[TheClimate.Vote] June 10, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*June 10, 2020*/

[Recounting coal]
*Britain goes coal free as renewables edge out fossil fuels*
By Justin Rowlatt - 9 June 2020
Britain is about to pass a significant landmark - at midnight on 
Wednesday it will have gone two full months without burning coal to 
generate power.

A decade ago about 40% of the country's electricity came from coal; 
coronavirus is part of the story, but far from all.

When Britain went into lockdown, electricity demand plummeted; the 
National Grid responded by taking power plants off the network.

The four remaining coal-fired plants were among the first to be shut down.

The last coal generator came off the system at midnight on 9 April. No 
coal has been burnt for electricity since.

The current coal-free period smashes the previous record of 18 days, 6 
hours and 10 minutes which was set in June last year...
- -
The remaining three coal plants in the UK will be shut down within five 
years.

Then the fuel that sparked the industrial revolution here in Britain 
almost two centuries ago will be a thing of the past.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52973089?


[Graphics library]
*2020 Hurricane Season*
Rising temperatures are causing hurricanes to become more intense, 
produce more rainfall, and create higher storm surges.
https://medialibrary.climatecentral.org/resources/2020-hurricane-season



[Dr James Hansen more - draft chapters of an excellent book ]
*Chapter 15. Greenhouse Giants*
The greenhouse effect was described in Chapter 10 in comparing the 
Goldilocks planets:
Venus, Mars and Earth. The greenhouse effect was understood 
qualitatively two centuries ago,
as there are numerous references to it in the literature during the 
first half of the 19th century.
Joseph Fourier, a French mathematician and physicist, wrote in 1824: 
"The temperature [of
Earth's surface] can be augmented by the interposition of the 
atmosphere, because heat in the
state of light finds less resistance in penetrating the air, than in 
re-passing into the air when
converted into non-luminous heat."

Fourier was describing the natural greenhouse effect. Sunlight readily 
penetrates Earth's
atmosphere, heating the surface. In contrast, heat (infrared radiation) 
from Earth's surface is
largely absorbed by the atmosphere, with some of this energy radiated 
back to the surface. Thus
the atmosphere acts like a blanket, additionally warming Earth's surface.
If Earth had no atmosphere, and still absorbed 70 percent of incident 
sunlight as it does today, its
temperature would need to be -18C to emit enough infrared radiation to 
yield energy balance.
But the blanket of greenhouse gases forces Earth to warm to a point that 
the radiation emitted to
space equals the absorbed solar energy. That results in the actual 
surface temperature of +15C.
So the natural greenhouse effect on Earth is 33C, which is about 60F. 
Absent the greenhouse
effect, Earth would be uninhabitably cold. Any human-made increase of 
global temperature,
usually called 'global warming,' is surely small compared with this 
natural greenhouse effect.
Can the smaller human-made effect really be important? That question has 
a long history.
John Tyndall, an Irish physicist, is the father of the greenhouse 
effect, in the sense that he
made the greatest contributions to the science...
- - -
My interest was in what Dr. Jastrow called End-of-Century predictions. 
My proposal to
the stratospheric research program at NASA Headquarters had been 
approved. The funding
helped support development of the coarse resolution climate model. 
Specifically, it allowed me
to pay the salary of Gary Russell, who did not want to move to Maryland.
We were still early in our work on the three-dimensional (3-D) coarse 
resolution model, so I did
not have results for end-of-century climate simulations. All that I 
could show was calculations
that we had done with a simple 1-D (vertical column) climate model, 
while we were working on
the 3-D climate model.
These calculations were for the natural climate experiment that was 
playing out over our heads in
1963, when Andy and I were taking the Ph.D. qualifying examination. Now 
we could use the
measurements that we had made on a cold winter night in Iowa in 1963, as 
the moon was
obscured by the sulfate aerosols produced by the massive eruption of 
Mount Agung on the island
of Bali, Indonesia.
The idea was to use this volcanic eruption as a natural climate 
experiment. The stratospheric
aerosols produced by the Agung eruption reflected sunlight to space, 
reducing solar heating of
Earth so much that it should have a discernable cooling effect on Earth.
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2020/20200609_SophiePlanet10.pdf



