate more resources to protect the environment, at the cost of economic growth.
Scientific studies presumably showing the urgency of the need to do more to protect the environment are an elaborate hoax put forth by the liberals. Whatever the scientific findings, doing more to protect the environment means more government involvement. This would reduce the efficient working of capitalism, which is indispensable for economic growth.
Since the developing economies, such as China and India, are causing environmental problems at such a rapid pace and of such huge magnitude, there is no reason for the developed economies to do more, to the detriment of their own economic performance.

Argument 1 is feigned skepticism or ignorant anti-scientism, put forth despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary. This is the same brazen deception as was used at a US Congressional hearing in April of 1994 by the seven CEOs of the largest American cigarette firms when they all denied that nicotine is addictive.

Argument 2 is no more than a desperate ruse motivated by ideology and/or political or financial gain. The “efficient working of capitalism” is a fig-leaf to conceal shortsighted self-interest.

Argument 3 is ludicrous because the developed economies, which polluted and degraded the environment freely from the time they began to industrialize until only several decades ago, are still the major emitters of pollution. This argument also ignores the fact that today the per capita consumption of energy from fossil fuel and other sources and the consequent emissions per capita in the developed economies are at least 10 to 100 times greater than the energy consumption and emissions output in all of the emerging economies.

In 2014 the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC, cited above, reported that the reductions in emissions that were necessary to avert the environmental tipping point would require huge investments. The Assessment describes the mitigation scenarios needed to make improvements in the technology of energy production from fossil fuels and renewables in order to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations in the range of 430–530 ppm CO2eq (parts per million, CO2 equivalent) by 2100. They would require an additional annual global investment of about $177 billion through 2029. Further, the annual incremental investment necessary globally to improve energy-use efficiency (involving the modernization of existing equipment and infrastructures) must increase by about $336 billion per year, also until 2029. The total comes to $513 billion per annum over a 15-year period, on top of the annual investments that the developed economies have been making during recent years. A very large proportion of this additional annual investment of $513 billion must be made collectively by the developed economies. If their existing capitalist system remains unchanged and they continue to follow their current fiscal and monetary policies, they will not be able to make the investment necessary to avert the environmental tipping point and at the same time create the increased demand that will enable their economies to grow.

A meeting to discuss the global environmental crisis was held by the United Nations in Paris from November 20 to December 11, 2015 and was attended by the political leaders and scientists of 196 countries. Its purpose was essentially to adopt the recommendations of the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC. Most news reports called this a major victory in our efforts to prevent further degradation of the environment. However, as was expected, the outcome was in fact only another victory in a skirmish, and the war is far from won. This is evident in the principal agreement reached. Each country has promised to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions in order to prevent a global temperature rise by 2°C (possibly 1.5°C), but the agreement is to be implemented on the “honor” system, with no international enforcement. The developed economies are to provide at least $100 billion per year, starting in 2020, to aid the developing economies in their efforts to reduce emissions. And the agreement is to be effective only if 55 countries, or the countries emitting 55 percent of the total emissions, ratify the agreement.

Unfortunately, there are numerous reasons why the Paris Agreement is only a victory in a skirmish, one that is certain to be followed by many more skirmishes. The “pledged” contributions towards the $100 billion to be paid by the developed economies include a contribution from the US of at least $10 billion annually. That this pledge will be honored is highly problematic because it is very likely that the Republican Party, whose leaders have already voiced strong opposition to the Agreement, will continue to control the House of Representatives. To be sure, more and more American voters have become highly concerned about the sustainability of their environment. But to believe that the US Congress will ratify the Agreement and continue to provide at least $10 billion per year over the coming decades is simply not realistic. And this is not the situation just in the US. It would be naïve to believe that all the other developed economies will be able to honor their pledges over the coming years.

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

Demographic, Social and Economic Changes Aggravate Threat to Humanity due to Climate Change.

Fires have been and always will be a threat to human habitation, and while changing climatic conditions may increase the size, frequency and intensity of wildfires, the threat, certainly for the foreseeable future, is relatively contained.

Today, from a Global Community perspective, the world is burning. The world is changing in ways that are likely to increase the size, frequency and intensity of natural and manmade disasters. Some of the changes, or threats, are climatic in nature, and we ignore them at our peril. Extreme weather, including record temperatures, record droughts, and torrential rains will increase the risks of fires, hurricanes, and floods and, perhaps more importantly, massive crop failures.

In addition to those changes, other important influences and aggravations are also at work in the world, and they include demographic, economic and social changes that pose, perhaps, an even greater threat than climate change. The demographic changes are profound. World population this year reached the 7.5 billion mark, and we are now adding another 1 billion people to the planet every dozen or so years. The vast majority of that increase, over 95 percent, will occur in the developing world and much of it in countries that rank among the very highest in terms of hunger, severe poverty, environmental degradation and political instability.

Because of rising population and the growing popularity of meat consumption, the world over the next 50 years may need to double grain production, but we are already using a land mass about the size of South America to grow the crops we consume and a land mass the size of Africa to feed and graze the animals we eat. There is not a whole lot of arable land left in the world, and much of what’s left is tropical rainforest. Doubling grain production in a world afflicted by climate change will be a daunting challenge, and doing so without seriously exacerbating greenhouse gas emissions is clause to impossible.

The economic challenges are also enormous. While the number of people living in severe poverty has been reduced in recent decades, very little progress, if any, has been made in countries with rapidly growing populations. Demographers project that Africa’s population, currently 1.2 billion will nearly quadruple by the end of the century. Education in Africa, particularly the education of girls, lags well behind the rest of the world. Unless more is done to educate girls, empower women, and improve access to contraception, Africa will continue to underperform. If so, chances of eradicating global hunger and severe poverty are slim, and the economic disparity between North and South could expand, rather than contract.

The emerging and advanced economies also face challenges, as their labor forces are increasingly threatened by automation. Self-driving cars and trucks could increase unemployment in the transportation sector, and advances in artificial intelligence could make many white-collar professions functionally obsolete. Just as automation once replaced human ‘physical strength’ it is now replacing human ‘brainpower. Unless labor forces shrink faster than currently anticipated, we could see widespread unemployment as early as mid-century, and rising unemployment would exacerbate economic inequality.

These demographic and economic challenges could, in turn, strain the political and social cohesion that holds countries together and magnify the international tensions that contribute to a devastating conflict between nations. It’s no wonder that political dysfunction and instability are on the rise or that terrorism has reached a harmful and deadly scale in many parts of the world now under enormous strain.

Political and social strong or violent changes or disturbances arise from a combination of factors, and it is often easier and less costly, in the long run, to prevent fires than fight them. That certainly applies to the threats posed by climate change, but it also applies to many of the demographic, economic and social challenges we confront. In the long run, the peace and prosperity of the world will hinge on our ability to prevent fires, not fight them.

Americans Contributes 20% Of World’s Annual Carbon Debt Increase.

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

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

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

Numerous climate scientists , biologists and science-informed activists demand that for a safe planet for all peoples and all species the atmospheric CO2 – presently about 430 parts per million and increasing at 3 ppm CO2 per year – be urgently returned to the pre-Industrial Revolution level of about 300 ppm CO2. Until the late 20th century the atmospheric CO2 had not exceeded 280 ppm CO2 for about 800,000 years. The present annual increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution of 66.4 billion tonnes CO2-equivalent can be seen as an increase in the world’s Carbon Debt. This Carbon Debt can also be expressed in dollar terms. Thus Dr Chris Hope of 90-Nobel-Laureate Cambridge University has estimated a damage-related Carbon Price of US$200 per tonne of CO2-equivalent. The annual Carbon Debt increase (at a damage-related Carbon Price of $200 per tonne CO2-equivalent) = 66.4 billion tonnes CO2-equivalent x $200 per tonne CO2-equivalent = $13, 280 billion = $13.28 trillion.

Whereas ordinary financial indebtedness can be addressed by default, bankruptcy or printing money, Carbon Debt is an inescapable burden on future generations e.g. if sea walls are not built, coastal cities will be inundated.

Below are listed revised “annual per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution” estimates for all countries (tonnes CO2-e per person per year, the world average being 8.9), together with the damage-related per capita cost of that pollution (at $200 per tonne CO2-equivalent)

(A) countries with about 4 to 41 times the world average annual per capita GHG pollution:

Belize (366.9; $73,380), Guyana (203.1; $40,620), Malaysia (126.0; $25,200), Papua New Guinea (114.7; $22,940), Qatar (101.8; $20,360), Zambia (97.5; $19,500), Antigua & Barbuda (85.6; $17,120), United Arab Emirates (82.4; $16,480), Panama (68.0; $13,600), Botswana (64.9; $13,629), Liberia (55.0; $11,000), Indonesia (53.6; $10,720), New Zealand (53.2; $10,640), Australia (52.9; $10,580 – 116; $23,200 if including its huge GHG-generating exports), Nicaragua (51.2; $10,240), Canada (50.1; $10,020), Equatorial Guinea (47.5; $9,500), Venezuela (45.2; $9,040), Brazil (43.4; $8,680), Myanmar (41.9; $8,380), Ireland (41.4; $8,280), United States (41.0; $8,200), Cambodia (40.5; $8,100), Kuwait (37.3; $7,460), Paraguay (37.2; $7,440), Central African Republic (35.7; $7,140).

(B) countries with about 2 and 4 times the world average annual per capita GHG pollution:

Peru (34.8; $6,960), Mongolia (32.2; $6,440), Singapore (31.2; $6,240), Bahrain (30.5; $6,100), Trinidad & Tobago (29.8; $5,960), Cameroon (29.5; $5,900), Congo, Democratic Republic (formerly Zaire) (29.3; $5,860), Côte d’Ivoire (29.1; $5,820), Denmark (27.8; $5,560), Brunei (27.4; $5,480), Bolivia (27.3; $5,460), Guatemala (26.9; $5,380), Belgium (26.3; $5,260), Ecuador (26.2; $5,240), Estonia (25.4; $5,080), Laos (25.3; $5,060), Suriname (25.1; $5,020), Netherlands (24.9; $4,980), Libya (24.9; $4,980), Nepal (24.6; $4,920), Benin (24.5; $4,900), Angola (23.8; $4,760), Madagascar (23.7; $4,740), Argentina (23.7; $4,740), Uruguay (23.7; $4,740)*, Luxembourg (23.6; $4,720), Turkmenistan (23.5; $4,700), Czech Republic (23.5; $4,700), Zimbabwe (23.3; $4,660), Gabon (23.1; $4,620), Greece (21.9; $4,380), United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (21.5; $4,300), Cyprus (21.4; $4,280), Congo, Republic (21.0; $4,200), Spain (20.9; $4,180), Finland (20.6; $4,120), Israel (20.2; $4,040), Norway (20.1; $4,020), Colombia (19.8; $3,960), Namibia (19.8; $3,960), Mauritania (19.7; $3,940), South Africa (19.4; $3,880), Ukraine (19.1; $3,820), Germany (18.6; $3,720).

(C) countries with about 1 and 2 times the world average annual per capita GHG pollution:

France (17.7; $3,540), Italy (17.6; $3,520), Uzbekistan (17.5; $3,500), Costa Rica (17.1; $3,420), Sudan (16.8; $3,360), Saudi Arabia (16.6; $3,320), Slovenia (16.5; $3,300), Azerbaijan (16.4; $3,280), Russia (16.2; $3,240), Sierra Leone (16.2; $3,240), Slovakia (15.9; $3,180), Honduras (15.8; $3,160), Hungary (15.5; $3,100), Kazakhstan (15.4; $3,080), Portugal (15.0; $3,000), Sweden (15.0; $3,000), Iran (14.5; $2,900), Iceland (14.2; $2,840), Mexico (13.9; $2,780), Oman (13.8; $2,760), Malta (13.; $2,660), Austria (13.0; $2,600), Poland (12.9; $2,580), Jamaica (12.8; $2,560), Palau (12.8; $2,560), South Korea (12.7; $2,540), Guinea (12.5; $2,500), North Korea (12.1; $2,420), Bahamas (12.1; $2,420), Nigeria (11.7; $2,340), Nauru (11.7; $2,340), Malawi (11.7; $2,340), Mali (11.6; $2,320), Chad (11.6; $2,320), Taiwan (11.6; $2,320), Latvia (11.4; $2,280), Vanuatu (11.1; $2,220), Switzerland (11.0; $2,200), Romania (10.9; $2,180), Togo (10.9; $2,180), Japan (10.7; $2,140), Serbia & Montenegro (10.4; $2.080), Seychelles (10.2; $2,040), Bulgaria (10.1; $2,020), Lebanon (9.8; $1,960), Syria (9.4; $1,880), Tanzania (9.3; $1,860), Turkey (9.2; $1,840), Barbados (9.1; $1,820), Jordan (9.1; $1,820), Occupied State of Palestine (9.1; $1,820)*, Philippines (9.0; $1,800), Guinea-Bissau (9.0; $1,800).

(D) countries with annual per capita GHG pollution at or below world average (8.9 tonnes CO2-equivalent per person per year):

Ghana (8.9; $1,780), Thailand (8.7; $1,740), Chile (8.7; $1,740), Fiji (8.7; $1,740), Belarus (8.6; $1,720), Sri Lanka (8.5; $1,700), Macedonia (8.5; $1,700), Tonga (7.4; $1,480), Croatia (7.4; $1,480), China (7.4; $1,480), Burkina Faso (7.3; $1,460), Bosnia & Herzegovina (7.2; $1,440), Kenya (7.1; $1,420), Dominican Republic (7.1; $1,420), Senegal (7.0; $1,400), Tunisia (7.0; $1,400), Algeria (6.6; $1,320), Grenada (6.4; $1,280), Samoa (6.2; $1,240), Rwanda (6.1; $1,220), El Salvador (6.0; $1,200), Lithuania (5.9; $1,180), Mozambique (5.8; $1,160), Lesotho (5.7; $1,140), Burundi (5.5; $1,100), Iraq (5.5; $1,100), Eritrea (5.3; $1,060), St Kitts & Nevis (5.1; $1,020), Uganda (5.1; $1,020), Haiti (5.0; $1,000), Mauritius (5.0; $1,000), Albania (4.3; $860), Dominica (4.2; $840), Bhutan (4.1; $820), Niger (4.1; $820), Ethiopia (4.1; $820), Moldova (4.0; $800), Georgia (4.0; $800), Yemen (3.7; $740), Tajikistan (3.7; $740), Afghanistan (3.6; $720), Swaziland (3.6; $720), Cuba (3.5; $700), Cape Verde (3.5; $700), Kyrgyzstan (3.4; $680), The Gambia (3.0; $600), St Lucia (2.9; $580), Bangladesh (2.7; $540), Egypt (2.6; $520), Niue (2.6; $520), Pakistan (2.5; $500), Morocco (2.5; $500), Djibouti (2.4; $480), St Vincent & Grenadines (2.4; $480), Armenia (2.3; $460), Maldives (2.1; $420), India (2.1; $420), Cook Islands (2.1; $420), Vietnam (1.9; $380), São Tomé and Príncipe (1.9; $380), Comoros (1.6; $320), Solomon Islands (1.4; $280), Kiribati (1.2; $240), Tuvalu (1.2; $240)* (* indicates an estimate based on that for an immediately contiguous, ethnically-related country).

You can examine this data and ascertain how your country contributes to greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution in an absolute and comparative sense. Thus, for the US the annual Carbon Debt of $8,200 per person x 324.1 million persons = a $2,657.6. billion. per year annual Carbon Debt increase i.e. a disproportionate 20.0% of the world’s annual total Carbon Debt increase ($13, 280 billion) due to a country with only 4.4% of the world’s’ population.

