[✔️] November 2, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*November 2, 2021*/

/[ United Nations news ]/
//*United Nations Climate Change *
Latest information
https://unfccc.int/news


/[ Greta's activism ]/
*SIGN THE EMERGENCY APPEAL FOR CLIMATE ACTION!*
As citizens across the planet, we urge you to face up to the climate 
emergency. Not next year. Not next month. Now:

    -- Keep the precious goal of 1.5°C alive with immediate, drastic,
    annual emission reductions unlike anything the world has ever seen.
    -- End all fossil fuel investments, subsidies, and new projects
    immediately, and stop new exploration and extraction.
    -- End creative carbon accounting by publishing total emissions for
    all consumption indices, supply chains, international aviation and
    shipping, and the burning of biomass.
    -- Deliver the $100bn promised to the most vulnerable countries,
    with additional funds for climate disasters.
    -- Enact climate policies that protect workers and the most
    vulnerable, and reduce all forms of inequality.

We can still do this. There is still time to avoid the worst 
consequences if we are prepared to change. It will take determined, 
visionary leadership. And it will take immense courage -- but know that 
when you rise, billions will be right behind you.
https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/climate_action_now_loc/?cACRrpb



/[ doubtful and difficult ]/
*Can carbon capture facilities reverse climate change?*
The world’s biggest such complex will capture 4,000 tonnes of greenhouse 
gas per year in boxes the size of shipping containers...
- -
As world leaders meet in Glasgow for COP26, the United Nations’ climate 
summit, scientists are touting this cutting-edge yet costly technology 
as a key solution to the climate crisis.

Others warn its high price and voracious appetite for energy are 
obstacles to neutralising emissions on a global scale. Its fiercest 
critics brand it a naive and unproven tactic that offers the worst 
polluters a smokescreen...
- -
“We have to have technological solutions to get ourselves out of this 
problem that technology has created. I’m all in favour of planting trees 
and rewilding, but none of those in themselves is enough. Direct air 
capture, together with using much less fossil fuel, is part of the 
remedy.”...
- -
Conversely, experts say it is not enough simply to reduce emissions of 
greenhouse gases. Substantial and sustained capture is crucial too — 
particularly as a recent UN paper found that governments plan to extract 
more than double the amount of fossil fuels needed to keep global 
temperatures to safe levels.

“There is no historical precedent for the scale of the necessary 
transitions,” said a landmark 2018 report by the Intergovernmental Panel 
on Climate Change. “Conceptually, it is possible that techniques to draw 
CO2 out of the atmosphere could contribute to limiting warming to 1.5°C.”...
- -
The clock is ticking and some environmental groups remain deeply 
sceptical of the technology. In a report this year, Friends of the Earth 
dismissed Direct Air Capture as “futuristic, unproven and dangerous”, 
adding the technique is “unlikely to ever work at scale” and warning 
investment in it “could even lead to greater fossil fuel extraction”...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/1/cop



/[ Thoughtful innovation video presentation ]/
*Solar PV film roll. Revolutionary new production technology.*
Oct 31, 2021
Just Have a Think
Solar PV panels are now a common site around the world and they do a 
great job. But they only work on flat surfaces. What about the millions 
of other surfaces that are not so conveniently shaped? That's where 
flexible solar film comes in. The concept is not new but now a UK 
company has developed a unique Solar PV film that could make the 
technology accessible to millions more people in remote off grid areas 
in developing nations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGQAOeSnErs


/
/

/[ Contrasting conversations -- young- old - beautiful - aged - and 
mutual admiration ]/
*AOC & Noam Chomsky: The Way Forward*
Oct 31, 2021
The Laura Flanders Show
In this historic, inter-generational meeting of minds, Laura Flanders 
brings together New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and MIT 
professor emeritus Noam Chomsky—for the first time ever—to discuss the 
way forward for people, politics, and the planet. From labor strikes to 
racial uprisings to climate action to the Great Resignation, they 
reflect on the renewed power of collective organizing and the changing 
tide in economic thinking and electoral politics. Their insights demand 
that we think differently about everything from our nation’s history and 
its place in the world, to who can run for office in America and win. In 
their first face-to-face conversation, the mutual admiration is 
palpable. Laura closes with some thoughts on thinking the unthinkable.

