But the degrowth movement is extremely, astoundingly unlikely to prove politically viable within the political mainstream of the global North (rich countries), which to my mind means we can't put very many of our precious political eggs in that basket. What's needed, with the fullness of urgency, is a socio-political movement which seeks to institute radical social change in a degrowth direction from well outside of the political mainstream and its bought and owned corporate capitalist governments.
Now, to the ears of most people living here in the USA, where you and I live, Patrick, what I said makes no sense whatsoever. After all, they will be thinking, politics is a game of first getting majority support and then using that majority support to "put pressure on our representatives" ... and all that familiar yada yada. But that's not been working very well for us, now, has it? I mean for the last couple of hundred years, right?
The corporate owned, capitalist-industrial-consumer political system can't and won't turn in time to change course in time. And we all know that. So it's time to begin a serious conversation about what we are to do when we are a large, important, urgently necessary minority without political power in the old-fashioned sense of having hegemony within the establishment's carefully crafted Overton window.
So far, hardly anyone is up for this conversation, Patrick. Are you up for it? I have some good ideas, I think. But they aren't getting much traction, yet. That's because the conversation is what's needed for the traction to occur. Think of what Noam Chomsky said about concision in the film, Manufacturing Consent. Familiar ideas get easy traction. Unfamiliar ideas tend not to -- and especially when the billionaires and corporations own and control the media, etc.
As I wrote, the politics of the issue have made me skeptical about degrowth. But I’ve worked on this issue so long, and we haven’t changed the trend line. It’s even gotten worse. So what do we do? This new Heinberg piece talks a lot about building community resilience. I think that’s the course you’re on. The conundrum is if we don’t somehow deal with the whole, we will face those chaotic outcomes that swamp our efforts to adapt. Somehow it’s a both-and strategy.
Jun 24, 2023·edited Jun 24, 2023Liked by Patrick Mazza
Resilience is necessary but insufficient unto itself. What's required is regeneration AND resilience-building, both.
So here we are in this elevator, Patrick, so I'm going to offer an "elevator pitch". My basic idea, in essence, is that while it's very difficult to start a camp fire after weeks of heavy rains, it's sometimes necessary to do so. So we need to look at how to make a camp fire when most of the small light fuels are soggy.
Another analogy and metaphor is growing a vegetable garden where the soils are relatively poor, water is scarce ... and success would likely lead to the deer and rabbits eating whatever we grow.
In both cases, there are similar (conceptually and theoretically) means of getting to the desired situation -- fire and food.
The elevator is about to bring us to floor seven, so I want to know if I have your attention. Think of a novel. You know if you're going to read this novel after reading a few paragraphs. If the paragraphs are shit, you'll move on to another novel.
If we're going to change our political situation, we have to understand how to create the conditions for fire and successful gardening. That's my elevator pitch. That's the first few paragraphs. Shall we have lunch?
I am up for any conversation on how to overcome the immense barriers facing us and break through to a future that leaves a habitable world for our children. That's a fundamental reason I do The Raven and the unifying theme of this diverse web journal. History shows us that once a power system is locked in it becomes very hard to dislodge it. And that generally happens once the system visibly fails and breaks down in a catastrophic way. Everything points to catastrophic failure of the current system. My fear is that it becomes so catastrophic it drags us all down with it, human society and the biosphere. So how do we create communities and movements that provide survival and resilience, that provide models and a base to make the kind of changes that are necessary to avert that final collapse?
Patrick, I believe it would be best for us to hold our conversation -- by email text -- outside the present forum, then publish it both in The Raven and The R-Word.
I thought of making this request private, by email. But that would have left a gap in the conversation here. So you can reply in private if you wish.
Jun 24, 2023·edited Jun 24, 2023Liked by Patrick Mazza
“…… What's needed, with the fullness of urgency, is a socio-political movement which seeks to institute radical social change in a degrowth direction from well outside of the political mainstream and its bought and owned corporate capitalist governments.….”
What you say is true.
But it’s going to be grim.