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

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

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

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

Below is the annual per capita Excess Carbon Debt (A-C) or Excess Carbon Credit (D) of the world’s nations in “tonnes CO2-equivalent per person per year after subtracting the world average of 8.9” and this also expressed in “US dollars” with a damage-related Carbon Price of $200 per tonne CO2-equivalent:

(A) countries with about 4 to 41 times the world average annual per capita GHG pollution:

Belize (358.0; $71,600 ), Guyana (194.2; $38,840), Malaysia (117.1; $23,420), Papua New Guinea (105.8; $21,460), Qatar (92.9; $18,580), Zambia (88.6; $17,720), Antigua & Barbuda (76.7; $15,340), United Arab Emirates (73.5; $14,700), Panama (59.1; $11,820), Botswana (56.0; $11,200), Liberia (46.1; $9,220), Indonesia (44.7; $8,940), New Zealand (44.3; $8,860), Australia (44.0; $8,800; 107.1 ; $21,420 if including its huge GHG-generating exports), Nicaragua (42.3; $8,460), Canada (41.2; $8,240), Equatorial Guinea (38.6; $7,720), Venezuela (36.3; $7,260), Brazil (34.5; $6,900), Myanmar (33.0; $6,600), Ireland (32.5; $7,100), United States (32.1; $6,420), Cambodia (31.6; $6,320), Kuwait (28.4; $5,680), Paraguay (28.3; $5,660), Central African Republic (26.8; $5,360).

(B) countries with about 2 and 4 times the world average annual per capita GHG pollution:

Peru (25.9; $5,180), Mongolia (23.3; $4,660), Singapore (22.3; $4,460), Bahrain (21.6; $4,320), Trinidad & Tobago (20.9; $4,180), Cameroon (20.6; $4,120), Congo, Democratic Republic (formerly Zaire) (20.4; $4,008), Côte d’Ivoire (20.2; $4,040), Denmark (18.9; $3,780), Brunei (18.5; $3,700), Bolivia (18.4; $3,680), Guatemala (18.0; $3,600), Belgium (17.4; $3,480), Ecuador (17.3; $3,460), Estonia (16.5; $3,300), Laos (16.4; $3,280), Suriname (16.2; $3,240), Netherlands (16.0; $3,200), Libya (16.0; $3,200), Nepal (15.7; $3,140), Benin (15.6; $3,120), Angola (14.9; $2,980), Madagascar (14.8; $2,960), Argentina (14.8; $2,960), Uruguay (14.8; $2,960)*, Luxembourg (14.7; $2,940), Turkmenistan (14.6; $2,920), Czech Republic (14.6; $2,920), Zimbabwe (14.4; $2,880), Gabon (14.2; $2,840), Greece (13.0; $2,600), United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (12.6; $2,520), Cyprus (12.5; $2,500), Congo, Republic (12.1; $2,420), Spain (12.0; $2,400), Finland (11.7; $2,340), Israel (11.3; $2,260), Norway (11.2; $2,240), Colombia (10.9; $2,180), Namibia (10.9; $2,180), Mauritania (10.8; $2,160), South Africa (10.5; $2,100), Ukraine (10.2; $2,040), Germany (9.7; $1,940).

(C) countries with about 1 and 2 times the world average annual per capita GHG pollution:

France (8.8; $1,760), Italy (8.7; $1,740), Uzbekistan (8.6; $1,720), Costa Rica (8.2; $1,640), Sudan (7.9; $1,580), Saudi Arabia (7.7; $1,540), Slovenia (7.6; $1,520), Azerbaijan (7.5; $1,500), Russia (7.3; $1,460), Sierra Leone (7.3; $1,460), Slovakia (7.0; $1,400), Honduras (6.9; $1,380), Hungary (6.6; $1,320), Kazakhstan (6.5; $1,300), Portugal (6.1; $1,220), Sweden (6.1; $1,220), Iran (5.6; $1,120), Iceland (5.3; $1,060), Mexico (5.0; $1,000), Oman (4.9; $980), Malta (4.4; $880), Austria (4.1; $820), Poland (4.0; $800), Jamaica (3.9; $780), Palau (3.9; $780), South Korea (3.8; $760), Guinea (3.6 $720), North Korea (3.2; $640), Bahamas (3.2; $640), Nigeria (2.8; $560), Nauru (2.8; $560), Malawi (2.8; $560), Mali (2.7; $540), Chad (2.7; $540), Taiwan (2.7; $540), Latvia (2.5; $500), Vanuatu (2.2; $440), Switzerland (2.1: $420), Romania (2.0; $400), Togo (2.0; $400), Japan (1.8; $360), Serbia & Montenegro (1.5; $300), Seychelles (1.3; $260), Bulgaria (1.2; $240), Lebanon (0.9; $180), Syria (0.5; $100), Tanzania (0.4; $80), Turkey (0.3; $60), Barbados 0.2; $40), Jordan (0.2; $40), Occupied State of Palestine (0.2; $40)*, Philippines (0.1; $20), Guinea-Bissau (0.1; $20).

(D) countries with annual per capita GHG pollution at or below world average (8.9 tonnes CO2-equivalent per person per year) and hence having Zero Excess Carbon Debt or Negative Excess Carbon Debt (Excess Carbon Credit):

Ghana (0; $0), Thailand (-0.2; -$40), Chile (-0.2; -$40), Fiji (- 0.2; -$40), Belarus (-0.3; -$60), Sri Lanka (-0.4; -$80), Macedonia (-0.4; -$80), Tonga (-1.5; -$300), Croatia (-1.5; -$300), China ( -1.5; -$300), Burkina Faso ( -1.6; -$320), Bosnia & Herzegovina (-1.7; -$340), Kenya (-1.8; -$360), Dominican Republic (-1.8; -$360), Senegal (-1.9; -$380), Tunisia (-1.9; -$380), Algeria (-2.3; -$460), Grenada (-2.5; -$500), Samoa (-2.7; -$540), Rwanda (-2.8; -$560), El Salvador (-2.9; -$580), Lithuania (-3.0; -$600), Mozambique (-3.1; -$620), Lesotho (-3.2; -$640), Burundi (-3.4; -$680), Iraq (-3.4; -$680), Eritrea (-3.6; -$720), St Kitts & Nevis (-3.8; -$760), Uganda (-3.8; -$760), Haiti (-3.9; -$780), Mauritius (-3.9; -$780), Albania (-4.6; -$920), Dominica (-4.7; -$940), Bhutan (-4.8; -$960), Niger (-4.8; -$960), Ethiopia (-4.8; -$960), Moldova (-4.9; -$980), Georgia (-4.9; -$980), Yemen (-5.2; -$1,040), Tajikistan (-5.2; -$1,040), Afghanistan (-5.3; -$1,060), Swaziland (-5.3; -$1,060), Cuba (-5.4; -$1,080), Cape Verde (-5.4; -$1,080), Kyrgyzstan (-5.5; -$1,100), The Gambia (-5.9; -$1,180), St Lucia (-6.0; -$1,200), Bangladesh (-6.2; -$1,240), Egypt (-6.3; -$1,260), Niue (-6.3; -$1,260), Pakistan (-6.4; -$1,280), Morocco (-6.4; -$1,280), Djibouti (-6.5; -$1,300), St Vincent & Grenadines (-6.5; -$1,300), Armenia (-6.6; -$1,320), Maldives (-6.8; -$1,360), India (-6.8; -$1,360), Cook Islands (-6.8; -$1,360), Vietnam (-7.0; -$1,400), São Tomé and Príncipe (-7.0; -$1,400), Comoros (-7.3; -$1,460), Solomon Islands (-7.5; -$1,500), Kiribati (-7.7; -$1,540), Tuvalu (-7.7; -$1,540)* (* indicates an estimate based on that for an immediately contiguous, ethnically-related country).

As a summary, Americans have vowed to withdraw from the Paris Climate Change Agreement that aimed for less than a 2C temperature rise and an ideal target of no more than plus 1.5C. The Paris Agreement was agreed to by 195 countries (Syria and Nicaragua declined agreement). The US withdrew from the Paris Climate Change Agreement. A 1.5C temperature rise will be exceeded in 4-10 years and it is now to late to avoid a catastrophic plus 2C temperature rise. Already 7 million people die each year from air pollution. An estimate of a present 0.4 million annual deaths from climate change may well be a considerable under-estimate because presently 17 million people die avoidably from deprivation in Developing Countries (minus China) that are already impacted by man-made climate change. It is estimated that 10 billion people may die from climate change this century, an average of 100 million such deaths each year this century, if man-made climate change is not requisitely addressed. Nevertheless we are all obliged to do everything we can to make the future “less bad” for future generations.

Decent people must act in concert by (a) informing everyone they can, (b) insisting like Pope Francis that the cost of pollution is “fully borne” by the polluters via a damage-related Carbon Price, (c) resolutely promising that those political and corporate leaders disproportionately complicit in the worsening Climate Genocide will inescapably face dispossession and dire custodial punishment, and (d) by urging application of Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), Green Tariffs , International Court of Justice (ICJ) litigations and International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutions against the worst polluting countries.

What famine, drought, and climate change have in common?

First, though, let’s consider whether the famines of 2017 are even a valid indicator of what a climate-changed planet might look like. After all, severe famines accompanied by widespread starvation have occurred throughout human history. In addition, the brutal armed conflicts now underway in Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen are at least in part responsible for the spreading famines. In all four countries, there are forces, Boko Haram in Nigeria, al-Shabaab in Somalia, assorted militias and the government in South Sudan, and Saudi-backed forces in Yemen, interfering with the delivery of aid supplies. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that pervasive water scarcity and prolonged drought (expected consequences of global warming) are contributing significantly to the disastrous conditions in most of them. The likelihood that droughts this severe would be occurring simultaneously in the absence of climate change is vanishingly small.

In fact, scientists generally agree that global warming will ensure diminished rainfall and ever more frequent droughts over much of Africa and the Middle East. This, in turn, will heighten conflicts of every sort and endanger basic survival in a myriad of ways. In their most recent 2014 assessment of global trends, the scientists of the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that “agriculture in Africa will face significant challenges in adapting to climate changes projected to occur by mid-century, as negative effects of high temperatures become increasingly prominent.” Even in 2014, as that report suggested, climate change was already contributing to water scarcity and persistent drought conditions in large parts of Africa and the Middle East. Scientific studies had, for instance, revealed an “overall expansion of desert and contraction of vegetated areas” on that continent. With arable land in retreat and water supplies falling, crop yields were already in decline in many areas, while malnutrition rates were rising, precisely the conditions witnessed in more extreme forms in the famine-affected areas today. It’s seldom possible to attribute any specific weather-induced event, including droughts or storms, to global warming with absolute certainty. Such things happen with or without climate change. Nonetheless, scientists are becoming even more confident that severe storms and droughts (especially when occurring in tandem or in several parts of the world at once) are best explained as climate-change related. If, for instance, a type of storm that might normally occur only once every hundred years occurs twice in one decade and four times in the next, you can be reasonably confident that you’re in a new climate era. It will undoubtedly take more time for scientists to determine to what extent the current famines in Africa and Yemen are mainly climate-change-induced and to what extent they are the product of political and military mayhem and disarray. But doesn’t this already offer us a sense of just what kind of world we are now entering?

In some popular accounts of the future depredations of climate change, there is a tendency to suggest that its effects will be felt more or less democratically around the globe, that we will all suffer to some degree, if not equally, from the bad things that happen as temperatures rise. And it’s certainly true that everyone on this planet will feel the effects of global warming in some fashion, but don’t for a second imagine that the harshest effects will be distributed anything but deeply inequitably. It won’t even be a complicated equation. As with so much else, those at the bottom rungs of society, the poor, the marginalized, and those in countries already at or near the edge, will suffer so much more (and so much earlier) than those at the top and in the most developed, wealthiest countries.

As a start, the geophysical dynamics of climate change dictate that, when it comes to soaring temperatures and reduced rainfall, the most severe effects are likely to be felt first and worst in the tropical and subtropical regions of Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America, home to hundreds of millions of people who depend on rain-fed agriculture to sustain themselves and their families. Research conducted by scientists in New Zealand, Switzerland, and Great Britain found that the rise in the number of extremely hot days is already more intense in tropical latitudes and disproportionately affects poor farmers. Living at subsistence levels, such farmers and their communities are especially vulnerable to drought and desertification. In a future in which climate-change disasters are commonplace, they will undoubtedly be forced to choose ever more frequently between the unpalatable alternatives of starvation or flight. In other words, if you thought the global refugee crisis was bad today, just wait a few decades.

The scientific literature on climate change indicates that the lives of the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed will be the first to be turned upside down by the effects of global warming. “The socially and economically disadvantaged and the marginalized are disproportionately affected by the impacts of climate change and extreme events,” the IPCC indicated in 2014. “Vulnerability is often high among indigenous peoples, women, children, the elderly, and disabled people who experience multiple deprivations that inhibit them from managing daily risks and shocks.” It should go without saying that these are also the people least responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming in the first place (something no less true of the countries most of them live in). In this context, consider the moral consequences of inaction on climate change. Once it seemed that the process of global warming would occur slowly enough to allow societies to adapt to higher temperatures without excessive disruption, and that the entire human family would somehow make this transition more or less simultaneously. That now looks more and more like a fairy tale. Climate change is occurring far too swiftly for all human societies to adapt to it successfully. Only the richest are likely to succeed in even the most tenuous way. Unless colossal efforts are undertaken now to halt the emission of greenhouse gases, those living inless affluent societies can expect to suffer from extremes of flooding, drought, starvation, disease, and death in potentially staggering numbers. And you don’t need a Ph.D. in climatology to arrive at this conclusion either. The overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists agree that any increase in average world temperatures that exceeds 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial era, some opt for a rise of no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, will alter the global climate system drastically. In such a situation, a number of societies will simply disintegrate in the fashion of South Sudan today, producing staggering chaos and misery. So far, the world has heated up by at least one of those two degrees, and unless we stop burning fossil fuels in quantity soon, the 1.5 degree level will probably be reached in the not-too-distant future.

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

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.

Time left to avert climate catastrophe.

Our window of time to act on climate may be shrinking even faster than previously thought. We may only have one year remaining before we lock in 1.5ºC of warming, the ideal goal outlined in the Paris climate agreement, after which we’ll see catastrophic and irreversible climate shifts, many experts have warned. The clock’s countdown now shows that only one year is left in the world’s carbon budget before the planet heats up more than 1.5º over pre-industrial temperatures. That’s under the most pessimistic calculations. According to the most optimistic prediction, we have four years to kick our carbon habit and avert 1.5º of warming. And to limit warming to 2ºC, the limit agreed upon in the Paris climate accord, we have nine years to act under the most pessimistic scenario, and 23 years to act under the most optimistic. Instead, greenhouse gas emissions have been rising at a faster pace during the last decade than previously, despite growing awareness and political action across the globe. Once we have exhausted the carbon budget, every ton of CO2 that is released by cars, buildings, or industrial plants would need to be compensated for during the 21st century by removing the CO2 from the atmosphere again. Generating such ‘negative emissions’ is even more challenging and we do not know today at which scale we might be able to do that.

So what should Society do to avoid the worst impacts of climate change?

The longer we delay addressing environmental problems, the more difficult it will be to resolve them. Although we’ve known about climate change and its potential impacts for a long time, and we’re seeing those impacts worsen daily, our political representatives are still approving and promoting fossil fuel infrastructure as if we had all the time in the world to slow global warming.

We can’t say we weren’t warned. In 1992, a majority of living Nobel prize-winners and more than 1,700 leading scientists worldwide signed a remarkable document called "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity."