“We’re now having one of the major strikes in American history when 
workers are simply saying, ‘We're not gonna go back to the rotten, 
oppressive jobs, or precarious circumstances, with no health[care].’ The 
one-sided class war of the last 40 years is becoming two-sided…” —Noam 
Chomsky

“There are already communities actively experimenting and developing 
solutions… What I work on is not how we find solutions but how we scale 
[them] to transform our society.” —AOC

GUESTS
Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, U.S. Representative, NY-14th District

CONTENT
Introduction 0:00
Changing Tide & Alternatives to Capitalist System 2:11
Addressing White Supremacy 9:00
Prospects for a Green New Deal 12:06
Popular Activism & Politics 15:27
The Progressive Agenda & The Way Forward 17:12
Laura's Closing Commentary 24:19
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6M9VxHLqV8



/[ Yes, hear these two brilliant climate philosophers in conversation - 
book discussion.  video ]/
*Saul Griffith with David Roberts: A realistic, optimistic plan for our 
clean energy future*
on Oct 25, 2021
Town Hall Seattle
We know we have to do something about climate change, and we know we 
need to move immediately. The mere thought of it tends to make people 
freeze in their tracks from sheer overwhelm. Thousands of ideas exist, 
but there's no clear, collective plan. Try as some people might, jumping 
on a rocket to the next planet isn’t the answer. But what if we don't 
need groundbreaking new inventions to move the needle on climate change? 
What if most of the innovations already exist? Could we build a better, 
cleaner future (and maybe even generate millions of new jobs while we’re 
at it)?

Engineer and inventor Saul Griffith shares a detailed plan of action in 
his new book, Electrify: The Optimist’s Playbook for our Clean Energy 
Future. Take note of two important words in the book’s title, electrify 
and optimist. Griffith’s strategy circles around the transformation of 
our infrastructure to electrify everything, update our grid, and adapt 
homes to make it possible. And then there’s optimism: if we’re to build 
the future we dream of, a realistic yet optimistic outlook is necessary. 
After all, desperation and doom haven’t successfully elicited the 
unified global response needed to shift our trajectory; but we can 
change. Griffith shares the blueprints for exactly how.

Saul Griffith is an inventor, entrepreneur, and engineer. He is the 
founder of Rewiring America, a nonprofit dedicated to decarbonizing 
America by electrifying everything, and founder and chief scientist at 
Otherlab. He was a recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant” in 2007.

David Roberts writes for his newsletter, Volts, and previously wrote for 
Vox and Grist. Over the past 15+ years, he’s written for several other 
publications and appeared on a variety of TV shows, radio programs, and 
podcasts.
Presented by Town Hall Seattle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGq-NYGs5uM

- -

/[ electrification site by Saul Griffith - revising the grid ]/
*_Rewiring America_ is a growing nonprofit, working to launch a movement 
that electrifies everything, starting with our 121 million households.*
Through accurate, accessible, and actionable data and storytelling tools 
that power smart, inclusive advocacy and market-transforming 
partnerships, Rewiring America aims to achieve national emissions goals, 
improve our health, lower monthly bills, and create millions of clean 
energy jobs.
https://www.rewiringamerica.org/



/[  chill sounds - 42 min video ] /
*The sound of dying ice | DW Documentary*
Oct 31, 2021
DW Documentary
Ice is melting around the world, with drastic consequences for humanity. 
One way scientists can work out just how fast it’s melting is by 
listening. The disappearing ice has its own sound.