Take the example of Germany where a longstanding supposedly “green party” is now in Government and showing their true colours as warmongers and capitalists. What is happening to this outside opposition that you speak of, while the “Green party” is in power? See here:
Die Grunen is particularly disturbing. I speak from the standpoint of being one of the original co-chairs of the US Association of State Green Parties, the predecessor to the current Green Party US, and coauthor of the Global Greens Statements to the 1997 Kyoto and 1998 Buenos Aires climate conferences, endorsed by green parties on all continents including Die Grunen and the European parties. What seems to have happened is the corruptions of power that began back in the 1990s. Petra Kelly wanted the greens to remain an anti-party out of the system, but supposedly she was murdered by her partner. Seeing what happened later, I have dark suspicions about what really might have happened. She would have opposed the trend led by Joschka Fischer who took the party into coalition with the SPD and supported the bombing of Serbia by NATO. Yes, it's going to be a long, hard road, and the initiative will come from the outside and the margins. How long do we have? That's the key question.
I love the concepts I read about in Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics. Basically, it’s about having an economic system that operates within the confines of planetary boundaries, vs. the growth/de-growth debate. Sometimes that means no growth, overall, with the exception of some impoverished countries, while at other times, it’s conceivable growth could once again occur, though that’s not the goal. I’m greatly oversimplifying the book’s contents, but I believe local groups are using the author’s ideas to begin creating such systems that function outside and yet also within a locale’s main economy. I’ve been itching to reread the book and find a way to get involved.
The same. Having worked on this so long, I find it disheartening to read of the temperature spikes, heat domes, floods, fires, etc. Being a truthteller is the best I can come up with.
The energy companies are the tip of the spear being plunged into the heart of our beautiful mother, but it's the people whose jobs depend on oil that are wielding that spear. Those people work in industries that are even more dependent on oil than the energy companies, which as this article notes at least know they could switch to renewables if they had to.
There is only one industry on the planet that absolutely could not change even if it wanted to, since then it would cease to exist, and in the final analysis it is even more powerful than the energy companies by far: the war industry. As shown by the decisive role that access to oil played in WWII, you simply cannot fight, let alone win, a modern war without cheap and abundant oil-based based fuels and the machines they power (unless the war goes nuclear). And there are no sustainable and affordable substitutes on the horizon, as I can assure you the militaries everywhere know very well.
The military establishments, both in the USA and elsewhere, do not generally put their domestic power on display, but whenever they really need something, they always get it (the still-unaudited US DOD budget alone should be sufficient evidence of that). And without that overriding need, the energy companies would have long since been brought to heel. Read "Oil, Power and War: A Dark History" by Matthieu Auzanneau.
If you knew that several dozen scientists, engineers and other highly skilled and ethical experts have been deliberation over three dozen possible means to cool the Arctic, Antarctic and Himalayas in an urgent near term “triage” intervention to avert irreversible tipping points while decarbonization and carbon removal from the atmosphere and oceans ramps up over several decades, would you consider the likelihood that we may have a fighting chance at survival and retire your piece? Join any of our three Google Groups as a welcome guest: NOAC (Nature-Based Ocean & Atmospheric Cooling), HPAC Healthy Planet Action Coalition, and PRAG (Planetary Restoration Action Group).
I would be willing to look at your groups. Please send me access information. It may be necessary to undertake such actions. But the moral hazard issues of geoengineering as a way to avoid rapid decarbonization cause me some skepticism. As you will note from the below, the most read article The Raven has ever published regards indigenous opposition to geoengineering experiments funded by Bill Gates. In any event, I will not withdraw my piece. It is clear we are not getting it, and that we need to consider radical alternatives. That is true in any event, as the new science on Arctic summer sea ice reported in the piece indicates
Actually, “retire” was a typo that is impossible to correct. The phrase that I intended is: “we may have a fighting chance at survival and rewrite your piece?” The AI spellchecker turned my comment upside down, regretfully.