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

It then outlines critical areas where the collision was and is still occurring: the atmosphere, water resources, oceans, soil, forests, species extinction and overpopulation. In the 25 years since it was published, the problems have worsened. The document grows bleak: “No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished. We the undersigned, senior members of the world’s scientific community, hereby warn all humanity of what lies ahead. A great change in our stewardship of the earth and life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.” Now, as monthly and annual records for rising global average temperatures continue to break, as extreme weather events become more frequent and severe, as refugees overwhelm the capacity of nations, and as tipping points for climatic feedback loops and other phenomena are breached, the need to act is more urgent than ever.

Over the next 50 years our Biosphere will undergo drastic temperature change. That change may bring about our extinction. Unlike past extinctions, this one will not be brought on by a random meteorite/asteroid or natural planetary happening. It will be self-inflicted by Homo sapiens. How could this be happening? The evidence is clear. As we spread throughout the planet, we destroyed all life and nonlife in our path. Then from the Industrial Revolution onward, without discretion we pillaged the planet’s natural resources, America being by far the worst GHG polluter from corporate greed with unlimited fossil fuel exploitation, largely creating climate warming and other environmental degradation, and in doing so burning enormous amounts of coal, oil and gas. At the same time deforestation limited the amount of CO2 being absorbed back. The result: carbon dioxide levels in the biosphere are now beyond what they were millions of years ago, well before our evolutionary beginnings. Rising global temperatures have been the result. And they will continue to rise as the scenario gets worse. Far more damaging than CO2, Methane (CH4) is now beginning to bubble in the warming Arctic. It will increase global warming exponentially. We were warned in 2012 by the World Bank that with CH4, a deadly Permian Triassic Feedback Loop could occur. This raises serious epistemological questions: Why are so many of us so blinded to all of this reality? Could it be that we have a self-destructive suicidal neurotic/psychotic cranial imperfection? And if that is the reason, how deeply implanted is it in our DNA eukaryotic chromosomic brains? Even more disturbing is this question: Clearly our aggression and disregard for Nature was an evolutionary strength from the beginning of our hominid development. Why is it now a weakness? Now to the bigger question: If a weakness, do we psychologically neurologically have the ability to overcome it; to alter what had once been our strength and replace it with a new form of non aggressive synchronous behavior that establishes for Homo sapiens coexistent unity in interactive equilibrium with all life and nonlife on the planet? And then the big question: If not, what then?

The term “Biosphere” defines the relatively thin layer of the planet’s air and water that can support life. It envelops the planet, extending down to the deepest layers of soils and ocean trenches and up to the highest oxygenated level. For humans the habitable fraction begins at sea level and extends upward a few thousand feet above sea level. Humans are born and live out their lives in their narrow fraction. Other forms of life also exist in the biosphere from top to bottom; squirrels, bears, cockroaches, sharks, Antarctic sea spiders, Plankton, and the list goes on. Predecessors to cellular life, Prokaryotic bonds, began to form in the Biosphere several billion years ago. Predecessors to Homo sapiens began to form four million years ago. (Laetoli footprints proved that hominids walked upright as far back as 3.6 million years) We in our present form as measured by increased brain cage size began our journey about four hundred thousand years ago.

We know that all “life” forms are in a sense at one with the biosphere. Each lives in a state of complete biological niche interdependency. We are no different. We live in a state of total dependency on our niche. Also we are the same as all other life in our need to adjust as change occurs in our niche. Adjustment generally occurs by way of adaptation to changes in the surrounding environment. It normally takes place in multiples of many hundreds or thousands or even millions of years. Adjustment can however come quickly. Darwin’s Galapagos bird beaks adapted relatively quickly as the nut shells became harder. (Discovered by meticulous 20 year study beginning in in 1970) We also know that adaptability is not always possible. Then a species will die out. We also know that biosphere change can come quickly. The Permian Triassic mass extinction 252 million years ago and the Cretaceous extinction 66 million years ago are two examples of rapid biosphere change. The Cretaceous came from a meteorite and resulted in low biosphere temperatures and the Permian Triassic came from high temperatures. Both were accompanied by atmospheric change so sudden and temperature extremes so sudden as to extinguish in a relatively short period of time a very large percentage of planetary life. When such rapid biosphere change does occur, those species that inhabit precisely bounded biological niches are the first to be affected. They die out quickly. Then others follow.

This brings us to the question of our age. Are we now facing the possibility of another sudden biosphere change? This one of our own making?! And if we are, why are we not concerned? There is ample evidence at hand that we are about to face a change. For one, there is a continuing die out of other planetary life. Much of that die out has been of our own doing. It began early on with our population expansion. As we spread throughout the planet, we destroyed every other form of life in our path. That die out is now accelerating on land and in the oceans. Another noticeable indicator that could affect our continued existence is more recent. It is seen in the biosphere change coming from the excessive amounts of coal, oil and gas burned since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. As a result, enormous amounts of CO2 have been added to the earth’s biosphere. At the same time deforestation is limiting the amount of CO2 being absorbed back. Rising global temperatures are the result. This has been well known in the scientific community for some time. Back in 2012, the World Bank warned that resultant high temperatures from CO2 could trigger what is called a Methane Hydrate Feedback Loop in the Arctic. Scientists are now telling us that this has already begun. Recent temperatures have been the highest in recorded history. So here is the question. Are we about to face a test of our biosphere vulnerability?

Altering the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere can only bear fatal consequences for nature and humanity. This scientific projection is holding true: it is estimated that, to date, some 150,000 to 400,000 people world-wide have perished each year due to direct and indirect effects of global warming. This includes, for example, 1833 people in New Orleans, possibly up to 5000 in Puerto Rico, 6329 by typhoon Haiyan in the Philippine, the list goes on. Although these events have been documented in detail, the silence in most of the mainstream media regarding the connection between global warming on the one hand and the rising spate of hurricanes, storms and fires on the other, is deafening. Atmospheric CO2 levels is rising at a rate of 2 to 3 parts per million per year while mean global temperature has accelerated between 1998 and 2016, rising by about 0.4 degrees Celsius. The projected trend, inducing large-scale melting of the Greenland, west and east Antarctic ice sheets, many meters scale sea level rise and a rising spate of hurricanes, storms, heat waves, fires and droughts, commenced in the 20th century, threatens to render large parts of the planet uninhabitable.

Which is what climate science has been projecting over the last 40 years or so. The message, refused by vested interests and ignored or only paid lip service to by the political and economic powers, has also been overlooked by millions of people due to part cover-up by much of the media. Business as usual and a bread and circuses culture continue unabated. Many understand the climate message but feel powerless, voting for parties that, under false promises, end uptaking little or no effective measures at reduction of carbon emissions. In so far as there is hope a majority of people will understand global warming is transcending the very life support systems of the planet, it is when they face the rise in extreme weather events. That this to date is not the case is the responsibility of the mainstream media, since, although climate science clearly indicates the rise in carbon emissions is responsible for the rise in extreme weather events,rarely does the media include the terms “climate change” or “global warming”in reporting these events only. By contrast, expressions such as “one in 100 or 1000 year event” are common. Climate science and scientists are rarely represented on media panels, by contrast to science infotainment programs where attractive celebrities promote space travel to the planets and beyond. The promotion by the media of outer space travel and the conquest of planets constitute one of the biggest distractions from the global climate emergency.

Through the media vested interests and their political and journalistic mouthpieces have been proliferating untruths regarding the causes and consequences of global warming. With few exceptions the mainstream media continues to propagate half-truths, or remain silent, or deal mainly with related economic issues, as if anything like the present economy could survive under +4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial conditions. Whenever the term “future” is expressed in the media and in Parliaments, it is rare that a caveat is made regarding the effects of global warming, given the currently 2 to 3-foldrise in extreme weather events. With exceptions, little or no information is given in the mainstream media regarding what the future holds under +2 or +4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, projected by the IPCC to take place within this century,which would render large parts of the planet uninhabitable.Likewise, with exceptions, rarely does most of the mainstream media report the global consequences of a nuclear exchange. In the lack of detailed information and warning by the Forth Estate, the world is being led blindly toward collapse.

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

It is well known that a MW equivalent of RE capacity will generate less than half of annual energy as compared to that of the same MW capacity of a conventional technology power plant, but will require more land area. Hence a 100% RE dependent scenario will also need diversion of vastly more forest and agricultural land than otherwise. This fact cannot be ignored either. Hence, in order to visualise a 100% RE scenario as a major step in addressing the Climate Change threat, the global community will also need very many other enabling scenarios. On a closer examination, all these issues can be intricately linked to the high GDP growth rate paradigm practiced by the governments around the world. Can we even consider moving away from such an obsession and move over to a sustainable and inclusive growth paradigm? A sustained high GDP growth rate will mean the manufacture of products and provision of services at an unprecedented pace leading to: setting up of more factories/ manufacturing facilities; consumption of large quantities of raw materials such as iron, steel, cement, chemicals etc.; increasing an unsustainable demand for natural resources such as land, water, minerals, timber etc.; acute pressure on the Government to divert agricultural /forest lands; huge demand for various forms of energy (petroleum products, coal, electricity etc.); accelerated urban migration; clamour for more of airports, airlines, hotels, shopping malls, private vehicles, express highways etc. Vast increase in each of these activities, while increasing the total greenhouse gas (GHG, responsible for global warming) emissions, will also add up to reduce the overall ability of natural carbon sinks such as forests to absorb GHG emissions. There will also be increased pollution of land, air and water along with huge issues of managing the solid, liquid and gaseous wastes. The corollary of all these issues is that the overall health of the humanity will go down drastically.

The multiplication of the size of global economy by 2040/50 would basically mean the multiplication of the demand for materials and energy; increase by several factors the production of wastes, contamination/pollution of air, water and soil; and corresponding increase in number of un-natural deaths, illnesses, accidents etc. Whereas the nuclear power technology is being wrongly advocated by vested interests as a credible solution for the Climate Change, the associated radiation issues can only worsen the situation. For countries like Bangladesh and many in African continent, which have so far a low energy carbon foot print, power generation capacity addition through coal and nuclear power plants can bring massive social, environmental and health problems. Hence, the transformation of energy systems to renewable energy based system alone should not be our focus. The real issues must be: (a) how much minimum energy demand can we manage with in order to eradicate the poverty at the global levels; (b) how best to distribute this much energy in the most equitable way possible; (iii) how to produce this much of energy without adding to total GHG emissions from the energy sector; (d) and how to minimise the pollution/contamination/depletion of our natural resources in this process. Even, this extraordinary approach may not be good enough. In a business as usual scenario, by 2050 the forest/vegetation wealth may get degraded to a point of no return; the pollution and contamination of the air, water and soil may become unbearable because of the human activities such as transportation, manufacturing, entertainment, military operations, construction etc. Many other human activities, which were not needed by our ancestors or till recently, would have come to be deemed as essential by 2050. For example the huge demand for electronic, computer and communication devises. All these activities, which will need lot of energy, materials, water etc., and which will also produce waste/contaminants, will continue to drag us down the path of ecological disaster, even if 100% RE scenario is feasible by 2050.

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

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

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

For many years, it has been known by some people that the world or at least a huge portion of it is going literally to hell in a handbag, the place that holds money and credit cards to support shopaholic tendencies across the world. It is due to the economic system largely being at odds with the natural world remaining intact. It’s quite the collision course with climate change factors, stripped forests, conflicts over resource rights, the sixth great extinction, water and other critical resource deficits and other dire matters increasingly in the mix over time. Meanwhile the human population keeps bursting ever higher while more and more people slip into poverty due to a number of myriad interrelated factors like an inadequate number of jobs, inadequate salaries for many jobs that do exist, too many people for the local resource base to subsume, resource conflicts ending in murder and other factors. Almost half the world, over three billion people, live on less than $2.50 a day. At least 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day. More than 80 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where income differentials are widening. The richest 1% of the global population received 82% of wealth created in 2017, while nothing went to the poorest half (3.7 billion) of humanity, according to a new study … And while billionaire wealth rose by 13% a year from 2006-2015, ordinary workers saw their incomes rise by an average of 2% a year.

In the USA, the Southern states may become too hot to support much life if any at all. Some of them and others will be overwhelmed with floods, tornadoes, ocean rise problems (which will destroy many coastal cities, other landscapes and possibly much of Florida), wildfires due to drought and other causes combined, spreading desertification and lack of water, as well as a transportation system and sufficient energy supplies to bring in goods to regions under duress.

Freshwater resources around the world were already badly stressed before heat-trapping carbon emissions from fossil fuels began to warm Earth’s surface and affect rainfall. Many major rivers — diverted, dammed, over-exploited — no longer reach the sea. Aquifers millennia in the making are being sucked dry. Pollution in many forms is tainting water above ground and below. Across the densely-populated Indo-Gangetic Plain” — home to more than 600 million people in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh —- “groundwater is being pumped out at an unsustainable and terrifying rate. More than half the water in the same basin is undrinkable and unusable for irrigation due to elevated salt and arsenic levels, according to a recent study. Groundwater provides drinking water to at least half of humanity and accounts for more than 40 percent of water used for irrigation. But underground aquifers do not fill up swiftly, as a reservoir does after a heavy rain. Their spongy rock can take centuries to fully recharge, which makes them a non-renewable resource on a human timescale.

Today people live in places where we are effectively using all the available renewable water, or, even worse, living on borrowed time by overpumping non-renewable groundwater. Exhausted groundwater supplies also cause land to subside, and allow in coastal regions, saltwater to seep into the water table. Dozens of mega-cities, rich and poor, are sinking: Jakarta, Mexico City, Tokyo and dozens of cities in China, including Tianjin, Beijing and Shanghai have all dropped by a couple of metres over the last century. Half a billion people in the world face severe scarcity all year round. It seems to me that our northern states that are still intact when conditions worsen in the US will have to take on the brunt of the US population, which is currently still climbing and at 327 million to date.

The states still viable in the USA will not be able to take in lots of people from collapsed and collapsing regions of the world. They will be hard pressed to just handle the entire US population (if that can be done) without any additional people from other regions.

Another problem is whether the natural world will adjust to climate change factors in those states. For example, Massachusetts is supposed to become like Florida by century’s end. Is that enough time for the evolving of the plants and animals around that state to new conditions? Weather experts at the United Nations just said that the highest April temperature ever may have just been recorded, an ominous sign that comes on the heels of the monthly average concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hitting the highest level on the books. Speaking to press at the UN headquarters in Geneva, Clare Nullis from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) referenced the extreme heat in the Pakistani city of Nawabshah, which reportedly reached 50.2°C (122.36°F) on Monday. “This is April, it’s not June or July, it’s April. We don’t normally see temperatures above 50 degrees C. In fact, as far as we’re aware, we’ve never seen a temperature of above 50 degrees C in April.

The current world population of close to 7 billion is projected to reach 10.1 billion in the next ninety years. Furthermore much of the animal and plant diversity will disappear unless this matter, too, is addressed, displacement of the rest for ever more humans … and it needs to be quickly and meaningfully addressed across the entire world since the sixth great extinction is ALREADY underway. My conclusion is that we as a whole are simply not doing enough to prepare for the coming times ahead. Moreover anyone who thinks that many people who live with lots of extravagant privileges (such as vacation homes out of state, travel for holidays out of country and other ways to lavishly treat themselves) will have to realize that they have no intention of changing their own lifestyles until forced to do so by circumstances. Why would the wealthiest members of societies want to curtail their own copious pleasures? After all, life looks often mostly rosy from their vantage points and they don’t want lacks of luxuries.

In the end, the good news is that some of our plentiful US northern states can subsume many more people that will do fairly well by this century’s end. Alternately these states cannot take in everyone in peril from climate change and other factors. There’s the sad rub! It is not just extreme weather conditions which are posing a major threat, but also ‘unseasonal ‘ extreme weather that is becoming more and more common. For example in South India, there were thunderstorms and rains in the middle of summer that destroyed mango crops. There was a dust storm across north India that killed many people and the Met office did not care to warn people initially and, when it did finally warn, the damage was already done.