Geophysicist Ludovic Moreau wants to get to the bottom of a mystery: Why 
is the pack ice in the Arctic melting faster than predicted? He and five 
other scientists travel to Svalbard in Norway, not far from the North 
Pole. On a frozen lake, they drill holes in the ice and place seismic 
sensors inside. The melting ice creates a sound like singing. It’s music 
that could help solve the mystery of the retreating pack ice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KUyyQluY1A



/[ Prediction video conjectures ]/
//*What will the world look like in 2050 if we reach carbon neutrality? 
| DW News*
Oct 31, 2021
DW News
Many countries are aiming to reach carbon neutrality in 2050. The 2050s 
will be completely different from the 2020s. Let's say we meet our 
climate goals and manage to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, 
which is what many nations agreed to in the Paris Climate Agreement. But 
that means the planet will still be 1.5 degrees warmer than in 
pre-industrial times. So what will our future look like?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJB2WAKqQ34



/[ Easy to agree.  Long essay ]/
//*Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our 
own destruction*
Instead of focusing on ‘micro consumerist bollocks’ like ditching our 
plastic coffee cups, we must challenge the pursuit of wealth and level 
down, not up
by George Monbiot - Sat 30 Oct 2021

There is a myth about human beings that withstands all evidence. It’s 
that we always put our survival first. This is true of other species. 
When confronted by an impending threat, such as winter, they invest 
great resources into avoiding or withstanding it: migrating or 
hibernating, for example. Humans are a different matter.

When faced with an impending or chronic threat, such as climate or 
ecological breakdown, we seem to go out of our way to compromise our 
survival. We convince ourselves that it’s not so serious, or even that 
it isn’t happening. We double down on destruction, swapping our ordinary 
cars for SUVs, jetting to Oblivia on a long-haul flight, burning it all 
up in a final frenzy. In the back of our minds, there’s a voice 
whispering, “If it were really so serious, someone would stop us.” If we 
attend to these issues at all, we do so in ways that are petty, 
tokenistic, comically ill-matched to the scale of our predicament. It is 
impossible to discern, in our response to what we know, the primacy of 
our survival instinct.

Here is what we know. We know that our lives are entirely dependent on 
complex natural systems: the atmosphere, ocean currents, the soil, the 
planet’s webs of life. People who study complex systems have discovered 
that they behave in consistent ways. It doesn’t matter whether the 
system is a banking network, a nation state, a rainforest or an 
Antarctic ice shelf; its behaviour follows certain mathematical rules. 
In normal conditions, the system regulates itself, maintaining a state 
of equilibrium. It can absorb stress up to a certain point. But then it 
suddenly flips. It passes a tipping point, then falls into a new state 
of equilibrium, which is often impossible to reverse.

Human civilisation relies on current equilibrium states. But, all over 
the world, crucial systems appear to be approaching their tipping 
points. If one system crashes, it is likely to drag others down, 
triggering a cascade of chaos known as systemic environmental collapse. 
This is what happened during previous mass extinctions.

Here’s one of the many ways in which it could occur. A belt of savannah, 
known as the Cerrado, covers central Brazil. Its vegetation depends on 
dew forming, which depends in turn on deep-rooted trees drawing up 
groundwater, then releasing it into the air through their leaves. But 
over the past few years, vast tracts of the Cerrado have been cleared to 
plant crops – mostly soya to feed the world’s chickens and pigs. As the 
trees are felled, the air becomes drier. This means smaller plants die, 
ensuring that even less water is circulated. In combination with global 
heating, some scientists warn, this vicious cycle could – soon and 
suddenly – flip the entire system into desert.
The Cerrado is the source of some of South America’s great rivers, 
including those flowing north into the Amazon basin. As less water feeds 
the rivers, this could exacerbate the stress afflicting the rainforests. 
They are being hammered by a deadly combination of clearing, burning and 
heating, and are already threatened with possible systemic collapse. The 
Cerrado and the rainforest both create “rivers in the sky” – streams of 
wet air – that distribute rainfall around the world and help to drive 
global circulation: the movement of air and ocean currents.