[because it was under snow and ice for 400 years]
*Kedarnath temple opens for pilgrims: Why this temple in Uttarakhand is 
famous*
India Today Web Desk  May 9, 2019
The tourist season in Uttarakhand is on and the historic temple in 
Kedarnath re-opened for pilgrims on Thursday. The temple, which is 
dedicated to Lord Shiva, is said to be more than 1,200 years old. It was 
built by Adi Shankaracharya and is among one of the 12 jyotirlingas in 
India...
- -
Located at a height of nearly 3,500 meters above the sea level, the 
Kedarnath temple remains covered in snow for the most part of the year.
- -
The website says that the temple is built of extremely large, heavy and 
evenly cut grey slabs of stones, it evokes wonder as to how these heavy 
slabs had been handled in the earlier days...
- -
In 2013, the temple town was badly damaged during the Kedarnath floods 
which wreaked havoc across Uttarakhand. The floods were triggered by 
heavy rain and a breach of a massive glacial lake that was situated just 
above Kedarnath.
https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/kedarnath-temple-opens-for-pilgrims-why-this-temple-in-uttarakhand-is-famous-1520807-2019-05-09
photo 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kedarnath_Temple#/media/File:Kedarnath_temple_1880's.jpg
20 min Video documentary
https://www.indiatoday.in/programme/long-story/video/the-long-story-price-of-pilgrimage-1267751-2018-06-23?jwsource=cl


[Long text with difficult conclusions]
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-06-08/collapse-of-civilisation-is-the-most-likely-outcome-top-climate-scientists/
*'Collapse of Civilisation is the Most Likely Outcome': Top Climate 
Scientists*
By Asher Moses, originally published by Voice of Action
June 8, 2020
Australia's top climate scientist says "we are already deep into the 
trajectory towards collapse" of civilisation, which may now be 
inevitable because 9 of the 15 known global climate tipping points that 
regulate the state of the planet have been activated.

Australian National University emeritus professor Will Steffen 
(pictured) told Voice of Action that there was already a chance we have 
triggered a "global tipping cascade" that would take us to a less 
habitable "Hothouse Earth" climate, regardless of whether we reduced 
emissions.

Steffen says it would take 30 years at best (more likely 40-60 years) to 
transition to net zero emissions, but when it comes to tipping points 
such as Arctic sea ice we could have already run out of time.

Evidence shows we will also lose control of the tipping points for the 
Amazon rainforest, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and the Greenland ice 
sheet in much less time than it's going to take us to get to net zero 
emissions, Steffen says.

"Given the momentum in both the Earth and human systems, and the growing 
difference between the 'reaction time' needed to steer humanity towards 
a more sustainable future, and the 'intervention time' left to avert a 
range of catastrophes in both the physical climate system (e.g., melting 
of Arctic sea ice) and the biosphere (e.g., loss of the Great Barrier 
Reef), we are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse," said 
Steffen.

"That is, the intervention time we have left has, in many cases, shrunk 
to levels that are shorter than the time it would take to transition to 
a more sustainable system.

"The fact that many of the features of the Earth System that are being 
damaged or lost constitute 'tipping points' that could well link to form 
a 'tipping cascade' raises the ultimate question: Have we already lost 
control of the system? Is collapse now inevitable?"

This is not a unique view - leading Stanford University biologists, who 
were first to reveal that we are already experiencing the sixth mass 
extinction on Earth, released new research this week showing species 
extinctions are accelerating in an unprecedented manner, which may be a 
tipping point for the collapse of human civilisation.

- -
Steffen used the metaphor of the Titanic in one of his recent talks to 
describe how we may cross tipping points faster than the time it would 
take us to react to get our impact on the climate under control.

"If the Titanic realises that it's in trouble and it has about 5km that 
it needs to slow and steer the ship, but it's only 3km away from the 
iceberg, it's already doomed," he said.

'This is an existential threat to civilization'
Steffen, along with some of the world's most eminent climate scientists, 
laid out our predicament in the starkest possible terms in a piece for 
the journal Nature at the end of last year.

They found that 9 of the 15 known Earth tipping elements that regulate 
the state of the planet had been activated, and there was now scientific 
support for declaring a state of planetary emergency. These tipping 
points can trigger abrupt carbon release back into the atmosphere, such 
as the release of carbon dioxide and methane caused by the irreversible 
thawing of the Arctic permafrost.
- -
https://voiceofaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/tipping-points-climate-change-nature-comment-1.jpg
9 of 15 known Earth tipping points have been activated
- -
"If damaging tipping cascades can occur and a global tipping point 
cannot be ruled out, then this is an existential threat to 
civilization," they wrote.

"No amount of economic cost-benefit analysis is going to help us. We 
need to change our approach to the climate problem.