Similarly, there are ‘extended’ snowfalls in US which people rarely expect and forest fires in some parts of Australia or central and South America. There are also cases of abnormal sea tides along the coasts. Hence, the seasons are overlapping and becoming arbitrary and thereby predicting is becoming more difficult. We are living in a precarious atmosphere where weather prediction is becoming as inaccurate as astrology….!

Everyone should seriously think about these complex daunting problems. Before the start of industrialization, the natural resources were rarely disturbed. There were plenty of forests, fresh air, water and less polluted seas. The tribes, Adivasis, aborigines, etc., lived along with flora and fauna and wild life in the forests. The fisherfolk could go fishing without fear as they could almost accurately estimate the time when seas are likely to be rough. But, as industries picked up, greed of people too started to rise rapidly. In their eagerness to amass profits and increase production, they began to plunder forests, cut trees, occupy coasts and build skyscrapers along the coasts, displace people on the pretext of ‘developing’ nuclear plants, etc. In short, a few tycoons with economic and political power began to ‘ control’ the environment and make it a ‘slave’ as are many slave-wage workers to their aims. That is why, there are resistance movements in forest areas (like Chhattisgarh in India) , in coastal areas (like in Kerala, India or in the south coast of Australia where the Adani group wanted to have its coal company), or the Amazon basin or Narmada river, or the Standing Rock Sioux movement to protect their hills and lands.

Unexpected and unpredictable, climatic changes including many earthquakes (i.e., ones related to fracking) are mostly man made. Especially the few elite corporates and industrialists constituting 1% with 99% wealth bring disasters. They care less for balance of climate and environment. They trample the earth and its beauty by overwhelming greed for their own personal wealth and sense of power. It is these few oligarchs who must be controlled. The majority of people do not like to disturb Nature. The fact that deterioration of climate at a faster rate has begun relatively recently is an indication of haphazard growth of industries and contains madness, human madness, at the root. Otherwise, the decline would have started much earlier – much prior to industrialization.

The fact that people are living longer and many of their children are thriving rather than dying young is adding to the population explosion. The development of agriculture and animal husbandry largely brought the shift away from protection of the natural world into being. Imagine the amount of species that declined or were killed off to bring a landmass the size of South America into being for human agriculture. Imagine that one the size of Africa was put in place for care of our domestic animals — a boon to our species, but certainly not much else. Everyone tries to foster their own selves and the groups with which they identify. Yet we need to be more inclusive to have members outside of our groups and in other species more included in the mix or else we are all across the planet in deep peril.

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

Perfidiously, profanely, the masters of the universe among us have taken so much of what is regarded generally as “abnormal” in human behavior and cleverly normalized all of it. If only the world worked the way we want it to! That all-too-human creatures of Earth were actually self-proclaimed ‘masters of the universe’ in more ways than “name only.” By evading extant scientific knowledge about our distinctly human limits and the biophysical limitations of the planet we inhabit; by denying that Earth is relatively small and finite with a frangible environment; by widely sharing and consensually validating utterly false, hubristic thinking regarding our seemingly god-like super-human capabilities and Earth as a maternal presence, imagined as an eternally expressive teat, it may be that The One Percent is not able to evade the consequences of its patently unsustainable behavior. In that event, humankind can be expected to “reap the whirlwind.”

There is better distribution of food and other goods critical for survival, but it is not sufficient to stave off starvation across the globe. So it is not just food in the mix in my opinion. More impinges on the overall picture Indeed, there are religious and cultural beliefs that support large families even in the face of daunting local scarcities in resources. In addition, many people in certain societies equate having lots of children with male prowess and familial happiness. The thinking is: the more the merrier, especially when the wife or girlfriend is tasked with care of household and children, along with her sometimes having a paying job, too! So where does such an orientation get us collectively? It leads to deprivation in basic, life supportive materials. And who is suppose to provide them for regions undergoing overshoot and collapse? Who is supposed to pay for the supplies being created, delivered and distributed? (For instance in South Sudan, huge cargo planes deliver food and cans of oil dropped by individual parachutes compliments of western nations, but still it is not enough food to feed everyone in this war-torn nation and why should equally impoverished people in western countries have to pay taxes to feed other impoverished people outside of their own countries?)

Oh, and let’s not forget the role of the wealthy people in terms of the overall situation. Many would much rather foster their own self-gratifying benefits than serve humanity and the eco-system as a whole.

Apparently while humanity can exhibit much goodness, there is a deep flaw that our species also shows. It is that many people want whatever they want, whether ever more children or carbon loading vacations, and aim to get them regardless of the consequences for everything and everyone else around them, including the ramifications for the people to be born in the future as the world deteriorates due to their present choices. This present period will not be the first time. nor will it be the last, that the human population has been delimited by catastrophes, such as droughts and locust plagues. This curtailment has been happening since our kind has shown up on Earth. Indeed, the same sort of crunch has happened to other species, too, and has taken place since life first showed up on the planet. It is the way that evolution works … However, it is the first time that a supposedly intelligent species caused widespread damage practically across the entire Earth due to very poor choices. How tragic that we can’t get over our myopic, self-centered wants! All the same, we will likely prevail if we can show sufficient compassion for others, other people and other species, as we support them into our regions. In times ahead, it will certainly have to be done.

Industrial farming is not an efficient way to grow food.

To avoid catastrophic impacts on life on earth, the world desperately needs joined-up action on industrial farming. Every day there is a new confirmation of how destructive, inefficient, wasteful, cruel and unhealthy the industrial agriculture machine is. We need a total rethink of our food and farming systems before it's too late. The world's largest ever "deadzone", an area in the sea where pollutants from farms create algal blooms that kill off or disperse marine life. The deadzone was found in the U.S.'s Gulf of Mexico heavily industrialized factory farm system and it measures 8,776 square miles, about the size of New Jersey.

Factory farming is not, as some contend, an efficient, space, saving way to produce the world's food but rather a method in which the invisible costs are actually far higher than the savings. Factory farming is shrouded in mythology, and one of the myths is that it's an efficient way of producing food when actually it is highly inefficient and wasteful. Another myth is that the protagonists will say that it can be good for the welfare of the animals. After all, if hens weren't happy they wouldn't lay eggs.

The third myth is that factory farming saves space. On the surface it looks plausible, because, by taking farm animals off the land and cramming them into cages and confinement you are putting an awful lot of animals into a small space. But what is overlooked in that equation is you are then having to dedicate vast acreages of relatively scarce arable land to growing the feed. The crops fed to industrially reared animals worldwide could feed an extra four billion people on the planet. As the global demand for cheap meat grows, the expansion of agricultural land is putting more pressure on our forests, rivers and oceans, contributing to deforestation, soil erosion, marine pollution zones and the global biodiversity crisis. The U.N. has warned that if we continue as we are, the world's soils will have effectively gone within 60 years. And then what? We shouldn't look to the sea to bail us out because commercial fisheries are expected to be finished by 2048. The rainforest homes of the likes of jaguars and the critically endangered sumatran elephants are being razed to make way for intensive crop production and plantations that are feeding factory farm animals ... the mixed farm habitats of once common farmland birds such as barn owls, turtle doves and skylarks are being stripped away, and ... vast quantities of wild fish are being scooped up to feed industrially reared farmed fish and chickens and pigs, leaving the likes of penguins, puffins and other species starving. Increased soybean cultivation in Brazil has destroyed, and continued to destroy, huge areas of Amazon rainforest. Antibiotic use is another red flag area. There is now overwhelming evidence that the routine prophylactic use of antibiotics is leading to the rise of antibiotic resistant superbugs, and the World Health Organization has issued warnings that if we don’t do something to curb antibiotic use in both human and animal medicine we will face a post-antibiotic era where currently treatable diseases will once again kill.

Human compassion for other life-forms advocates a reduction in meat-eating. In the long term regenerative farming is needed, a broad term that includes all sorts of practices such as rotational grazing, tree planting, improving soils, reducing chemical inputs, silvopasture and increasing biodiversity. There is a need to move away from industrial agriculture towards agro-ecological models, a new style of agriculture which goes beyond industrial agriculture, which goes beyond simple sustainability, which brings us to a point of regeneration.

Our rivers and lakes contain a scary number of pesticides and pharmaceuticals. From pesticides to caffeine, chemicals that affect living organisms are making their way into the nation’s rivers and streams. That's the conclusion reached by a pair of complimentary studies by the US Geological Survey (USGS) and the US EPA, both published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. This is a concern for living things in our environment, and also potentially for human health: rivers and streams supply much of the nation’s drinking water supplies. Previous studies have shown that water treatment facilities remove some, but not all of these contaminants. There are large studies that have shown that these kinds of contaminants even in low doses like we're seeing here, are actually able to cause biological effects. The effects are extremely broad. When we think in terms of the stream environment we’re talking about the entire food web. We’re going from microorganisms all the way up to large fish and mammals. The long term environmental and health effects are unknown, but it’s folly to think that effect is zero. Why should we think they're not having an effect on the environment?

Many of the chemicals detected were pharmaceuticals. And though pharmaceuticals are moving away from animal models, one of the first ways that they test for human pharmaceutical efficacy is by testing compounds in fish. That means there's no reason to think that aquatic life in our rivers and streams won't be effected by the influx of chemicals we're putting into the water. There are 85,000 manufactured chemicals currently in production. And the list is growing.

At the same time, the researchers found a strong correlation with the highest concentration of chemicals and proximity to a wastewater treatment facility—the closer a river or stream is to one, the more chemicals are present in the water. Medications like birth control, diabetes medication, and other treatments don't just stay in our bodies. If they did, we wouldn't have to take multiple doses. Instead, chemicals get excreted from our bodies and they end up getting flushed down the toilet with our waste, eventually ending up at a water treatment plant. Figuring out how to reduce them as a part of water treatment processes is a whole other line of study. Do we treat waste close to the source [our homes and buildings] as opposed to collecting it and treating it altogether? The question of how many chemicals end up in our waterways, and how we prevent it is going to be an ongoing one, with serious consequences.

To truly fight poverty, hunger and climate change, sustainable agriculture must go global. The Paris Climate Agreement went into force on November 4, less than a year after 190 governments signed the landmark, legally binding international treaty. Ten days later, world leaders and civil society groups gathered at the COP22 climate conference in Marrakech, Morocco, to tackle the next phase—implementation—beginning with the development of concrete climate action plans. Agriculture, which accounts for 25 to 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (second only to the energy sector), is finally playing a starring role at the conference thanks to the treaty’s formal recognition of the critical interplay between agricultural expansion, deforestation and climate change. We need to train more than 1.4 million farmers in vulnerable landscapes around the world, and the building of sustainable commodity supply chains. Resources will be required to support the world’s 570 million farmers on their journey to long-term sustainability. Although the outcome of the U.S. presidential election brings some uncertainty to these efforts, it is heartening to note that nine out of ten countries that have ratified the Paris agreement have included agriculture in their climate action plans. And in the days after the election, more than 300 huge brands called upon the president-elect to continue U.S. participation in the Paris Agreement. Hundreds more have made independent commitments to sustainability, ranging from removing deforestation from their supply chains to improving agricultural practices on the ground. As sustainability becomes a mainstream concern, public pressure is shifting attitudes in boardrooms, and other governments will continue to push their countries towards low-carbon economies. This is both an important commitment by world leaders, a rousing call to action for businesses, and a mandate to double down on efforts for organizations. One of the biggest and most complex questions is how to scale up sustainable agriculture while addressing challenges specific to various regions and crops. Today,there are more than 1.2 million farms in 45 countries that grow over 100 different crops and must be brought in line and demonstrate continuous improvement over the years and reach the highest level of performance by the sixth year. There is a need of strengthening the capacity of farmers to manage their operations, mitigate risks to workers and nearby communities, practice farming methods designed to eliminate deforestation and build climate resilience.

Climate smart agriculture (CSA) is a system of methods that make farms more productive and resilient in the face of climate change, while reducing their climate impacts. The key is for farms to proactively build locally appropriate climate resilience practices into their management. Action plans will vary by region but could include planting more diverse crops; planting trees to absorb GHG emissions; better soil management to improve the retention of water, organic fertilizer, and carbon; and/or reducing chemical pesticides.

We prohibit 150 chemical substances classified by the UN World Health Organization and Food and Agriculture Organization as “highly hazardous,” including widely used pesticides like atrazine, and institutes strict safety measures governing the use of another 170 high-risk substances. These requirements are designed to reduce chemical use over time while minimizing risks to human health, wildlife, aquatic ecosystems, and pollinator species that facilitate the cultivation of three-quarters of the world’s leading food crops. Hundreds of companies around the world have pledged to fight climate change by eliminating deforestation from their supply chains. Recognizing the vital role workers play in long-term sustainability, we incorporates stricter mandatory requirements and a strong continuous improvement framework governing human rights, worker housing, sanitation, safety, gender and child labor protections, and living wage considerations. Workers on certified farms must receive no less than the legal minimum wage of the applicable laws of the country, but the final goal is to ensure that farms pay a living wage. Climate change, the greatest global crisis in human history, calls upon people at every level of society to fight unprecedented environmental destruction and human suffering. Indeed, we can only address this crisis effectively if we do so together, with every single tool at our disposal, from bold international policy decisions to everyday actions by people around the world. Agriculture is the greatest opportunity…unrivaled in its potential to simultaneously address poverty, hunger, and climate change.

Rising Sea levels will remake the coastlines of endangered U.S. States and drown much of other world coastlines.

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. 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. 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.

Because of climate change, dry conditions and extreme heat have led to a proliferating number of intense wildfires, causing massive damage to infrastructure, land and the loss of human life.

Climate Change is about all life on our planet and a threat to humanity as great or greater than geopolitical conflict or terrorism. Rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns will intensify competition for resources, food and water. Rising sea levels and extreme weather events will displace ever greater numbers of people. There is a real link between a changing climate, migration and conflict and how climate change can be seen as a threat multiplier. Displacement as a consequence of climate change is not something happening only far away or in a distant future. Former U.S. National Security Advisor Richard Clarke said that climate change is the greatest single risk to California and to the entire United States, a warning that was followed by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, which hit the U.S. and a number of Caribbean islands with devastating impacts, causing flooding, destruction, and forcing people to leave their homes. At the same time in the U.S., dry conditions and extreme heat have led to a proliferating number of intense wildfires, causing massive damage to infrastructure, land and the loss of human life. These events are all increasing in frequency and are magnified as a result of climate change and they give us a glimpse into a future we all face. The strength and frequency of hurricanes and storms, drought and wildfires will increase dramatically.

Since 2008, weather-related hazards, which are magnifying and multiplying as a result of climate change, displaced more than 21 million people each year, equivalent to 59,600 people every day or 41 people every minute. Millions more were forced to leave their homes due to prolonged droughts and their devastating impacts.

In Bangladesh, one meter of sea level rise would equate to a loss of 17-20 percent of territory. The government estimates that would create around 25 million climate refugees, while other experts suggest nearer 35 million. Bangladesh does not have the capacity to absorb such mass displacement (most poorer countries do not), so refugees will be forced into neighboring countries. And as the basic necessities of life become precious commodities, the risk of conflict will surge. While senior military figures in Bangladesh have pointed, urgently, to these threats, making clear that peace is at risk not just in their country, but across South Asia and the rest of the world, senior military figures from Britain to the United States have raised a similar alarm, identifying climate change and the accompanying threats to our national and global security as a cause for urgent action. They are warning world leaders of the need to cut our addiction to carbon, today.