The ocean current that brings heat from the tropics is weakening. 
Without it, the UK would have a climate like Siberia’s
Global circulation is already looking vulnerable. For example, the 
Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), which delivers heat 
from the tropics towards the poles, is being disrupted by the melting of 
Arctic ice, and has begun to weaken. Without it, the UK would have a 
climate similar to Siberia’s.

AMOC has two equilibrium states: on and off. It has been on for almost 
12,000 years, following a devastating, thousand-year off state called 
the Younger Dryas (12,900 to 11,700 years ago), which caused a global 
spiral of environmental change. Everything we know and love depends on 
AMOC remaining in the on state.
- -
Regardless of which complex system is being studied, there’s a way of 
telling whether it is approaching a tipping point. Its outputs begin to 
flicker. The closer to its critical threshold it comes, the wilder the 
fluctuations. What we’ve seen this year is a great global flickering, as 
Earth systems begin to break down. The heat domes over the western 
seaboard of North America; the massive fires there, in Siberia and 
around the Mediterranean; the lethal floods in Germany, Belgium, China, 
Sierra Leone – these are the signals that, in climatic morse code, spell 
“mayday”.

You might expect an intelligent species to respond to these signals 
swiftly and conclusively, by radically altering its relationship with 
the living world. But this is not how we function. Our great 
intelligence, our highly evolved consciousness that once took us so far, 
now works against us.

An analysis by the media sustainability group Albert found that “cake” 
was mentioned 10 times as often as “climate change” on UK TV programmes 
in 2020. “Scotch egg” received double the mentions of “biodiversity”. 
“Banana bread” beat “wind power” and “solar power” put together.

I recognise that the media are not society, and that television stations 
have an interest in promoting banana bread and circuses. We could argue 
about the extent to which the media are either reflecting or generating 
an appetite for cake over climate. But I suspect that, of all the ways 
in which we might measure our progress on preventing systemic 
environmental collapse, the cake-to-climate ratio is the decisive index.
The current ratio reflects a determined commitment to irrelevance in the 
face of global catastrophe. Tune in to almost any radio station, at any 
time, and you can hear the frenetic distraction at work. While around 
the world wildfires rage, floods sweep cars from the streets and crops 
shrivel, you will hear a debate about whether to sit down or stand up 
while pulling on your socks, or a discussion about charcuterie boards 
for dogs. I’m not making up these examples: I stumbled across them while 
flicking between channels on days of climate disaster. If an asteroid 
were heading towards Earth, and we turned on the radio, we’d probably 
hear: “So the hot topic today is – what’s the funniest thing that’s ever 
happened to you while eating a kebab?” This is the way the world ends, 
not with a bang but with banter.

Most political news is gossip: who’s in, who’s out, who said what. It 
avoids what lies beneath: the dark money, the corruption …

Faced with crises on an unprecedented scale, our heads are filled with 
insistent babble. The trivialisation of public life creates a loop: it 
becomes socially impossible to talk about anything else. I’m not 
suggesting that we should discuss only the impending catastrophe. I’m 
not against bants. What I’m against is nothing but bants.

It’s not just on the music and entertainment channels that this deadly 
flippancy prevails. Most political news is nothing but court gossip: 
who’s in, who’s out, who said what to whom. It studiously avoids what 
lies beneath: the dark money, the corruption, the shift of power away 
from the democratic sphere, the gathering environmental collapse that 
makes a nonsense of its obsessions.

I’m sure it’s not deliberate. I don’t think anyone, faced with the 
prospect of systemic environmental collapse, is telling themselves: 
“Quick, let’s change the subject to charcuterie boards for dogs.” It 
works at a deeper level than this. It’s a subconscious reflex that tells 
us more about ourselves than our conscious actions do. The chatter on 
the radio sounds like the distant signals from a dying star.
There are some species of caddisfly whose survival depends on breaking 
the surface film of the water in a river. The female pushes through it – 
no mean feat for such a small and delicate creature – then swims down 
the water column to lay her eggs on the riverbed. If she cannot puncture 
the surface, she cannot close the circle of life, and her progeny die 
with her.