"The evidence from tipping points alone suggests that we are in a state 
of planetary emergency: both the risk and urgency of the situation are 
acute."
- -
Steffen is also the lead author of the heavily cited 2018 paper, 
Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, where he found 
that "even if the Paris Accord target of a 1.5C to 2C rise in 
temperature is met, we cannot exclude the risk that a cascade of 
feedbacks could push the Earth System irreversibly onto a 'Hothouse 
Earth' pathway."

Steffen is a global authority on the subject of tipping points, which 
are prone to sudden shifts if they get pushed hard enough by a changing 
climate, and could take the trajectory of the system out of human 
control. Further warming would become self-sustaining due to system 
feedbacks and their mutual interaction.

Steffen describes it like a row of dominos and his concern is we are 
already at the point of no return, knocking over the first couple of 
dominos which could lead to a cascade knocking over the whole row.

"Some of these we think are vulnerable in the temperature range we're 
entering into now," said Steffen.

"If we get those starting to tip we could get the whole row of dominos 
tipping and take us to a much hotter climate even if we get our 
emissions down."

Even the notoriously conservative United Nations Intergovernmental Panel 
on Climate Change (IPCC) has found that already with the 1.1C of warming 
we have had to date, there was a moderate risk of tipping some of these 
- and the risk increased as the temperatures increased.

Steffen believes we are committed to at least a 1.5C temperature rise 
given the momentum in the economic and climate system, but we still have 
a shot at staying under 2C with urgent action.
- -
*+4C world would support < 1 billion people*
Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director emeritus and founder of 
the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, believes if we go 
much above 2C we will quickly get to 4C anyway because of the tipping 
points and feedbacks, which would spell the end of human civilisation.

"There is a very big risk that we will just end our civilisation": 
Professor Schellnhuber

Johan Rockstrom, the head of one of Europe's leading research 
institutes, warned in 2019 that in a 4C-warmer world it would be 
"difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half 
of that … There will be a rich minority of people who survive with 
modern lifestyles, no doubt, but it will be a turbulent, conflict-ridden 
world".

Schellnhuber, one of the world's leading authorities on climate change, 
said that if we continue down the present path "there is a very big risk 
that we will just end our civilisation. The human species will survive 
somehow but we will destroy almost everything we have built up over the 
last two thousand years."

Schellnhuber said in a recent interview that the IPCC report stating we 
could stay below 1.5C of warming was "slightly dishonest" because it 
relies on immense negative emissions (pulling CO2 out of the air) which 
was not viable at global scale. He said 1.5C was no longer achievable 
but it was still possible to stay under 2C with massive changes to society.

If we don't bend the emissions curve down substantially before 2030 then 
keeping temperatures under 2C becomes unavoidable. The "carbon law" 
published in the journal Science in 2017 found that, to hold warming 
below 2C, emissions would need to be cut in half between 2020 and 2030.

Steffen told Voice of Action that the three main challenges to humanity 
- climate change, the degradation of the biosphere and the growing 
inequalities between and among countries - were "just different facets 
of the same fundamental problem".

This problem was the "neoliberal economic system" that spread across the 
world through globalisation, underpinning "high production high 
consumption lifestyles" and a "religion built not around eternal life 
but around eternal growth".

"It is becoming abundantly clear that (i) this system is incompatible 
with a well-functioning Earth System at the planetary level; (ii) this 
system is eroding human- and societal-well being, even in the wealthiest 
countries, and (iii) collapse is the most likely outcome of the present 
trajectory of the current system, as prophetically modelled in 1972 in 
the Limits to Growth work," Steffen told Voice of Action.

Eternal growth is not possible
Turner ran updated figures through the model again in 2012 for another 
peer-reviewed paper, and again in 2014 when he had joined the University 
of Melbourne's Sustainable Society Institute.

"Data from the forty years or so since the LTG study was completed 
indicates that the world is closely tracking the BAU scenario," Turner 
concluded in the 2014 paper.

"It is notable that there does not appear to be other 
economy-environment models that have demonstrated such comprehensive and 
long-term data agreement."

Turner semi-retired in 2015 but runs a small organic market garden on a 
rural property in the NSW south coast's Bega Valley.

He and his wife grow most of their own food and live off grid powered by 
a solar energy system. Turner said this saved him during last summer's 
catastrophic bushfires as his power stayed online but most people in the 
area lost power for weeks.

Turner has continued tracking the data as best as possible since his 
last official report in 2014, and last year he helped a Harvard masters 
student update the data for their thesis.