Mass displacement caused by climate change can also ignite or exacerbate conflict. While no serious observer would claim that climate change caused the conflict in Syria, it is clear that it magnified and multiplied many of the stresses that fed into the explosion of violence. Not least important was that over one million people were on the move from drought-stricken regions before a single gunshot was fired. The prolonged drought in Syria, coupled with devastating climate events such as wildfires, droughts and storms in major grain, producing areas that reduced 2010/11’s harvests and doubled the global price of wheat in six months left people hungry, poor and on the move.

Climate change is increasingly viewed as a threat-multiplier, driving the likelihood of violent conflict arising from pre-existing and complex interactions between political, economic, religious, ethnic or other cultural forces. The challenge facing us is complex, and in a rapidly changing world, climate change and its potential to trigger both mass migration and violent conflict need to be considered as urgent priorities for policymakers and business leaders. And we must consider that those who are least to blame for climate change are those who are all too often affected first and worst. The world's least developed countries produce only a fraction of global greenhouse gas emissions and have had far fewer of the benefits reaped by the developed world from their carbon-based economies, yet they are the most vulnerable and the least able to respond effectively to the impacts of climate change.

We need the development of a new legally-binding agreement to protect climate refugees. This instrument will give definition and status to climate refugees; to define rights and obligations, and to coordinate and combine our actions so that they are effective. We cannot hope to deal with the wave of suffering and disruption as single nations; it will not work. We will all be better served, better prepared and better protected if we act together. For climate refugees, tomorrow will be too late.

Failures of capitalism, degrowth prosperity, climate change, ecological emergencies, and mass refugee flights from failing states.

The distortions of late-stage capitalism eroding basic trust, tolerance, and hope. common decency and respect is starting to seem anachronistic. Worship of money and celebrity rules the media, while our ties to land, loyalties, and love are severed. Many diseases have been eradicated or are manageable. Modern science and industry have brought sanitation, clean water, and industrial food to billions worldwide. Smart phones and the Internet give us access to unfathomable volumes of information. There are competing trends. Decay and chaos on one hand, integration and regeneration on the other. As $100 trillion changes hands in the next twenty years, the question is, which future wins? Will this generational wealth transfer help us rebuild, or will it throw gasoline on the fires of rampant greed? There are so many ways we can turn that money to transforming the world. We can rethink taxation to make it more fair. We can price carbon. We can create schools and hospitals for all. Feed the world sustainably. Make pollution and other externalities illegal and guard smart use of resources. What else could the clean money revolution accomplish with $100 trillion? Thanks to the passion and wisdom of so many great leaders over the past fifty years, our basic ethical premises about self-interest, ecology, and life itself are starting to shift. We have further to go as a global culture that will only become more intertwined. Despite what some segments of our society would prefer, there’s no going back. What if we agreed that the meaning and purpose of life was not only to enjoy it, but to use our energies to ensure a liveable future for dozens of generations into the future? What if our Golden Rule and central religious belief was that we be responsible for leaving the Earth better than we found it, restoring it rather than degrading it?

Here are some foundational elements for a resilient future global civilization.

•Fair taxation •Gender, race, class, or sexual preference equality •Global carbon pricing •Elimination of fossil fuel subsidies •Legal ownership of pollution and externalities •Life cycle manufacturing responsibility •Money out of politics •Proportional representation voting •Degrowth prosperity •Slowing population growth •Minimum guaranteed income •Just social safety net •Housing as a human right •Prison and drug law reform •Gun control and demilitarization •Quality public health care and education •Clean Money Transition Costs (2017–2050) •Reparations for colonialism and slavery $10T •Transition to renewable energy $20T •Sustainable transportation $10T •Green and living buildings $10T •Soil restoration and carbon capture $10T •Guaranteed income, health care, education $10T •Zero waste $10T •War and weapons industry reduction $10T •Steady state economy transition $10T •Total $100T

These numbers are symbolic. At this early stage the exact numbers are less important than recognizing the need for a massive shift of capital from destructive uses to regeneration. That is our chance for a soft landing and a resilient future civilization. There are precedents and estimates to get us started. The World Bank noted in 2010 that moving global economies to a net-zero emissions trajectory will take $700 billion to $1 trillion per year of investment. The sustainable business advocacy group Ceres has called for $36 trillion to be invested in clean energy between 2014 and 2050 in order to have an 80 percent chance of capping global warming at 2°C.

At Davos in 2014, World Bank president Kim Jim called for removing the $1.9 trillion in global subsidies to the fossil fuel industry — a number that includes externalities the industry itself causes — then turning that money toward clean energy investment.

Many statistics exist to inform a $100 trillion shift. The point is, are these numbers wrong? How would we know? We need to study, discuss, map, design, and empower solutions strategies that show the way. We now see how much money we will lose and how much human suffering we face from global warming and other ecological and social catastrophes. One scenario shows that up to $31.5 trillion of pension assets are overvalued with respect to climate risk. There are no doubt efforts already underway to determine the costs of achieving needed changes. They are probably rapidly emerging for scientists, academics, economists, insurance companies, governments, and military. We should fund those doing the modeling, and popularize a map for shifting to a positive future history. We may still avert massive disaster, and empower a steady-state society of enlightened self-interest. We need a financial plan for achieving a safe world in the next thirty years. This period will be crucial as social and ecological externalities come home to roost. We need a rapid reinvention of capitalism, finance, and wealth management. We need to rethink power and purpose. Otherwise this revolutionary moment where “the 20 percent could consciously shift trillions of dollars” will be replaced with “global meltdown, all bets are off, retreat to your bunkers, hope the military can protect you.”

Let’s remember our responsibility for the long game. To a “seventh-generation” vision, quarterly and annual results are only minor blips on a chart. We need MBAs and academics and investors and citizens to consider the world in five hundred years. Then we can map out the first fifty-year stage. Part of that is identifying a viable human population total that Earth can sustain, and planning for that. That’s evidence of a wise society. Those of us with resources and influence can complement the visioning process by pushing intelligent conversations and policy change, and shifting our own investment decisions. Find your purpose. Connect your actions to it. Step up and run for office. Lobby for fair taxes. If you own a business, shift toward a generative rather than a zero-sum extractive model. We all have a role. We are ancestors. We are responsible for future generations.

To teach the younger generation about climate change.

It's time to start teaching kids about climate change. The atmosphere is all around us, it’s the air we breathe. We can’t see it, but without it, humans, animals, and plants couldn’t live on Earth. It’s made up of tiny parts called molecules. Who’s heard of oxygen before? That’s one of the molecules! A really important one that plants breathe in is called carbon dioxide. We are upsetting a natural balance of the Earth by producing more and more greenhouse gases that keep heat from the sun inside our atmosphere, while cutting down plants that use up carbon dioxide. The result is that our planet is getting warmer, which is causing dangerous changes. Once students have a common foundation, it is easier to teach that the problem of global warming as both an environmental and social issue. Why is this a problem? We’re polluting the air, and people can’t breathe. Sometimes in other countries people have to wear masks because the air is bad to breathe.

Hurricane Katrina happened because of global warming. Instead of discussing scientific concepts we hadn’t studied, such as how warmer waters influence air masses and weather patterns, It is best to focus on the connection between the storm surge, rising sea levels, and coastal erosion. When ice melts and melts and melts in Antarctica, where does it go? This analogy can help students visualize global rising sea levels and coastal land loss. To illustrate one of the ways climate change is affecting our state, show coastal land loss in Louisiana in fast motion over 50 years. You can literally see peninsulas about two hours from New Orleans shrink to tiny islands. The land lost in Louisiana is our natural sponge to soak up huge waves from hurricanes before they get to where people live. Now, it is important to explain that all those global leaders who met in Paris have an important job to do.

Many people can’t seem to wrap their minds around the idea that if we want lessening climate change problems and curtailment of other sorts of devastation like massive spills and air pollution, we need to use less fossil fuels. We also have to stop taking away more and more of the natural world for economic development, stop personally using up ever more resources to climb up the socio-economic ladder and stop increasing the human population. After all more people will require more and more jobs provided based on further gobbling up the biosphere, as well as even more resources in use. Imagine facing this sort of misery when you are in your nineties? How can you possibly imagine picking up your life and putting it back together at that age? You don’t have necessarily the energy, will or wits (mental capacity) to do it. Devastated people, including many who barely escaped with their lives and who lost their homes, flocked to her town in the thousands as a potentially safe haven. Yet everyone is on standby alert in the event that it, too, has to be evacuated at any moment since fires all but surround it! How alarming is that for my friend and all the rest of the people? Nerve racking!

Clearly, we all (except the poorest of the poor) have to cut back on lots. We have to cut back on fossil fuels, resource use and economic development. If we don’t, our world will be in a shambles way worse than it is now. We humans have to smarten up. We need to start transition town movements now! Yet how many people can we convince to follow this model at this stage of disintegration of the environments around us? (Most are still in la-la land in terms of a need and desire to change their ways.) The terms transition town, transition initiative and transition model refer to grassroot community projects that aim to increase self-sufficiency to reduce the potential effects of peak oil, climate destruction, and economic instability.

Global commons, biodiversity debt, and the goal in America must be to overturn our present expansionary system by fostering de-growth.

Global Commons.

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

Any and all such efforts to work against extinction should be undertaken as acts of environmental solidarity on the part of the peoples of the global North with the true stewards of the planet’s biodiversity, the people of the global South. Only in this way can the struggle against extinction help promote not simply forgiveness and reconciliation, but also survival after five hundred years of colonial and imperial ecocide. The struggle to preserve global biodiversity must be seen as an integral part of a broader fight to challenge an economic and social system based on feckless, suicidal expansion. If, as we have seen, capitalism is based on ceaseless compound growth that is destroying ecosystems the world over, the goal in the rich nations of the global North must be to overturn our present expansionary system by fostering de-growth . Most importantly, nations that have benefited from burning fossil fuels must radically cut their carbon emissions in order to stem the lurch towards runaway climate chaos that endangers the vast majority of current terrestrial forms of life. Rather than false and impractical solutions such as the carbon trading and geoengineering schemes championed by advocates of neoliberal responses to the climate crisis, anti-capitalists should fight for some version of the contraction and convergence approach proposed by Global Community. This proposal is based on moving towards a situation in which all nations have the same level of emissions per person (convergence) while contracting them to a level that is sustainable (contraction).

The 1% as much wealth as half the world's population.

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

The poorest of the world population own just 1.86 percent of the $256 trillion in global wealth or $4.76 trillion. That's more than two-thirds of all the people on Earth. That means five billion people have, on average and after debt is figured in, about a thousand dollars each in home and property and savings. In the U.S., the Forbes 400 own as much as 3/5 of the american people. The bottom 60 percent of Americans own three percent of the nation's $85 trillion in total wealth or $2.55 trillion. The Forbes 400 owned $2.4 trillion in October 2016 and that's been steadily increasing.

Just as capitalism made it possible for Gates, Zuckerberg and the others to reach the highest rung on the economic ladder, it is making it possible for billions of men and women to climb up from the lowest rung. Poverty as we know it is not disappearing but getting worse. Those climbing out of poverty are due to rapid economic growth in China. And yes, many Americans have negative wealth because of debt. A human being doesn't have to live in a third-world slum to be impoverished. Yet as inequality ravages the American and world economies, denial grows right along with it. The rich people suggest that even if inequality was growing as fast as observed, it would not necessarily be a problem. The deniers try to explain away reality.

Energy and prosperity.

Our current standard of living clearly is provided by our ability to burn through unimaginable amounts of fossil fuels, including an estimated 30 billion barrels of oil or more a year, whilst roughly 40 percent of global energy consumption stems from petroleum. Conversely, people without access to such rich energy sources, whether in developed or developing nations, rightfully equate prosperity and access to material goods with fossil fuel use. After all, no “green” substitute can even come close to the energy density obtained by their derivatives. At the same time, access to fossil fuels will increasingly be a major driver of small and large conflicts around the world with the biggest contenders – most notably the USA, China and Russia – using ever more forceful means to gain advantage over rivals. As such, the current Middle East and African wars are diminutive in scale compared to the contention that lies ahead. In addition, the pending oil shortfall will cause products, services and food that rely on oil to skyrocket in cost. Moreover, petroleum derivatives serve as the foundation for fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, transportation of goods to markets, the majority of the grocery packaging operations (i.e., the manufacture of containers in addition to the bottling and canning processes, etc.) and, of course, operational farm machinery. All considered, imagine just farms alone being run without sufficient oil. Would they be capable to supply enough food for over seven billion people without it? How will they provide for the nine billion to ten billion expected to be on the Earth in approximately 40 years? Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.” However, he perhaps neglected to consider that our food and practically all industry and finance are deeply tied to energy and that, in turn, is tied to fossil fuels.

Nearly 71 percent of US electricity comes from fossil fuels, including 53 percent from coal. Of the remainder, 21 percent is generated from nuclear power, 15 percent from natural gas, 7 percent from hydro, and less than 2 percent from other renewable sources.’ As a result of this energy mix, the US emits more than 2,500 million metric tons of C02 (MMtC02) every year. In addition, coal and gases that can be converted into power supplies are not endlessly abundant. So, in light of our energy dilemma, what can be expected in times ahead?

Why Keystone XL should never get built.

1) Economics

Even Enbridge CEO Al Monaco recently stated that Canada only needs two more export pipelines. “If you look at the supply profile, and you look at our expansion replacement capacity for Line 3 and one other pipeline, that should suffice based on the current supply outlook, out to at least mid-next decade. There’s not an evident need to get three or four pipelines built. Those include Exxon’s writing off of 3.5 billion barrels in bitumen reserves, cutting of 1.2 billion barrels in reserves and Shell’s forecasting of global peak oil demand in 2021. Just last week, Shell sold off almost all of its oilsands assets to Canadian Natural Resources Limited. This follows divestitures by Statoil and Total SA in recent years. There will be no more greenfield projects if the price of oil stays at what it is. Western Canadian Select already sells at a discount of around $15/barrel due to transportation and quality discounts. Pipeline companies thrive on long-term contracts with producers, with lower rates for longer terms (such as 10 or 20 years). Such contracts are huge financial gambles, especially given uncertainty about oil prices. In a low oil price scenario, oilsands take a hit because of the high cost of production. The economic case is not there for the three pipelines. And should the massive expansion happen, the financial benefits for the sector would not be there either.

2) Landowners

We’ve already seen what lawsuits and protests can do to proposed oil pipelines, including cripplingEnbridge’s Northern Gateway and seriously delaying Energy Transfer Partner’s Dakota Access Pipeline. Same goes for Keystone XL. Lawsuits have plagued the company for years. In 2015, over 100 Nebraska landowners sued TransCanada over the proposed use of eminent domain; the company eventually withdrew from the case and its plans for eminent domain, but it appears such conflicts will reignite with the federal approval. Landowners have already started to meet to plot out how to resist the pipeline. TransCanada requires a permit from Nebraska in order to proceed. Last week, two-thirds of Nebraska’s senators signed a letter petitioning the state’s Public Service Commission to okay the proposed route; the original route was altered in April 2012 due to public opposition. A lot of resistance to the Keystone project on the ground in Nebraska, especially given that the project still doesn’t have a legal route through the state. There’s also growing resistance from Indigenous people, especially in the wake of Standing Rock. Thousands of Indigenous people recently gathered in Washington, D.C. for a four-day protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline. In 2014, the Cowboy Indian Alliance united potentially affected farmers and Indigenous people to protest against the Keystone project. The recently signed continent-wide Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion specifically identified Keystone XL as a proposed pipeline to be stopped.