Doug, we passed the tipping points 30 yeas ago. There may be a few well intentioned scientists with good ideas but I don't know anyone who is willing to give up cheap air travel, air conditioning and their car. Do you know people who have given up flying and driving? Have you given up flying and driving? We love our carbon fueled pie and we will fight to the death for it.-Peter
This episode of global warming was underway by 1800. By 1800 atmospheric CO2 had begun to rise from burning coal. By 1850 the atmospheric temperature had begun to rise. The core understanding of how the atmosphere worked was solved between 1820 and 1856. Emma Foote, the 1856 discoverer of coal burning as the driving force in heating the atmosphere, warned that we needed to stop burning it. Continuing to burn coal would lead to crop failures and mass starvation.
William Ruddiman has argued that global warming began with among other things cutting down forests to build cities, and converting forests to marshes to grow Rice and forests to fields forlivestock. These activities began as much as ten thousand years ago. The American Indians of the southwest for open fire were burning coal to cook because wood was too valuable to burn.
Global warming has been coming for a long time. Now we are burning fossil fuels at a rate that is incredibly fast and producing huge amounts of CO2 from other sources such as cement making. Our artifical adding green house games to the atmosphere has triggered natural processes that do the same. We are now in positive feedback loops.
Deindustrialzation will not get use back to 1750 and that includes deindustrializing farming.
Thank you for crediting Emma Foote. John Tyndall unjustly gets the credit. Whether Ruddiman is correct, and it is a matter of dispute, land use change has had an effect, both in terms of forest cutting and plowing. Interesting that it is theorized that forest re-growth in North America caused by extermination of native populations, which extensively managed forests with fires, contributed to the little ice age. Certainly humanity has been adding to the concentration of heat-trapping gases since mass coal burning started in the 1700s. And yes we are in positive feedback loops. Any effort to re-stabilize climate must include dramatic fossil fuel reductions, an end to mass deforestation, and farming practices that build soil carbon such as no-till and cover cropping, as well as precision applications of fertilizers.
IMPORTANT PIECE THAT DEMANDS WIDE CIRCULATION!!! You write: "It appears we are heading for the fourth super-El Nino in 40 years, the condition in which the eastern tropical Pacific heats up and transmits extreme weather effects around the world. Both 1983 and 1998 were 2.2 degrees C anomalies. 2015 was 2.5 degrees C. The 2023 El Niño is projected at a monster 3.2 degrees. Says Eliott Jacobson,” The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has had both the most extreme and most accurate forecasts of the developing El Niño. But this forecast, just released, is so extreme it’s hard to believe I’m seeing it."
Perhaps it is obvious, but is this suggesting that there will be an average global temperature increase of 3.2C, or is it a Pacific Ocean temperature increase? THANKS! in peace and solidarity, glast
It is a 3.2 degree anomaly from the average temperature in a baseline ares of the Pacific used to measure the intensity of El Niños. The heat will discharge and increase the global,average temperature, but not to that level. It likely will cause this year to be the hottest on record, or near.
Saw your post on Resilience.org. Since they have canceled me, let me post a brief comment here. Yes we should have listened to Jim Hansen. BUT . . . If YOU would have listened to US fifty years ago, WE wouldn't be in trouble NOW. I started saying this when Reagan became president, starting with ten years, then 15 years, etc.
As for Degrowth, it is just a channeliing mechanism to keep the developed world going a little longer. What we need is contraction of the economy, something that is anathema to the Degrowthers. Whether you (plural you) like it or not, recession, depression and collapse is bake in. The smart move is to get our of the city, grow some of your own food and build community.
Will we wake up before then, driven by increasing catastrophes? Will we do it in time? I think crop failure in multiple breadbaskets leading to a global food crisis is the effect that will be most widespread across human populations. My hope is that enough will pile up to finally cause popular willingness to act and demand for action.
"We have to consider degrowth."
Boy, now there's an understatement!