This is also the human story. If we cannot pierce the glassy surface of 
distraction, and engage with what lies beneath, we will not secure the 
survival of our children or, perhaps, our species. But we seem unable or 
unwilling to break the surface film. I think of this strange state as 
our “surface tension”. It’s the tension between what we know about the 
crisis we face, and the frivolity with which we distance ourselves from it.

Surface tension dominates even when we claim to be addressing the 
destruction of our life-support systems. We focus on what I call 
micro-consumerist bollocks (MCB): tiny issues such as plastic straws and 
coffee cups, rather than the huge structural forces driving us towards 
catastrophe. We are obsessed with plastic bags. We believe we’re doing 
the world a favour by buying tote bags instead, though, on one estimate, 
the environmental impact of producing an organic cotton tote bag is 
equivalent to that of 20,000 plastic ones.

Rich people can persuade themselves they’ve gone green because they 
recycle, while forgetting they have a second home

We are rightly horrified by the image of a seahorse with its tail 
wrapped around a cotton bud, but apparently unconcerned about the 
elimination of entire marine ecosystems by the fishing industry. We tut 
and shake our heads, and keep eating our way through the life of the sea.

A company called Soletair Power receives wide media coverage for its 
claim to be “fighting climate change” by catching the carbon dioxide 
exhaled by office workers. But its carbon-sucking unit – an 
environmentally costly tower of steel and electronics – extracts just 
1kg of carbon dioxide every eight hours. Humanity produces, mostly by 
burning fossil fuels, roughly 32bn kg of CO2 in the same period.

I don’t believe our focus on microscopic solutions is accidental, even 
if it is unconscious. All of us are expert at using the good things we 
do to blot out the bad things. Rich people can persuade themselves 
they’ve gone green because they recycle, while forgetting that they have 
a second home (arguably the most extravagant of all their assaults on 
the living world, as another house has to be built to accommodate the 
family they’ve displaced). And I suspect that, in some deep, unlit 
recess of the mind, we assure ourselves that if our solutions are so 
small, the problem can’t be so big.
I’m not saying the small things don’t matter. I’m saying they should not 
matter to the exclusion of things that matter more. Every little counts. 
But not for very much.

Our focus on MCB aligns with the corporate agenda. The deliberate effort 
to stop us seeing the bigger picture began in 1953 with a campaign 
called Keep America Beautiful. It was founded by packaging 
manufacturers, motivated by the profits they could make by replacing 
reusable containers with disposable plastic. Above all, they wanted to 
sink state laws insisting that glass bottles were returned and reused. 
Keep America Beautiful shifted the blame for the tsunami of plastic 
trash the manufacturers caused on to “litter bugs”, a term it invented.

The “Love Where You Live” campaign, launched in the UK in 2011 by Keep 
Britain Tidy, Imperial Tobacco, McDonald’s and the sweet manufacturer 
Wrigley, seemed to me to play a similar role. It had the added bonus – 
as it featured strongly in classrooms – of granting Imperial Tobacco 
exposure to schoolchildren.

The corporate focus on litter, amplified by the media, distorts our view 
of all environmental issues. For example, a recent survey of public 
beliefs about river pollution found that “litter and plastic” was by far 
the biggest cause people named. In reality, the biggest source of water 
pollution is farming, followed by sewage. Litter is way down the list. 
It’s not that plastic is unimportant. The problem is that it’s almost 
the only story we know.
- -
In 2004, the advertising company Ogilvy & Mather, working for the oil 
giant BP, took this blame-shifting a step further by inventing the 
personal carbon footprint. It was a useful innovation, but it also had 
the effect of diverting political pressure from the producers of fossil 
fuels to consumers. The oil companies didn’t stop there. The most 
extreme example I’ve seen was a 2019 speech by the chief executive of 
the oil company Shell, Ben van Beurden. He instructed us to “eat 
seasonally and recycle more”, and publicly berated his chauffeur for 
buying a punnet of strawberries in January.