Turner told Voice of Action that under his modelling the business as 
usual scenario "ends up resulting in a global collapse from about now 
through the next decade or so".

It was difficult to predict a timeline but Turner said he believed 
"there's an extremely strong case that we may be in the early stages of 
a collapse right at the moment".

"Vested interests and corrupt politicians combined with a population 
happy to deny problems overwhelm those that are trying to promulgate 
truth and facts," said Turner.
- -
https://voiceofaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/file-20181203-194941-1txzrqg.png
Fossil fuel emissions continue to rise
- -
'By 2030 we'll know what path we've taken'
Steffen told Voice of Action that it's "highly likely that by 2030 we'll 
know what pathway we've taken", "the pathway towards sustainability or 
the current pathway towards likely collapse".

"I think the 'fork in the road' will come in this decade, probably not a 
single point in time but as a series of events," said Steffen.

Steffen told Voice of Action he believes collapse "will likely not come 
as a dramatic global collapse, but rather as overall deterioration in 
many features of life, with regional collapses occurring here and there".

"For example, it appears that the USA is entering a long period of 
decline in many aspect of its society, with a potential for a more rapid 
collapse in the coming decade," said Steffen.

Samuel Alexander, a lecturer with the University of Melbourne and 
research fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, told 
Voice of Action that the coming collapse would not be a single black or 
white event.

"With respect to civilisations, what is more likely is that we have 
entered a stage of what JM Greer calls 'catabolic collapse' - where we 
face decades of ongoing crises, as the existing mode of civilisation 
deteriorates, but then recovers as governments and civil society tries 
to respond, and fix things, and keep things going for a bit longer," 
said Alexander.

"Capitalism is quite good at dodging bullets and escaping temporary 
challenges to its legitimacy and viability. But its condition, I feel is 
terminal."

Alexander, who studies the economic, political and cultural challenges 
of living on a full planet in an age of limits, believes the future will 
be "post-growth / post capitalist / post-industrial in some form".

"The future will like arrive in part by design and in part by disaster. 
Our challenge is to try to constitute the future through planning and 
community action, not have the future constitute us," said Alexander.

Alexander said that it would never be "too late" to act sensibly as 
whether we're trying to avoid or manage collapse there is lots of work 
to be done ("a 3 degree future is better than a 4 degree future").

Steffen believes the current US mass uprisings are not a sign of 
collapse but one of "growing instability".

Alexander said it was a sign of "steam building up within a closed 
system". Without bold grassroots and political action we were "likely to 
see explosions of civil unrest increasingly as things continue to 
deteriorate".

"As economies deteriorate and as inequalities deepen, more people get 
disenfranchised, incentivising resistance and sadly sometimes making 
people look for scapegoats to blame for new or intensifying hardships 
(e.g. the so-called alt-right)," said Alexander.
- -
https://voiceofaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/F2.large_.jpg
If we don't stabilise the climate we will fall into an irreversible 
Hothouse Earth scenario
- -
Funding dried up after inconvenient truths
When Turner joined CSIRO in the early 2000s the organisation was working 
on the Australian Stocks and Flows Framework - a model of the economy 
using physical things rather than dollars.

The work was funded by the Department of Immigration but Turner says the 
reports - the last of which was done in 2010 - were buried because the 
conclusions did not support high population growth.

The research found the economic benefits in terms of wealth per person 
would be outweighed by social ills including the impact on quality of 
life and the environment from resource use and pollution. The reports 
warned there would be nil net flow to the Darling River, loss of habitat 
and animal and plant species, traffic congestion, city water deficits 
and reduced biodiversity due to polluted creeks.

Turner's findings went against the neoliberal orthodoxies as they 
challenged the notion of infinite growth on a finite planet. He said he 
and others pursuing similar research in "stocks and flows" models of the 
economy "found it harder and harder to get work funded".

It is no wonder then that the latest Breakthrough National Centre for 
Climate Restoration report found "there is no literature that 
synthesises the large scale impacts that climate change could have on 
Australia's economy, and no reliable snapshot of Australia's economic 
vulnerability to future climate warming in a regional and global context".

Steffen said he hadn't received any political pressure over his work 
"but I probably haven't attacked the growth/capitalism paradigm as 
directly as Graham [Turner] has". He says he has not hesitated to note 
the incompatibility of the neoliberal economic system with a stable 
Earth system in his talks.

"It seems obvious that very fundamental changes are required, all the 
way down to core values - what do we really value in life?," said Steffen.