3) Environment and climate

Then there’s the fight north of the border over greenhouse gas emissions and climate obligations. The Canadian government’s approvals of Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain and Enbridge’s Line 3 added a bit over one million barrels per day in potential capacity to the oilsands network. Unless there are significant breakthroughs in technology to cut per-barrel emissions, those two pipelines alone will allow for oilsands production and associated greenhouse gases to hit Alberta’s 100 megatonne (Mt) cap; Stewart says companies have been talking about the possibility of emissions-cutting technologies such as solvents since 2007, but they still haven’t materialized in a commercial setting. Unconventional fuels expert David Hughes has calculated that if the 100 Mt cap is reached and a single LNG export terminal is built, Canada will need to cut non-oil and gas emissions by 47 per cent cut in order to meet the 2030 target, which will be impossible “barring an economic collapse.” Adding an additional 830,000 bpd of export potential via the Keystone XL , allowing for the kind of expansion hoped for by the National Energy Board and Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers , could result in the breaching of Alberta’s emissions cap and the country’s climate targets. Climate-based litigations are grounding fossil fuel projects around the world. A lawsuit based on constitutional rights to a healthy environment filed on behalf of 21 children during the Obama administration threatens to bring a similar precedent to the U.S. We’re actually looking at a variety of ways to put pressure , including possible legal challenges , on companies that are basing their business model on the failure of the Paris Agreement,” Stewart says. “If you’re telling your investors, ‘We’ll make money because the world will not act on climate change’ are you actually engaging politically to try to produce that outcome? Are you lobbying against climate policy?’ ”

Landowner and environmental-protection groups added a new claim to their ongoing lawsuit challenging the Keystone XL pipeline project. The claim highlights the project’s threats to critically endangered whooping cranes and other threatened species. The additional claim is against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for failing to thoroughly analyze Keystone XL’s threats to the cranes, and other protected birds, before federal approvals of the project began earlier this year. These threats include increased risk of oil spills, habitat loss and collisions with hundreds of miles of new power lines that would serve the pipeline’s pump stations. The Fish and Wildlife Service arbitrarily concurred with the U.S. Department of State’s determination that despite these serious threats, Keystone XL was not likely to adversely affect the crane or other listed birds. The State Department relied on that decision to issue a cross-border permit for Keystone XL in March. The Keystone XL pipeline was rejected by the Obama administration because it’s an absolute disaster for wildlife, water and our climate. Approving this massive pipeline without ensuring that iconic endangered species like the whooping crane are adequately protected is simply unacceptable. Construction of the pipeline and the associated power lines would harm these birds by significantly increasing the risk of collisions and providing artificial perches for predators that target these imperiled species. Collisions are a leading source of death for whooping cranes, and the proposed pipeline route follows the main migratory corridor for the largest surviving wild population of whooping cranes, which numbers fewer than 300 birds. Habitat fragmentation from construction activities and inevitable oil spills during operation will also threaten cranes, terns and plovers and the natural areas they depend on for feeding, breeding and nesting. The groups seek a more comprehensive analysis of Keystone XL’s threats to these protected species and a reconsideration of the conservation measures needed to prevent serious harm.

Not only will Keystone XL worsen the climate crisis, poison waters and threaten communities along its route, it will drive wildlife closer to the brink of extinction. Indigenous peoples and ranchers led the fight against Keystone XL and Trump’s effort to force through this dangerous and destructive project is a slap in the face to them, as well as all who care about our planet. The Trump administration rushed to approve the Keystone XL without properly evaluating the pipeline's impacts. A comprehensive review would show that Keystone XL poses a grave danger to our climate, waterways and endangered species along the pipeline route. The State Department and Fish and Wildlife Service failed to fully consider the risk of harm, ignored the best available science and relied on inadequate conservation measures. Threats from habitat fragmentation and oil spills along the entire route were downplayed or ignored, and the agencies disregarded harms from the construction and operation of Keystone XL in Canada. Imperiled migratory birds like the whooping crane may be jeopardized in order to allow a Canadian corporation to pump dirty tar sands across the United States. The tar sands pipeline would put at grave risk our waters, wildlife and climate. We cannot continue to sacrifice our most precious resources on the altar of tar sands greed. In addition to the well-documented risks to our life-giving water and land, Keystone XL poses significant and unacceptable risks to the rare and beautiful whooping cranes.

Energy independence over corporate profits.

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

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

To make America great again around a new economic orientation, industrialized military, and US deficits.

For the US Government it is more important to make weapons of destruction, build more military bases with endless military ships that threaten many nations. Social security, global affairs and environment, Medicare and health, community affairs, Veterans Benefits and education do not seem to mean anything. As a result, the American people and those of other countries are suffering numerous deprivations. All those responsible should not let this to continue to happen.

President Trumps’ histrionics over the US trade deficit seem oblivious to the fact that neocon policymakers had already chosen decades ago amongst paths to “make America great again”! Path one followed the post Second World War scheme where the US rebuilt erstwhile belligerents Japan and Germany into capitalist competitors. It then put a floor under the global economy with an international monetary system that had the dollar as hub currency but backed up by exchangeability with gold should this or that country accumulate more dollars than it wanted. Bretton Woods international monetary system hinged on the US remaining competitive top dog. However, when it experienced balance of payments deficits in 1971, the first time since 1891, institutions like the International Monetary Fund were purposed to dole out the necessary recovery medicine. Yet the US took being outcompeted by Japan and Germany badly and, rather than take its medicine to make its manufacturing economy great again, tore up the playing field. Nixon’s shock to the world by unilaterally ending dollar-gold convertibility was the first move in this gambit. However it only accelerated US domestic inflationary policies which combined with growing economic stagnation to produce “stagflation”. And it encouraged major allies to contemplate replacing the dollar as hub currency as US inflation was exported across the globe. It was into this increasingly hostile environment for the dollar that FED chair Paul Volcker struck hard and fast raising US interest rates to stratospheric heights. This changed everything. First, the inflation dragon was quickly slain. Second, the dollar rapidly appreciated in world markets. Third, it restored global confidence in the dollar as hub currency. Finally, it streamed global money to into US dollar savings instruments and dollar denominated assets.

The problem with this dream suite is that under global conditions of recession and indebtedness, with rates of interest soaring above rates of profit and the strong dollar pricing US goods out of world markets, the US industrial economy disintegrated. Yet, for neocons, this provided the perfect storm to make America great again around a new economic orientation! Step one in this scheme was to take advantage of the high interest rate induced debt crisis that struck the third world from the early 1980s to destroy whatever pretentions its leaders had of building their own developed, manufacturing economies. Step two was to deregulate and liberalize US financial markets and compel major advanced economy allies to deregulate theirs. After all, with global money streaming into US savings instruments and assets, and scant profitable investment opportunities in the real economy, why not empower Wall Street as the vortex through which all this booty flowed. Then, with a seamless financial world, Wall Street would become the global command centre spreading around the speculative, casino games it was hatching. Step three is basically what we understand as globalization. Major US and other advanced economy transnational corporations disarticulated their production systems and offshored them to low wage third world countries that had been forced to deregulate and open to foreign investment as a condition of access to global credit. Japan created a template for this by organizing a network of supply companies across the East and Southeast Asian region during the 1970s and 80s. When China opened to the world Japanese corporations embraced it in their networks. By the 1990s, global transnationals of all stripes got in on the action in the region. Statistics soon showed Asia was becoming the centre of global manufacturing growth.

But manufacturing growth no longer equalled industrialization because production was sliced and diced into global value chains that took high value added knowledge and design inputs from advanced economies, added medium value added components to them in East and Southeast Asia, and then assembled the goods in China. Manufacturing, like global trade, was increasingly marked by intermediate goods or sub-products destined for low wage assembly mills. However, let us get back to the US economy under neocon tutelage. Remember, the disintegration of the US industrial machine left the US labour force jobless or facing low paid precarious work. Paralleling this was tax cuts for businesses and the wealthy along with US military adventures which set off rounds of bloating budget deficits. Adding globalization into the mix means swelling trade deficits as consumption goods are increasingly imported. Given the fact that Americans can’t save because they’re saddled with debt, the big question arises – where’s the money running the US economy coming from?

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

Climate change, an existential threat to humanity and much of nature.

The current warming of Earth,manifest in the rise in extreme weather events, including collapse of polar ice sheets, melting of the Arctic Sea ice, penetration of snow storms into mid-latitudes, permafrost thaw and methane release, hurricanes and wildfires, manifestsa shift in state of the atmosphere-oceansystem, constituting an existential threat to humanity and much of nature. As extreme temperatures, the rate of sea ice melting, the collapse of Greenland glaciers, the thawing of Siberian and Canadian permafrost, and increased evaporation in the Arctic drive cold snow storms into Europe and North America, and as hurricanes, cyclones, heat waves and wild fires affect tropical and semitropical parts of the globe, it is becoming clear Earth is entering a shift in state of the atmosphere-ocean system associated with destructive climate tipping points including hurricanes such as in the Caribbean, SE USA and the SW Pacific.

With hundreds of Gigaton carbon stored in Arctic permafrost, its thawing and methane release by analogy with geological methane-release and mass extinction events is becoming more likely. Vulnerable carbon sinks. ( a ) Land: Permafrost – 600 GtC; High-latitude peatlands – 400 GtC; tropical peatlands – 100 GtC; vegetation subject to fire and/or deforestation – 650 GtC; ( b ) Oceans: Methane hydrates – 10,000 GtC; Solubility pump – 2700 GtC; Biological pump – 3300 GtC. It is reported that climate change will lead to the death of some 500,000 people a year due to food supplies by 2050 and hundreds of thousands of people due to extreme weather events.

Developments in the atmosphere/ocean system reported by major climate research organizations(including NASA, NOAA, NSIDC, Hadley-Met, Tyndall, Potsdam, the World’s academies of science),and in Australia the CSIRO and BOM, include:

•A rise of atmospheric CO2 level to 408.35 ppm (February, 2018) at a rate of about 2 ppm/year and in previous years 3 ppm/year rates unprecedented in the geological record since 56 million years ago, tracking across thestability threshold of the Antarctic ice sheet estimated variously at 450±50 ppm CO2 .

•The rise in greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere and oceans is leading to an increase inextreme weather events relative to 1950-1960, including tropical storms, such as those in the Caribbean islands and SE USA, Tonga, Fiji, Vanuatu and the Philippines, with lives lost and damages estimated in the $billions.

•In Australia the frequency of extreme weather events has been rising, where since 2001, the numberof extreme heat records has outnumbered extreme cool records by almost 3 to 1 for daytimemaximum temperatures, and almost 5 to 1 and more for night-time minimum temperatures .

•Impacts on a similar scale are taking place in the ocean, where the CO2 rise is causing an increase in acidity from pH 8.2 to 8.1, predicted to decrease further to 7.8 by 2100, affecting coral reefs and the marine food chain .

•Ice sheets melt rates and sea level rise have been increasing and the rate of sea level rise have been accelerating, from ~1.7 mm/year over the last century to ~3.2 mm/year between 1993 and 2010 and to 3.9 mm/year, threatening low-lying islands, delta and lower river valleys, where billions of people live, compounded by changes to river flow regimes. The current rates of greenhouse gas level rise and temperature rise exceed those observed in the geological record. Global warming, amplified by feedbacks from polar ice melt, methane release from permafrost, and extensive fires, may become irreversible, including a possible collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. According to Professor James Hansen, NASA’s former chief climate scientist “Burning all fossil fuels would create a different planet than the one that humanity knows. “According to Professor Joachim Schellnhuber, Germany’s chief climate scientist “We’re simply talking about the very life support system of this planet” . While the Paris Accord remains non-binding, governments world-wide are presiding over a large-scale demise of the planetary ecosystems, which threatens to leave large parts of the Earth uninhabitable.

Tackling the root causes of an unfolding climate tragedy requires a wide range of methods, the main ones being:

(1) sharp reduction in carbon emissions, and

(2) effort at draw-down of atmospheric CO2, using methods such as sea weed plantations, soil biochar, soil re-silicification (applying basaltic rock dust), air-streaming through basalt and serpentine, sodium hydroxide pipe systems and so on.

The melting of the Arctic ice will lead to Global Climate catastrophe.

Summer ice covering the Arctic Ocean was tied for the second-lowest extent on record is a sobering reminder that the planet is swiftly heading toward a largely ice-free Arctic in the warmer months, possibly as early as 2020. After that, we can expect the ice-free period in the Arctic basin to expand to three to four months a year, and eventually to five months or more. The great white cap that once covered the top of the world is now turning blue , a change that represents humanity’s most dramatic step in reshaping the face of our planet. And with the steady disappearance of the polar ice cover, we are losing a vast air conditioning system that has helped regulate and stabilize earth’s climate system for thousands of years.

Few people understand that the Arctic sea ice “death spiral” represents more than just a major ecological upheaval in the world’s Far North. The decline of Arctic sea ice also has profound global climatic effects, or feedbacks, that are already intensifying global warming and have the potential to destabilize the climate system. Indeed, we are not far from the moment when the feedbacks themselves will be driving the change every bit as much as our continuing emission of billions of tons of carbon dioxide annually. So what are these feedbacks, and how do they interact? The most basic stem from turning the Arctic Ocean from white to blue, which changes the region’s albedo , the amount of solar radiation reflected off a surface. Sea ice, in summer, reflects roughly 50 percent of incoming radiation back into space. Its replacement with open water , which reflects roughly 10 percent of incoming solar radiation , is causing a high albedo-driven warming across the Arctic. When covered almost entirely by ice in summer , which the Arctic was for tens of thousands of years , water temperatures there didn’t generally rise above freezing. Now, as the open Arctic Ocean absorbs huge amounts of solar radiation in summer, water temperatures are climbing by several degrees Fahrenheit, with some areas showing increases of 7 degrees F above the long-term average. Such changes mean that a system that was once a vast air conditioner has started to turn into a heater. Just how much extra heat are the dark waters of Arctic Ocean in summer adding to the planet? One recent study estimates that it’s equivalent to adding another 25 percent to global greenhouse emissions.

To appreciate the complexity of these feedbacks and interactions, one need only look at the growing role played by waves and storms in the melting Arctic. With more of the Arctic Ocean becoming ice-free in summer, more waves are being generated. In summer, this increased wave action breaks up large ice floes into smaller fragments and hastens their melt. Then, in autumn, larger storms fed by open water cause wave-induced mixing of the Arctic Ocean, which brings up heat absorbed during the summer. This warms the water, making it harder for ice to form in the fall. I observed this phenomenon last September and October aboard the University of Alaska research vessel Sikuliaq in the western Arctic Ocean. After the warm summer of 2015, the advance of winter ice was slow and sporadic, apparently held back by the quantity of heat in the water column.

Yet another albedo-related effect with important global climatic repercussions is now unfolding in the Arctic. As ice-free Arctic waters have warmed, in turn warming the air above them, these rising temperatures have spread over land. This is an important factor in the increased melting of snow in Arctic terrestrial regions. Today, in midsummer, the Arctic land area covered by snow has decreased by several million square miles compared to five decades ago. These now-dark lands absorb more heat and further warm the Arctic, and the planet. Also, as the tundra and boreal forests heat up, runoff from snowmelt and waterways runs through warmer land, increasing the temperature of the great Arctic rivers such as the Mackenzie in Canada and the Ob, Lena, and Yenisei in Siberia. The warmer waters of these north-flowing rivers discharge into the Arctic basin, injecting more heat into the polar ocean.

The terrestrial warming in the Arctic is roughly equivalent to a 25 percent boost in global CO2 emissions. This, combined with the warming caused by the loss of Arctic sea ice, means that the overall ice/snow albedo effect in the Arctic could add as much as 50 percent to the direct global heating effect of CO2. Scientists can debate the potential magnitude of such increases. But there is no doubt that they will be significant , vividly illustrating how the Arctic can become a driver of, rather than just a responder to, global climate change. The list of feedback effects on the global climate from diminishing Arctic sea ice goes on. As ocean and air temperatures in the Arctic rise, this adds more water vapor to the atmosphere, since warmer air holds more moisture. Water vapor is itself a greenhouse gas, trapping outgoing long-wave radiation and holding heat closer to the surface of the earth. With air temperatures rising in many parts of the Arctic by several degrees F in recent decades, water vapor concentration has gone up by more than 20 percent, adding to Arctic warming.