But the degrowth movement is extremely, astoundingly unlikely to prove politically viable within the political mainstream of the global North (rich countries), which to my mind means we can't put very many of our precious political eggs in that basket. What's needed, with the fullness of urgency, is a socio-political movement which seeks to institute radical social change in a degrowth direction from well outside of the political mainstream and its bought and owned corporate capitalist governments.
Now, to the ears of most people living here in the USA, where you and I live, Patrick, what I said makes no sense whatsoever. After all, they will be thinking, politics is a game of first getting majority support and then using that majority support to "put pressure on our representatives" ... and all that familiar yada yada. But that's not been working very well for us, now, has it? I mean for the last couple of hundred years, right?
The corporate owned, capitalist-industrial-consumer political system can't and won't turn in time to change course in time. And we all know that. So it's time to begin a serious conversation about what we are to do when we are a large, important, urgently necessary minority without political power in the old-fashioned sense of having hegemony within the establishment's carefully crafted Overton window.
So far, hardly anyone is up for this conversation, Patrick. Are you up for it? I have some good ideas, I think. But they aren't getting much traction, yet. That's because the conversation is what's needed for the traction to occur. Think of what Noam Chomsky said about concision in the film, Manufacturing Consent. Familiar ideas get easy traction. Unfamiliar ideas tend not to -- and especially when the billionaires and corporations own and control the media, etc.
As I wrote, the politics of the issue have made me skeptical about degrowth. But I’ve worked on this issue so long, and we haven’t changed the trend line. It’s even gotten worse. So what do we do? This new Heinberg piece talks a lot about building community resilience. I think that’s the course you’re on. The conundrum is if we don’t somehow deal with the whole, we will face those chaotic outcomes that swamp our efforts to adapt. Somehow it’s a both-and strategy.
Resilience is necessary but insufficient unto itself. What's required is regeneration AND resilience-building, both.
So here we are in this elevator, Patrick, so I'm going to offer an "elevator pitch". My basic idea, in essence, is that while it's very difficult to start a camp fire after weeks of heavy rains, it's sometimes necessary to do so. So we need to look at how to make a camp fire when most of the small light fuels are soggy.
Another analogy and metaphor is growing a vegetable garden where the soils are relatively poor, water is scarce ... and success would likely lead to the deer and rabbits eating whatever we grow.
In both cases, there are similar (conceptually and theoretically) means of getting to the desired situation -- fire and food.
The elevator is about to bring us to floor seven, so I want to know if I have your attention. Think of a novel. You know if you're going to read this novel after reading a few paragraphs. If the paragraphs are shit, you'll move on to another novel.
If we're going to change our political situation, we have to understand how to create the conditions for fire and successful gardening. That's my elevator pitch. That's the first few paragraphs. Shall we have lunch?
I am up for any conversation on how to overcome the immense barriers facing us and break through to a future that leaves a habitable world for our children. That's a fundamental reason I do The Raven and the unifying theme of this diverse web journal. History shows us that once a power system is locked in it becomes very hard to dislodge it. And that generally happens once the system visibly fails and breaks down in a catastrophic way. Everything points to catastrophic failure of the current system. My fear is that it becomes so catastrophic it drags us all down with it, human society and the biosphere. So how do we create communities and movements that provide survival and resilience, that provide models and a base to make the kind of changes that are necessary to avert that final collapse?
Patrick, I believe it would be best for us to hold our conversation -- by email text -- outside the present forum, then publish it both in The Raven and The R-Word.
I thought of making this request private, by email. But that would have left a gap in the conversation here. So you can reply in private if you wish.
Agreed. I will be awaiting your opening email.
Expect my email soon. And thanks!
“…… What's needed, with the fullness of urgency, is a socio-political movement which seeks to institute radical social change in a degrowth direction from well outside of the political mainstream and its bought and owned corporate capitalist governments.….”
What you say is true.
But it’s going to be grim.
Take the example of Germany where a longstanding supposedly “green party” is now in Government and showing their true colours as warmongers and capitalists. What is happening to this outside opposition that you speak of, while the “Green party” is in power? See here:
https://apnews.com/article/climate-germany-protests-fd24a7b21e72684c39789ce5eb251c2e
https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-italy-climate-change-nationwide-raid-on-climate-activists/
In the biggest economy in the world, the US, there NO ONE who will put themselves on the line the way that those young people in Germany are doing.