Turner said the "absolutely immense changes" required to deliver a 
sustainable future were just "too hard for the vast majority of people 
to contemplate".

"You'd have to halve the birth rate, you'd have to have net zero 
immigration, you'd have to go totally renewable energy and double 
efficiencies in every sector of the economy, and the really key thing is 
you'd have to reduce the working week over time so that it would become 
half of what it is," said Turner.

"But that would also mean that people wouldn't have the same level of 
income and it goes hand in hand with reducing household consumption by 
half. And unless you do all of those things, you don't achieve a steady 
state, sustainable future, and if you leave some things out you've got 
to go even harder at the others."

Turner believes it would be possible to provide for everyone's needs in 
a sustainable way but we would have to live a 1950s or 1960s-style 
lifestyle with limits such as one car and TV per household. We wouldn't 
be living in caves and we'd still have technology but the rate of change 
would be a lot slower.

"I think if we all manage to live a simpler and arguably more fulfilling 
life then it would be possible still with some technological advances to 
have a sustainable future, but it would seem that it's more likely … 
that we are headed towards or perhaps on the cusp of a sort of global 
collapse," Turner told Voice of Action.

Turner said he fears that the public at large won't take the problem 
seriously enough and demand change until they're "actually losing their 
jobs or losing their life or seeing their children directly suffer".

'Potentially infinite costs of climate change'
The political discourse is about getting back to growth, supported by 
taxpayer-subsidised fossil fuels, but evidence shows that even if the 
government was committed to renewable energy, "green growth" is just not 
possible at a global scale.

A 2019 IMF Working Paper notes a growing agreement between economists 
and scientists "that risk of catastrophic and irreversible disaster is 
rising, implying potentially infinite costs of unmitigated climate 
change, including, in the extreme, human extinction".
- -
https://voiceofaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/ipcc2100.jpg
Slide from Steffen's recent presentation showed the temperature anomaly 
over 2000 years
- -
The Australian-based Breakthrough National Centre for Climate 
Restoration has spent years publishing reports warning that the science 
shows we are headed for civilisational collapse. They stress there is no 
further carbon budget today for a realistic chance of staying below 2C, 
so there can be no further fossil fuel expansion.

The Breakthrough reports have been critical of the scientific community 
- including the IPCC - for underplaying the full risks of climate change 
particularly the tipping points and existential risk. Its latest report, 
Fatal Calculations, takes aim at economists for failing to adequately 
account for costs of inaction in their models, which in turn has been 
used by politicians to delay action.

"Despite the escalating climate disasters globally, not least our 
bushfires, this preoccupation with the cost of action -- and a blind eye 
turned to overwhelming future damage -- remains the dominant thinking 
within politics, business and finance," the Breakthrough report found.

"Because climate change is now an existential threat to human society, 
risk management and the calculation of potential future damages must pay 
disproportionate attention to the high-end, extreme possibilities, 
rather than focus on middle-of-the-spectrum probabilities."

In a discussion paper released in May, titled COVID-19 climate lessons, 
Breakthrough draws parallels between climate change and the lack of 
preparedness for the pandemic.

"The world is sleepwalking towards disaster. The UN climate science and 
policymaking institutions are not fit-for-purpose and have never 
examined or reported on the existential risks," the paper reads.

"There are no national or global processes to ensure that such risk 
assessments are undertaken and are efficacious. The World Economic Forum 
reports on high-end global risks, including climate disruption, once a 
year and then everybody goes back to ignoring the real risks."
- -
https://voiceofaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Global-map-of-potential-tipping-cascades-The-individual-tipping-elements-are-color-coded-1.jpg
Tipping points are poorly accounted for in climate change models
- -
Human activity is causing temperature rises beyond the envelope of 
natural variability that the biosphere is built to support. Steffen said 
there's only been two times in the last 100 million years that we have 
seen a spike in temperature like this, the first was when the dinosaurs 
were wiped out 65 million years ago and the second was another mass 
extinction event 56 million years ago.

The last time atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions were at the current 
level was during the early-to-mid Pliocene 3-4 million years ago, when 
temperatures were around 3C warmer than the late 19th century, and sea 
levels were around 25 metres higher.

Government failing to meet the challenge
Despite recent bushfires which burnt 35 million hectares, caused 445 
excess deaths from smoke and incinerated 1 billion animals - doubling 
Australia's annual CO2 emissions in the process - the government is 
refusing to commit to even modest emissions reduction targets and is 
pushing a "gas-fired recovery".