The great political transition of the past 50 years, driven by corporate 
marketing, has been a shift from addressing our problems collectively to 
addressing them individually. In other words, it has turned us from 
citizens into consumers. It’s not hard to see why we have been herded 
down this path. As citizens, joining together to demand political 
change, we are powerful. As consumers, we are almost powerless.

In his book Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman notes that, when Stalin and 
Hitler were in power, “one of the most astonishing human traits that 
came to light at this time was obedience”. The instinct to obey, he 
observed, was stronger than the instinct to survive. Acting alone, 
seeing ourselves as consumers, fixating on MCB and mind-numbing trivia, 
even as systemic environmental collapse looms: these are forms of 
obedience. We would rather face civilisational death than the social 
embarrassment caused by raising awkward subjects, and the political 
trouble involved in resisting powerful forces. The obedience reflex is 
our greatest flaw, the kink in the human brain that threatens our lives.

What do we see if we break the surface tension? The first thing we 
encounter, looming out of the depths, should scare us almost out of our 
wits. It’s called growth. Economic growth is universally hailed as a 
good thing. Governments measure their success on their ability to 
deliver it. But think for a moment about what it means. Say we achieve 
the modest aim, promoted by bodies like the IMF and the World Bank, of 
3% global growth a year. This means that all the economic activity you 
see today – and most of the environmental impacts it causes – doubles in 
24 years; in other words, by 2045. Then it doubles again by 2069. Then 
again by 2093. It’s like the Gemino curse in Harry Potter and the 
Deathly Hallows, which multiplies the treasure in the Lestrange vault 
until it threatens to crush Harry and his friends to death. All the 
crises we seek to avert today become twice as hard to address as global 
economic activity doubles, then twice again, then twice again.

Have we reached the bottom yet? By no means. The Gemino curse is just 
one outcome of a thing we scarcely dare mention. Just as it was once 
blasphemous to use the name of God, even the word appears, in polite 
society, to be taboo: capitalism.

The main cause of your environmental impact is your money. You persuade 
yourself you’re a green mega-consumer, but you’re just a mega-consumer

Most people struggle to define the system that dominates our lives. But 
if you press them, they’re likely to mumble something about hard work 
and enterprise, buying and selling. This is how the beneficiaries of the 
system want it to be understood. In reality, the great fortunes amassed 
under capitalism are not obtained this way, but through looting, 
monopoly and rent grabbing, followed by inheritance.

One estimate suggests that, over the course of 200 years, the British 
extracted from India, at current prices, $45tn. They used this money to 
fund industrialisation at home and the colonisation of other nations, 
whose wealth was then looted in turn.

The looting takes place not just across geography, but also across time. 
The apparent health of our economies today depends on seizing natural 
wealth from future generations. This is what the oil companies, seeking 
to distract us with MCB and carbon footprints, are doing. Such theft 
from the future is the motor of economic growth. Capitalism, which 
sounds so reasonable when explained by a mainstream economist, is in 
ecological terms nothing but a pyramid scheme.

Is this the riverbed? No. Capitalism is just a means by which something 
even bigger is pursued. Wealth.

It scarcely matters how green you think you are. The main cause of your 
environmental impact isn’t your attitude. It isn’t your mode of 
consumption. It isn’t the choices you make. It’s your money. If you have 
surplus money, you spend it. While you might persuade yourself that you 
are a green mega-consumer, in reality you are just a mega-consumer. This 
is why the environmental impacts of the very rich, however right-on they 
may be, are massively greater than those of everyone else.

Preventing more than 1.5C of global heating means that our average 
emissions should be no greater than two tonnes of carbon dioxide per 
person per year. But the richest 1% of the world’s people produce an 
average of more than 70 tonnes. Bill Gates, according to one estimate, 
emits almost 7,500 tonnes of CO2, mostly from flying in his private 
jets. Roman Abramovich, the same figures suggest, produces almost 34,000 
tonnes, largely by running his gigantic yacht.