Oh and in the greatest hypocrisy, the German “green party” policy is:
“do what we say”:
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/germany-alarmed-detention-vietnam-climate-activist-warns-coal-99896036
“not what we do”:
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/17/us/greta-thunberg-detained-germany-climate/index.html
It’s going to be a long road to battle this.
Die Grunen is particularly disturbing. I speak from the standpoint of being one of the original co-chairs of the US Association of State Green Parties, the predecessor to the current Green Party US, and coauthor of the Global Greens Statements to the 1997 Kyoto and 1998 Buenos Aires climate conferences, endorsed by green parties on all continents including Die Grunen and the European parties. What seems to have happened is the corruptions of power that began back in the 1990s. Petra Kelly wanted the greens to remain an anti-party out of the system, but supposedly she was murdered by her partner. Seeing what happened later, I have dark suspicions about what really might have happened. She would have opposed the trend led by Joschka Fischer who took the party into coalition with the SPD and supported the bombing of Serbia by NATO. Yes, it's going to be a long, hard road, and the initiative will come from the outside and the margins. How long do we have? That's the key question.
I love the concepts I read about in Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics. Basically, it’s about having an economic system that operates within the confines of planetary boundaries, vs. the growth/de-growth debate. Sometimes that means no growth, overall, with the exception of some impoverished countries, while at other times, it’s conceivable growth could once again occur, though that’s not the goal. I’m greatly oversimplifying the book’s contents, but I believe local groups are using the author’s ideas to begin creating such systems that function outside and yet also within a locale’s main economy. I’ve been itching to reread the book and find a way to get involved.
I should read that book. It comes up quite often.
I totally agree. I'm feeling it like gut-punches these days, and trying to figure out what to do.
The same. Having worked on this so long, I find it disheartening to read of the temperature spikes, heat domes, floods, fires, etc. Being a truthteller is the best I can come up with.
The energy companies are the tip of the spear being plunged into the heart of our beautiful mother, but it's the people whose jobs depend on oil that are wielding that spear. Those people work in industries that are even more dependent on oil than the energy companies, which as this article notes at least know they could switch to renewables if they had to.
There is only one industry on the planet that absolutely could not change even if it wanted to, since then it would cease to exist, and in the final analysis it is even more powerful than the energy companies by far: the war industry. As shown by the decisive role that access to oil played in WWII, you simply cannot fight, let alone win, a modern war without cheap and abundant oil-based based fuels and the machines they power (unless the war goes nuclear). And there are no sustainable and affordable substitutes on the horizon, as I can assure you the militaries everywhere know very well.
The military establishments, both in the USA and elsewhere, do not generally put their domestic power on display, but whenever they really need something, they always get it (the still-unaudited US DOD budget alone should be sufficient evidence of that). And without that overriding need, the energy companies would have long since been brought to heel. Read "Oil, Power and War: A Dark History" by Matthieu Auzanneau.
I eagerly await this new film by Abby Martin. https://peaceandplanetnews.org/abby-martins-new-film-earths-greatest-enemy/. This primer from Institute for Policy Studies is also invaluable. https://ips-dc.org/climate-militarism-primer/
If you knew that several dozen scientists, engineers and other highly skilled and ethical experts have been deliberation over three dozen possible means to cool the Arctic, Antarctic and Himalayas in an urgent near term “triage” intervention to avert irreversible tipping points while decarbonization and carbon removal from the atmosphere and oceans ramps up over several decades, would you consider the likelihood that we may have a fighting chance at survival and retire your piece? Join any of our three Google Groups as a welcome guest: NOAC (Nature-Based Ocean & Atmospheric Cooling), HPAC Healthy Planet Action Coalition, and PRAG (Planetary Restoration Action Group).