It has emerged this week that the government was warned about the 
likelihood of severe bushfires but failed to do enough to prepare. Fire 
chiefs were also gagged from talking about climate change.

The Great Barrier Reef this year was hit with its third mass bleaching 
event in 5 years.

The Australian government, beholden to the fossil fuel industry and with 
no corruption watchdog to keep it in check, continues to resist pressure 
to increase its climate change commitment. Australia will not even be 
able to meet its Paris targets without an accounting loophole - targets 
which themselves are inadequate to prevent collapse.

It's not just climate change that is leading us to collapse but also the 
fact that nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human 
history.

Around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with 
extinction, many within decades. As Steffen notes, the web of life on 
Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed.

Humans thoroughly dominate the land biosphere making up 32% of all 
terrestrial biomass followed by around 65% in domesticated animals, 
leaving less than 3% of vertebrate wildlife.

There has also been what's called "The Great Acceleration", whereby 
human population and economic growth is accelerating leading to 
accelerating use of resources like water and energy. This has also led 
to exponential growth in: greenhouse gas emissions, ocean acidification, 
ozone depletion, surface temperatures, marine fish capture, terrestrial 
biosphere degradation, tropical forest lost and domesticated land.

Many countries, including parts of Australia, are running out of water 
and having to truck in bottled water. It is predicted that 1.8 billion 
people will be living in water-scarce regions by 2025.

Steffen says net zero emissions by 2050 would be "too late" and the only 
thing that will save us are radical solutions committing to:
- No new fossil fuel developments of any kind from now
- A 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and 100% renewable 
energy
- Reaching net zero emissions by 2040
Steffen says it's much, much cheaper not to use fossil fuels in the 
first place than to try to capture the CO2 after the fact, as you're 
"fighting the second law of thermodynamics when you're trying to 
recapture CO2".

Turner believes the Corporations Act should be rewritten "so that 
corporations don't have more legal rights than people, and are not 
compelled to make a profit for shareholders".

'We're possibly gone already'
Associate Professor Anitra Nelson, honorary principal fellow at the 
University of Melbourne's Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, 
advocates for "de-growth" policies which would reduce global consumption 
and production to sustainable levels. She says we're currently consuming 
resources as if there were four Earths and if we don't change fast we 
will face conditions that we can't survive under.
- -
"On the current trajectory we're possibly gone already, and if we're 
not, unless we act very quickly and in very serious ways we just can't 
get back into a kind of balance with nature," Nelson told Voice of Action.

"I do actually think we're already into the collapse and it's just 
likely to get worse and more quickly worse as we go."

Nelson said we have to wholesale change how we live on this planet and 
that includes discussions about population control (such as restrictions 
on the number of kids people have) and even maximum income limits.

Nelson said we also need to get rid of capitalism as fundamentally that 
economic system could not survive without growth.

Instead of firms competing in a global market we need to be "localising 
economies" so that "basically people are producing locally for local 
needs and only basic needs". This would involve having "autonomous 
communities" with "substantive and direct democracy" and consensus 
decision making.

Tim Buckley, director of energy finance studies at the Institute for 
Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), told Voice of Action 
that our economic model "will have to change or collapse" as "we are 
reaching the limits to growth". The health and social costs were 
increasingly evident and "we are getting to the point where it can't be 
avoided".

"I think global capitalism is realising that the parasitical nature that 
has emerged (where the top 1% own the vast majority of the world's 
wealth), can only be sustained for so long," said Buckley.

"If they kill the host (the bottom 99% of the people), their position in 
absolute terms is worse off, even if they own all the wealth, the total 
pie will shrink, and they are most impacted. So in order to protect 
their 'elite' position, they will allow changes to make the model more 
sustainable, so they can remain the top 1%, but sharing a little more to 
make the model more sustainable."

Buckley is more optimistic than most in that he believes the world's 
financial elites will reorganise the global economy to become 
sustainable out of self preservation.

"The economics of renewables make this economically sensible. It is not 
about saving the poor of the world. It is about an economic reality - 
solar is killing coal fired power plant investments. Technology and 
economics win, not environmentalism."
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-06-08/collapse-of-civilisation-is-the-most-likely-outcome-top-climate-scientists/



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - June 10, 1963 *
In a commencement address at American University, President Kennedy 
famously observes:

    "For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we
    all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all
    cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal."

http://youtu.be/0fkKnfk4k40   at 14 minutes
transcript available for this superb presidential speech

/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/


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