Rising air temperatures over open Arctic waters in summer are also heating up the Greenland ice sheet. Until the 1980s, the Greenland ice sheet did not experience extensive summer melt. The melt then began at low altitudes, and in recent years has spread to the whole ice sheet. In July 2012, for example, 97 percent of the Greenland ice cap experienced surface melting, according to remote sensing by satellite. The meltwater does not just remain on the surface to refreeze in autumn. It plunges down into the ice sheet through large holes called moulins, lubricating the ice sheet bed and causing glacial advance to accelerate, doubling in speed in some cases as glaciers calve more icebergs into the ocean. Greenland is now the largest single contributor to global sea level rise, its melting ice cap adding some 300 cubic kilometres (72 cubic miles) of water per year to the ocean. The low estimates of sea level rise by the end of the century , two to three feet according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) , are being revised upwards, with serious implications for policymakers who must plan the defense of low-lying cities like Miami, New Orleans, London, Venice, and Shanghai, or of defenseless coastlines like Bangladesh. But the most worrisome feedback, which could lead to catastrophic effects in the near future, involves the release of seabed methane , a potent greenhouse gas , from the continental shelves of the Arctic Ocean.

The Arctic Ocean is unusual in that, while its abyssal depths are great (13,000 feet or more), it is surrounded by wide continental shelf seas only 150 to 300 feet deep. Most of these , the East Siberian, Kara, Laptev, and Barents seas , lie to the north of Siberia. Until this century, most of these Arctic continental shelves were covered with sea ice even in summer, and this prevented the water temperature from rising above 32 degrees F. During the last decade, however, the summer sea ice has retreated from the shelves, allowing the water to warm up into the high 30s. The warmer water, extending to the seabed, thaws the offshore permafrost that has been in place since the last Ice Age. Underneath it is a thick layer of sediment containing large amounts of methane in the form of solid methane hydrates; these have a cage-like crystal structure in which methane molecules are surrounded by ice. The release of the overlying pressure allows the hydrates to disintegrate and turn into gaseous methane, which bubbles up through the water column in intense plumes and is released to the atmosphere. This release is already causing global methane levels to rise after being flat through the early years of this century. The fear is that a larger portion of the methane will be released from the sediments. And although methane only remains in the atmosphere for a decade or so (unlike CO2, which can linger for centuries), it traps heat 23 times more efficiently per molecule than carbon dioxide. The Russian scientists investigating the offshore plumes (joined recently by German and Swedish expeditions) fear that a pulse of up to 50 gigatons of methane , some 8 percent of the estimated stock in the Arctic sediments , could be released within a very few years, starting soon. If this happened, model studies show that there would be a virtually immediate warming of 1 degree F, with accompanying massive costs to the planet. What is the risk of such an outbreak? Many scientists say it is low, although those who regard it as high are the very scientists who have actually done the observational work in the East Siberian Sea. The IPCC ignores this risk, but does go into the likely result of the thawing of permafrost on land, which would itself set off a total methane emission of a similar magnitude, albeit spread over decades.

The hidden costs of slow sea-level rise and rapid flooding.

The Greenland ice sheet between 2002 and 2014,has lost more than 2,500 gigatons (2500 billion tons) of ice, roughly 0.1 percent of its total. During the ﬁrst ﬁve years of the mission, Greenland lost mass at an average rate of about 200 gigatons (GT) per year. During the next ﬁve years, the average loss rate increased to about 300 gigatons per year.

What will the effects of sea-level rise look like in the next few decades? Probably much like the last few decades. Individual ﬂood events will strike several low-lying places, with potentially devastating consequences. In 1991, a massive cyclone struck Bangladesh. Much of this country’s population lives on a low-elevation river delta, where the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal. As with the Mississippi Delta, it is slowly subsiding. Winds from the cyclone drove storm surge far inland. The combination of high winds, ﬂooding, and the subsequent disease and starvation led to approximately 130,000 fatalities and devastating economic losses for this already impoverished nation. Massive ﬂooding again devastated the country in 1998, this time associated with high rainfall upstream. Deforestation in the upstream areas also contributed to ﬂooding. Densely forested hill slopes reduce rapid runoff in high rainfall events, encouraging absorption of rain into the soil. Cutting down the trees allows rainwater to ﬂow rapidly downhill, worsening ﬂooding down- stream. As sea level continues to rise and storm intensity increases (see Chapter 8), ﬂooding events in Bangladesh similar to the 1991 and 1998 catastrophes are virtually certain to increase in frequency and severity.

The 2005 ﬂooding of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the 2012 ﬂooding of New York and New Jersey associated with tropical storm Sandy, give clues to what the future will look like for coastal parts of the US. Many levees in New Orleans were rebuilt in the 1960s after extensive ﬂooding, and for decades, they seemed to be working. Geologists, engineers, and urban planners warned that such defenses were insufﬁcient in the face of rising sea level and subsiding land. For many years, nothing happened, and the optimists seemed to have the upper hand. When Katrina struck in 2005, the associated storm surge, starting from a higher base level (several decades worth of sea-level rise) attacked levees that were now too low (several decades worth of subsidence). In the end, coastal defenses were overwhelmed from over-topping and other failure modes, including erosion at the base of levees. Experts had warned of New York’s and coastal New Jersey’s vulnerability to storm surge for a long time before Hurricane Sandy struck in late October 2012. As with Bangladesh, these events will hit the US more frequently in the future as sea level slowly rises and storms become more intense. Areas that also experience coastal subsidence, such as cities built on river deltas or coastal areas built on dredged ﬁll, are more likely to be hit ﬁrst and suffer more extensive damage when storms do hit.

Most people (including many scientists) assume that this is all that most coastal communities will have to deal with for the next 50 years or so in terms of hazards and costs related to sea-level rise – the occasional violent storm and associated ﬂooding. Catastrophic, to be sure, but rare enough that individual communities can recover and rebuild. Rebuilding costs will be steep, but bearable: more than $100 billion for New Orleans and more than $50 billion for New York and New Jersey. Even the most pessimistic estimates predict that sea level will rise by less than 0.2 meters (a little less than 1 foot) by 2050, hence the amount of rise and additional risk is small compared to the short term but much larger effects from 5–6 meter storm surge. It’s the rapid storm surge, not the slow sea-level rise, that’s important, at least in the short term.

However, rising seas are eroding the beaches, bringing new coastline to the edge of private developments, often protected behind sea walls and sandbags. The net effect is that the public beaches are increasingly lost. Long-term loss of tourist revenue is a likely outcome. Miami Beach, Florida, a beautiful, art-deco tourist destination and a major source of income for South Florida, illustrates another example of hidden costs. When I was a professor at the University of Miami, a graduate student I knew lived in Miami Beach from 2005 to 2008 and parked her car on the street near her apartment. On several occasions, street-level ﬂooding was bad enough to rise above the door panels of the car and ﬂood the interior, requiring professional cleaning.

Parts of Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale now experience ﬂood- ing several times a year. These events used to be restricted to periods of intense rainstorms. The storm sewer system does not have much gradient, so during intense rain, the water has no place to go and ﬁlls the streets. In the last decade, a new phenomenon called sunny-day ﬂooding has started to occur. If high tide corresponds with a period of offshore wind, local sea level rises enough to ﬂood some of the streets, even without rain. Saltwater comes up through the storm sewers, and brackish water (mixed freshwater and saltwater) wells up through the porous ground. If you were living in Miami Beach and wanted a safe place to park your car, you might consult a topographic map (a map with elevation information), or if you have access to a computer or smartphone, you could consult Google Earth. Google has digitized the topographic maps of many areas, so it’s possible to read off the elevation of a speciﬁc location. If you are using an older map, the elevations will be in feet, and many areas of Miami Beach will lie on or close to the three-foot level (slightly lower than one meter). On Google Earth, they show up at or near the 1 m elevation mark. You might think that as long as you were lucky enough to ﬁnd a parking space for your car that was higher than 3 feet in elevation, which means three feet above the average height of the ocean, you would be safe most of the time, except during hurricanes or other extreme events. But, you would be wrong for several reasons.

First, the datum is now incorrect. Topographic maps are constructed with the assumption that the Earth is static – neither the Earth’s surface nor sea levels are supposed to change. For most places most of the time, static Earth is a good assumption. Most people (except geologists) think of the Earth in this way. But the Earth is actually changing all the time. In the more than 80 years since NAVD-29 was deﬁned and heights in Miami Beach were measured relative to it, certain parts of Miami Beach (the ones built on artiﬁcial ﬁll) have subsided, reﬂecting compaction of the ﬁll (by one or two feet), while sea level has risen by at least a foot. So places originally deemed to be 3 feet above mean high tide are now much closer to average sea level (i.e. zero elevation). If the tide is higher than average, the streets will ﬂood.

Second, as the surface of a street gets closer and closer to sea level (approaching zero elevation) details become important in terms of ﬂood potential. Small height differences (a foot or two) can make all the difference. Local depressions or high points may not be recorded on a typical topographic map. Also it is no longer enough to know the average elevation. This close to zero elevation, we also need to know the detailed time variation of sea level, which can change several tens of centimeters (1 to 2 feet) in an hour or less, due to tides and local weather. Miami Beach does not have levees like New Orleans to hold back high water, so high water conditions are felt almost immediately, with water often forcing its way up through the storm sewers or porous ground. High tide actually varies quite a bit. For Miami Beach, a spring high tide (when the moon is full or new, aligning its gravitational pull with the sun) will be a foot or two higher compared to a neap high tide (when the sun and moon are at right angles). The difference between spring and neap tides does not matter if you live in Colorado, much higher than sea level, but if you are living close to the ocean, that extra foot or two can make the difference between ﬂooding and no ﬂooding. Sometimes your parking space is actually going to be one or two feet below that day’s average water level, and you need to take that into account if you are looking for a safe place to park. In effect, you need a weather forecast for local sea level. If you knew sea level was going to be especially high over the next 24–48 hours, due to either a spring tide or an offshore wind, and you had the option, you might choose to pay extra to park your car overnight on the second or third ﬂoor of a parking structure.

Frequent ﬂooding of Miami Beach with water that is increasingly saline does more than damage parked cars. It is starting to wreak havoc with all sorts of infrastructure, from building foundations to buried cables and underground pipes for water and sewage. Gravity- drained storm sewers have become ineffective and require costly pumps, similar to those used in New Orleans. The present and future cost of these repairs and infrastructure upgrades is very high. In 2013 and 2014, Miami Beach spent millions of dollars installing new pumps to ﬂush ﬂoodwaters into nearby Biscayne Bay. Unfortunately, this “ﬁx” has had unintended economic consequences. Biscayne Bay is an important tourist attraction, famous for its swimming, boating, and ﬁshing. The untreated ﬂoodwater is hundreds of times higher in enterococci (the kind of bacteria that indicates fecal contamination) compared to levels recommended by the US Environmental Protection Agency.

China Plans to Break Petrodollar Stranglehold.

Beijing to set up oil-futures trading in the yuan which will be fully convertible into gold on the Shanghai and Hong Kong exchanges. Petrodollars have dominated the global energy markets for more than 40 years. China is looking to change that by replacing the dollars for yuan. Nations, of course, have tried this before since the system was set up by former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in tandem with the House of Saud back in 1974. Vast populations across the Middle East and Northern Africa quickly felt the consequences when Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in decided to sell oil in euros. Then there was Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi’s pan-African gold dinar blueprint, which failed to create a splash in an oil barrel. Of course, the US arranged for the killing Saddam Hussein. Fast forward 25 years and China is making a move to break the United States petrodollar strangle hold. The plan is to set upoil-futures trading in the yuan, which will be fully convertible into gold on the Shanghai and Hong Kong foreign exchange markets. The Shanghai Futures Exchange and its subsidiary, the Shanghai International Energy Exchange (INE), have already run four simulations for crude futures. It was expected to be rolled out by the end of this year, but that looks unlikely to happen. But when it does get off the ground in 2018, the fundamentals will be clear – this triple oil-yuan-gold route will bypass the mighty green back.

The fundamental contradiction between population/economic growth and protecting the environment.

Humans have a virtually unlimited capacity for self-delusion, even when self-preservation is at stake. The scariest example is the simplistic, growth-oriented, market-based economic thinking that is all but running the world today. Prevailing neoliberal economic models make no useful reference to the dynamics of the ecosystems or social systems with which the economy interacts in the real world. Consider economists’ (and therefore society’s) near-universal obsession with continuous economic growth on a finite planet.

Propelled by neoliberal economic thinking and fossil fuels, techno-industrial society consumed more energy and resources during the most recent doubling (the past 35 years or so) than in all previous history. Humanity is now in dangerous ecological overshoot, using even renewable and replenishable resources faster than ecosystems can regenerate and filling waste sinks beyond capacity. (Even climate change is a waste management problem , carbon dioxide is the single greatest waste by weight in all industrial economies.)

The “competitive displacement” of other species is an inevitable byproduct of continuous growth on a finite planet. The expansion of humans and their artefacts necessarily means the contraction of everything else. (Politicians’ protests notwithstanding, there is a fundamental contradiction between population/economic growth and protecting the “environment.”) And things can only get worse. Even at today’s “lacklustre” three-per-cent global growth rate, incomes/consumption would double in just 20 years and produce , in this century , dramatic climate change, widespread extinctions, the collapse of major biophysical systems, global strife and diminished prospects for continued civilized existence. But even this threat isn’t enough to move the world community to act sensibly to save itself. Like a mind-altering drug, the compound myth of perpetual growth and continuous technological progress obscures reality. Economists thicken the fog by insisting that the economy is “decoupling” from nature , another illusion resulting from faulty accounting, modelling abstractions and the fudging effects of globalization (for example, wealthy countries “offshoring” their ecological impacts onto poorer countries and the global commons).

The biophysical evidence , that is, reality , shows that material consumption and waste production are still increasing with population and GDP growth. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide is accumulating at accelerating record rates in the atmosphere and the years 2014, 2015 and 2016 sequentially shared the distinction of being the warmest years in the instrumental record. There is little question that the immediate drivers of overshoot are overpopulation and excess consumption, so there is widespread support for the idea of “clean production and consumption.” What only a few realists are willing to state out loud is that this must soon translate into less production/consumption by fewer people.

But this raises another problem. Thirty per cent of the world’s population are still considered to be “very poor” (living on less than $3.10 per day, purchasing power adjusted) and deserve to consume more. Meanwhile, ours is a world of chronic gross social inequity. Oxfam recently reported that the world’s richest eight billionaires possess the same wealth as the poorest 50 per cent of humanity , more than 3.5 billion people). The richest fifth of people take home about 70 per cent of global income compared to just two per cent by the poorest fifth. Such inequality deepens the hole we are digging for ourselves. There may be enough of everything to go around, but greater incomes enable the citizens of high-income countries to consume, on average, several times their equitable share of global economic and ecological output. Meanwhile the poor scrounge for crumbs at the bottom of our Earthly barrel. Even within prosperous nations, a widening income gap is known to undermine population health and erode social cohesion, the contemporary United States being an outstanding example. Our growth-based, winner-takes-all economy has become egregiously unjust as well as ecologically precarious. Perversely, the world community prescribes still greater material growth as the only feasible solution!