The multiple homes that ultra-rich people own might be fitted with solar 
panels, their supercars might be electric, their private planes might 
run on biokerosene, but these tweaks make little difference to the 
overall impact of their consumption. In some cases, they increase it. 
The switch to biofuels favoured by Bill Gates is now among the greatest 
causes of habitat destruction, as forests are felled to produce wood 
pellets and liquid fuels, and soils are trashed to make biomethane.

There is a poverty line below which no one should fall, and a wealth 
line above which no one should rise. We need wealth taxes, not carbon taxes

But more important than the direct impacts of the ultra-wealthy is the 
political and cultural power with which they block effective change. 
Their cultural power relies on a hypnotising fairytale. Capitalism 
persuades us that we are all temporarily embarrassed millionaires. This 
is why we tolerate it. In reality, some people are extremely rich 
because others are extremely poor: massive wealth depends on 
exploitation. And if we did all become millionaires, we would cook the 
planet in no time at all. But the fairytale of universal wealth, one 
day, secures our obedience.

The difficult truth is that, to prevent climate and ecological 
catastrophe, we need to level down. We need to pursue what the Belgian 
philosopher Ingrid Robeyns calls limitarianism. Just as there is a 
poverty line below which no one should fall, there is a wealth line 
above which no one should rise. What we need are not carbon taxes, but 
wealth taxes. It shouldn’t surprise us that ExxonMobil favours a carbon 
tax. It’s a form of MCB. It addresses only one aspect of the many-headed 
environmental crisis, while transferring responsibility from the major 
culprits to everyone. It can be highly regressive, which means that the 
poor pay more than the rich.

But wealth taxes strike at the heart of the issue. They should be high 
enough to break the spiral of accumulation and redistribute the riches 
accumulated by a few. They could be used to put us on an entirely 
different track, one that I call “private sufficiency, public luxury”. 
While there is not enough ecological or even physical space on Earth for 
everyone to enjoy private luxury, there is enough to provide everyone 
with public luxury: magnificent parks, hospitals, swimming pools, art 
galleries, tennis courts and transport systems, playgrounds and 
community centres. We should each have our own small domains – private 
sufficiency – but when we want to spread our wings, we could do so 
without seizing resources from other people.

In consenting to the continued destruction of our life-support systems, 
we accommodate the desires of the ultra-rich and the powerful 
corporations they control. By remaining trapped in the surface film, 
absorbed in frivolity and MCB, we grant them a social licence to operate.

We will endure only if we cease to consent. The 19th-century democracy 
campaigners knew this, the suffragettes knew it, Gandhi knew it, Martin 
Luther King knew it. The environmental protesters who demand systemic 
change have also grasped this fundamental truth. In Fridays for Future, 
Green New Deal Rising, Extinction Rebellion and the other global 
uprisings against systemic environmental collapse, we see people, mostly 
young people, refusing to consent. What they understand is history’s 
most important lesson. Our survival depends on disobedience.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/30/capitalism-is-killing-the-planet-its-time-to-stop-buying-into-our-own-destruction


/[The news archive - looking back]/
*On this day in the history of global warming November 2, 2010*
November 2, 2010: Republicans win control of the US House of 
Representatives in the midterm elections, putting some of the nation's 
most vehement climate-change deniers in control of that body. Also, 
California voters reject a ballot initiative intended to kill landmark 
climate-change legislation in that state.
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2010/11/03/128002/gop-frosh-class/
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2010/11/19/174837/climate-zombie-caucus/

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/california-politics/2010/11/voters-reject-prop-23-keeping-californias-global-warming-law-intact.html

http://blogsofbainbridge.typepad.com/greenfront/2010/11/becky-bond-of-credo-action-group-how-prop-23-was-defeated.html

http://blogsofbainbridge.typepad.com/greenfront/2010/11/adi-nochur-1sky-about-the-elections.html


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