How might a clear-sighted neutral observer interpret our predicament? First, she or he would point out that on a finite planet already in overshoot, it is not biophysically possible to raise the material standards of the poor to those of the rich sustainably , that is, without destroying the ecosphere, undermining life-support functions and precipitating global societal collapse. In a non-deluded world, governments would no longer see economic growth as the panacea for all that ails them; in particular, they would acknowledge that enough is literally enough and cease promoting growth as the primary solution to both North-South inequity and chronic poverty within nations. Instead, a rational world would focus on devising institutions and policies for co-operative redistribution , ways to share the benefits of development more equitably. The goal should be to enhance the material well-being of developing countries and the poor and improve life-quality for all while simultaneously reducing both aggregate material consumption and world population.

Chinese production and exports are dominated by US and other foreign corporations, and, like the pollution drifting across the globe, – are not really ‘Chinese’ at all.

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

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

Capitalism, and the relationship between work, energy, money and climate change.

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

A litre of diesel has an energy value of 16700 kilocalories. Thus a litre of diesel mined from the earth displaces the work of 16700 kilocalories /2500 kilocalories = 6.67 person days. Under capitalism a litre of diesel is valued at around Rs 60, or let us say one Swiss Frank / United States Dollar / European Euro / UK Pound. So if a capitalist has to pay more than 1 SFr / 6.67 = 15 cents/10 Indian Rupees for a day of the work of a person, she is better off paying a machine that runs on diesel to get the work done.

A 1 litre of diesel when burnt emits 2.6 kg of carbon dioxide. Combined with the damage to flora and fauna at the place where fossil fuels are extracted, the damage to ecology of mining and burning coal and petroleum products has resulted in an average global temperature rise on earth of 1.63 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times.

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

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

As a summary, 80% of us live by doing manual labour. In the interest of human survival and the survival of the remaining plants and animals, we must refuse to work on machines running on commercial energy, whether such machines are computers or car assembly robots let alone weapons of war. We must unite to overthrow the system which gives overwhelming priority to the growth of private property of capitalists and focus on the social, cultural, material means to do peaceful physical work on the land. The best kind of physical work involves building up soil, growing food, and supporting the natural cycle of carbon sequestration and release in natural forests and other natural ecosystems of which we are a part. It involves, for example, swimming in the oceans and catching fish. Whether you call it the landscape approach, as biodiversity conservationists do, or land redistribution like landless labourers, or de-growth, or revolution, it all amounts to the same thing. We must overthrow capitalism, which may or may not be possible now. We must, however, at the very least put it under strict social control; if we don’t most human beings except for those in very favourable ecological niches with old cultures will most likely be wiped out along with most other fauna and flora.

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

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

Aside from the domination of the market being a cause for concern, we should also be worried about a food system controlled by companies that have a history of releasing health-damaging, environmentally polluting products onto the market and engaging in activities that might be considered as constituting crimes against humanity. If we continue to hand over the control of society’s most important infrastructure, food and agriculture, to these wealthy private interests, what will the future look like? Aside from these social, health and environmental implications, can we trust private entities like Monsanto (or Bayer) to use these powerful (potentially bio-weapon) technologies responsibly? Given Monsanto’s long history of cover-ups and duplicity, trust took the last train out a long time ago.

Agroecology is a force for grass-root rural change that would be independent from the cartel of powerful biotech/agribusiness companies. This model of agriculture is already providing real solutions for sustainable, productive agriculture that prioritises the needs of farmers and consumers. It represents an alternative to corporate-controlled agriculture.

However, as much as people and communities strive to become independent from unscrupulous corporate concerns and as much as localised food systems try to extricate themselves from the impacts of rigged global trade and markets, there also has to be a concerted effort to roll back corporate power and challenge what it is doing to our food. The extremely wealthy interests behind these corporations do their level best to displace or dismantle alternative models of production, whether agroecology, organic, public sector agriculture systems or anything that exists independently from them, and replace them with ones that serve their needs. Look no further than attempts attempts to undermine indigenous edible oils processing in India, for instance. Look no further than the ‘mustard seed crisis‘ in India in 1998. Or look no further than how transnational biotech helped fuel and then benefit from the destruction of Ethiopia’s traditional agrarian economy. Small and medium-sized enterprises are pushed into bankruptcy or obliged to produce for a global distributor, state enterprises are privatised or closed down, independent agricultural producers are impoverished. Increasing profit and shareholder dividends are the bottom line. And it doesn’t matter how much devastation ensues or how unsustainable their business model is, ‘crisis management’ and ‘innovation’ fuel the corporate-controlled treadmill they seek to impose. As long as the domination of the food system by powerful private interests is regarded as legitimate and as long as their hijack of governments, trade bodies and trade deals, regulatory agencies and universities is deemed normal or is unchallenged in the sham ‘liberal democracies’ they operate within, we are destined for a future of more contaminated food, ill health, degraded environments and an agriculture displaced and uprooted for the benefit of self-interest.

Despite the promise of the Green Revolution, hundreds of millions still go to bed hungry, food has become denutrified, functioning rural economies have been destroyed, diseases have spiked in correlation with the increase in use of pesticides and GMOs, soil has been eroded or degraded, diets are less diverse, global food security has been undermined and access to food is determined by manipulated international markets and speculation, not supply and demand.

Food and agriculture have become wedded to power structures that have created food surplus and food deficit areas and have restructured indigenous agriculture across the world and tied it to an international system of trade based on export-oriented mono-cropping, commodity production for a manipulated and volatile international market and indebtedness to international financial institutions. The problem is the system of international capitalism that is driving a globalised system of bad food and poor health, the destruction of healthy, sustainable agriculture and systemic, half-baked attack on both groups and individuals who oppose these processes.

At the very least, there should be full public control over all GMO/synthetic biology production and research. And if we are serious about reining in the power of profiteering corporations over food, our most basic and essential infrastructure, they should be placed under democratic ownership and control. It is our basic human right to protect our food supply. Food would be planned to meet human need, not corporate greed. We have hunger not because there is not enough food, but rather because it is not distributed equally. The core of the problem is not a shortage of food, but capitalism!

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

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

The upshot of it all is that the democratic political process in the world will continue to be degraded to the point of being all but destroyed as enhanced austerity programmes for the masses continue to erode further still America and the rest of the world’s social safety nets and humanitarian standards. Yet the ultimate political con is that this all, somehow, is going to ultimately benefit the masses as one corporate giant after another passes on to its workers what amounts to a mere pittance of the obscenely-massive profits they now are about to realize. Boy, if the reader is inclined to believe this latest scam that declares the fat cats now are magically going to invest in the future well-being of the 99% anymore than they did in 2008, has this writer got another sure-fire ‘Bitcoin’ deal for you! In the end, the world will see yet a further resurgence of scenarios spring off the pages of the 1920’s “Roaring Twenties”, 1930’s Fascism, 1940’s World War and cold, hard-hearted 1950’s “Organizational Man” that still dominates world politics and finances.

To Protect Food and Water Security, NAFTA Negotiations Must Get Rid of the Destructive Mechanism That Allows Corporations to Sue Nations. As the sixth round of the negotiations on North American Free Trade Agreement begin next week in Montreal, Canada, the controversy over exactly what a new agreement might involve—if there is one at all—continues to generate debate. As the NAFTA renegotiations were about to start, the Canadian government publicly stated its core objectives for a renewed North American Free Trade Agreement. These included making NAFTA more progressive by bringing strong labor safeguards and enhanced environmental provisions into the core of the agreement; adding a new chapter on gender rights (and another on Indigenous issues, in line with Canada’s commitment to improving relationship with its Indigenous peoples), and reforming the controversial Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) process—a system through which investors can sue nations for alleged discriminatory practices—"to ensure that governments have an unassailable right to regulate in the public interest."

The U.S. proposal has resonance in Canada and Mexico as well. For example, the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives has argued that "removing ISDS from NAFTA—or killing it with an opt-in clause—would be a major win for Canada." In a report published earlier this week, CCAP takes stock of Canada's experience with NAFTA, and concludes that "Canada accounts for about half of the known ISDS challenges filed under NAFTA" and calls on Canadian negotiators to "not let this opportunity slip through their hands." What is at stake in ISDS? ISDS is now part of most multilateral or bilateral investment agreements. As a recent report from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) shows, ISDS gives foreign investors the right to demand compensation for environmental, public interest and other laws that undermine their anticipated profits. This provision, initially put in place to protect investors' rights against nationalizations or expropriations, has evolved to become a tool for corporations to tie up governments in long and expensive legal cases, with chilling effects on public interest rules around the world. Cases are decided by unaccountable panels of trade lawyers, who might have conflicts of interest.

In fact, this ISDS provision allowed the Canadian company TransCanada to sue the U.S. government over the Keystone XL (KXL) Pipeline, where it specifically claimed breach of “fair and equitable treatment/minimum standard treatment" of foreign investors. The ISDS clause in NAFTA allowed the Canadian multinational to craft a win-win scenario in the case of Keystone XL Pipeline: either it could have pursued the ISDS claim for the $15 billion from the United States, or it could have used the threat of ISDS claim to get around the new "buy American rules" (especially if it did not want to go through a lengthy WTO dispute settlement body citing this rule as violation of international trade rules]). As this example shows, no nation is powerful enough to be safe from the overreach of ISDS, whether it is trying to protect national interest or trying to fulfill a campaign promise.

With the number of ISDS cases growing exponentially across the globe over the last two decades, ISDS has become quite controversial globally too, especially because of the way it affects food and water security. Some of these cases involve agriculture-related foreign investments and involve land or water grabbing from local communities. In other cases, communities find that their water sources are either depleted or polluted, affecting not only their irrigation water but also their drinking water and cooking water. The fallouts are not limited to agriculture-related investments. Investments in other sectors (such as extractive industries) too directly affect food and/or water security of the impacted communities, as for example the experiences of two countries (El Salvador and the U.S.) examined in IATP’s report show. Moreover, experiences over the last three decades show that this provision is increasingly being misused by transnational corporations not only to avoid culpability but also to seek to extort public money by suing host governments. ISDS has evolved as an important instrument in the hands of investors, as they seek to stifle conflicts—often arising from environmental problems including water pollution and public health problems impacting local communities —with those communities/countries.

The ISDS provision threatens to undermine the tremendous progress made in terms of the universal recognition of the right to water over the last decade and a half. Over the last two decades, for example, governments in every region have been making concerted efforts to improve peoples' access to drinking water and sanitation. This has meant enacting new laws, making new regulations and, in a few cases, also enshrining it as a constitutional right. In addition, globally, the states came together at the United Nations to recognize water as a fundamental human right. However, investors have increasingly been using ISDS during this same period to challenge public interest measures to address water pollution or to reduce water tariffs. IATP’s research on ISDS and right to water shows that the presence of ISDS in trade and investment regimes help continue to protect investors—including water companies—even as they violate human rights. Once investors file a case through ISDS, the respondent States need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to defend their case, and in payment to the investor if they lose, in addition to taking care of the domestic concerns arising from the fallout of these investments. States’ counterclaims related to violation of the economic social and cultural right are rarely considered by a tribunal.

Even in a recent case, the first time when the tribunal award considered the host state’s counterclaim related to violation of the human right to water, the tribunal ruled that for the human right obligation to exist and "to become relevant in the framework of the BIT [bilateral investment treaty], it should either be part of another treaty (not applicable here) or it should represent a general principle of international law." In short, these tribunals, made up of unaccountable trade lawyers, are unlikely to rule in favor of states seeking to uphold their human rights obligations or any other public responsibilities as long as the ISDS system in place. ISDS has no place in a world facing enormous environmental challenges and trying to achieve sustainable development goals around food and nutrition security, health and water security, amongst others. Nor is Canada's current proposal (replacing ISDS with an Investment Court System similar to the one in its free trade deal with the European Union) enough. Such a replacement would still retain the worst elements of ISDS.

The NAFTA renegotiation is a great opportunity for all three countries to agree to get rid of ISDS in North America as a first step. Canada's proposals in the context of NAFTA to uphold labor and environmental standards in all three countries provide important moral leadership, but its calls to "trade and protect" remains empty as long as it does not propose to eliminate the ISDS and analogous systems. The three countries should chart a path forward without ISDS—one that takes us closer to that third track. Shiney Varghese is a Senior Policy Analyst of Water, Agroecology and Global Governance at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

Trump's Budget Deals Massive Blow to Clean Water and Air, Public Lands, Public Health and the Environment.

Government should invest investing in conservation programs that provide clean drinking water, protect public health, and support a booming outdoor recreation economy, instead of benefiting oil and gas special interests and private developers at the expense of essential conservation programs that benefit all people.

In total, conservation and natural resource programs account for barely one percent of the federal budget, yet they provide invaluable benefits: clean air for children to breathe, clean water for families to drink, healthy public lands that support a booming outdoor recreation economy, vibrant wildlife populations, resilient ecosystems, and renewable energy that powers a clean, sustainable future. These benefits are foundational to the U.S. economy, and create high quality American jobs that cannot be exported.

Americans deserve a federal budget that protects public health, prioritizes conservation, and ensures the world we leave our children is cleaner, healthier and more sustainable than the one we inherited.

Chapter I Actual scenario of the world from the beginning of the industrial revolution to today.

Table of Contents.

The Biosphere.

American consumers have the largest ecological footprint in the world and is largely a consequence of the global power of TNCs, corporate America.

Climate denialism requires shutting one’s eyes to obvious realities when the truth is that the Earth is warmer than it has been in 120,000 years.

Rising sea levels, coastal cities, and extreme weather.

World's Biggest Cities That Will Be Drowned.

America's biggest greenhouse gas (GHG) polluter.

Dollar and death calculations of GHG pollution versus global GDP calculation.

The Arctic, health and bunker oil used by container ships.

In coming decades, because of global warming, the Arctic tundra permafrost and Arctic Ocean sea bed will release Methane CH4, a much more deadly GHG than CO2.

Extreme, catastrophic economically and socially disastrous wildfires could increase by up to 40% as the world warms.

Environment, debt, and future generations.

Corporate polluters are the worst offenders.

Americans, Canadians and Australians are making sure to doom the world with unlimited Greenhouse Gas Pollution.

America and world energy.

Unlimited fossil fuel exploitation means a commitment to GHG pollution over 16 times greater than the world’s present remaining Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget that must not be exceeded if we are to have a 75% chance of avoiding a catastrophic 2C temperature rise.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, developed economies have been emitting GHGs which created global warming and today's environmental crisis, and that makes the capitalism system responsible, and we must first change it.

Demographic, Social and Economic Changes Aggravate Threat to Humanity due to Climate Change.

Americans Contributes 20% Of World’s Annual Carbon Debt Increase.

Time left to avert climate catastrophe.

So what should Society do to avoid the worst impacts of climate change?

Industrial farming is not an efficient way to grow food.

Rising Sea levels will remake the coastlines of endangered U.S. States and drown much of other world coastlines.

Because of climate change, dry conditions and extreme heat have led to a proliferating number of intense wildfires, causing massive damage to infrastructure, land and the loss of human life.

To teach the younger generation about climate change.

Global commons, biodiversity debt, and the goal in America must be to overturn our present expansionary system by fostering de-growth.

The 1% as much wealth as half the world's population.

Energy and prosperity.

Why Keystone XL should never get built.

Climate change, an existential threat to humanity and much of nature.

The melting of the Arctic ice will lead to Global Climate catastrophe.

The hidden costs of slow sea-level rise and rapid flooding.

China Plans to Break Petrodollar Stranglehold.

The fundamental contradiction between population/economic growth and protecting the environment.

Chinese production and exports are dominated by US and other foreign corporations, and, like the pollution drifting across the globe, – are not really ‘Chinese’ at all.

Capitalism, and the relationship between work, energy, money and climate change.

Trump's Budget Deals Massive Blow to Clean Water and Air, Public Lands, Public Health and the Environment.

Chapter I
Actual scenario of the world from the beginning of the industrial revolution to today.