I would be willing to look at your groups. Please send me access information. It may be necessary to undertake such actions. But the moral hazard issues of geoengineering as a way to avoid rapid decarbonization cause me some skepticism. As you will note from the below, the most read article The Raven has ever published regards indigenous opposition to geoengineering experiments funded by Bill Gates. In any event, I will not withdraw my piece. It is clear we are not getting it, and that we need to consider radical alternatives. That is true in any event, as the new science on Arctic summer sea ice reported in the piece indicates
Actually, “retire” was a typo that is impossible to correct. The phrase that I intended is: “we may have a fighting chance at survival and rewrite your piece?” The AI spellchecker turned my comment upside down, regretfully.
Email me at answerthecall@mac.com and I’ll reply with zoom invitations 💚
Ah, spell check. Literally putting words in your mouth. Know what that’s like.
Patrick, the following meeting reminder appeared in my inbox last night and I just now saw it:
[HCA-list] Zoom link HPAC meeting this Thursday, June 29 4:30 PM EDT Oliver Morton, the science journalist and author will be our guest
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88954851189?pwd=WVZoeTBnN3kyZFoyLzYxZ1JNbDFPUT09
Join us and I’ll introduce you very briefly—you will be invited to introduce yourself and your interest to hear what we are deliberation.
I’ll see if I can make it.
Doug, we passed the tipping points 30 yeas ago. There may be a few well intentioned scientists with good ideas but I don't know anyone who is willing to give up cheap air travel, air conditioning and their car. Do you know people who have given up flying and driving? Have you given up flying and driving? We love our carbon fueled pie and we will fight to the death for it.-Peter
This episode of global warming was underway by 1800. By 1800 atmospheric CO2 had begun to rise from burning coal. By 1850 the atmospheric temperature had begun to rise. The core understanding of how the atmosphere worked was solved between 1820 and 1856. Emma Foote, the 1856 discoverer of coal burning as the driving force in heating the atmosphere, warned that we needed to stop burning it. Continuing to burn coal would lead to crop failures and mass starvation.
William Ruddiman has argued that global warming began with among other things cutting down forests to build cities, and converting forests to marshes to grow Rice and forests to fields forlivestock. These activities began as much as ten thousand years ago. The American Indians of the southwest for open fire were burning coal to cook because wood was too valuable to burn.
Global warming has been coming for a long time. Now we are burning fossil fuels at a rate that is incredibly fast and producing huge amounts of CO2 from other sources such as cement making. Our artifical adding green house games to the atmosphere has triggered natural processes that do the same. We are now in positive feedback loops.
Deindustrialzation will not get use back to 1750 and that includes deindustrializing farming.
I would still like to see us give it a try.
Thank you for crediting Emma Foote. John Tyndall unjustly gets the credit. Whether Ruddiman is correct, and it is a matter of dispute, land use change has had an effect, both in terms of forest cutting and plowing. Interesting that it is theorized that forest re-growth in North America caused by extermination of native populations, which extensively managed forests with fires, contributed to the little ice age. Certainly humanity has been adding to the concentration of heat-trapping gases since mass coal burning started in the 1700s. And yes we are in positive feedback loops. Any effort to re-stabilize climate must include dramatic fossil fuel reductions, an end to mass deforestation, and farming practices that build soil carbon such as no-till and cover cropping, as well as precision applications of fertilizers.
IMPORTANT PIECE THAT DEMANDS WIDE CIRCULATION!!! You write: "It appears we are heading for the fourth super-El Nino in 40 years, the condition in which the eastern tropical Pacific heats up and transmits extreme weather effects around the world. Both 1983 and 1998 were 2.2 degrees C anomalies. 2015 was 2.5 degrees C. The 2023 El Niño is projected at a monster 3.2 degrees. Says Eliott Jacobson,” The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has had both the most extreme and most accurate forecasts of the developing El Niño. But this forecast, just released, is so extreme it’s hard to believe I’m seeing it."
Perhaps it is obvious, but is this suggesting that there will be an average global temperature increase of 3.2C, or is it a Pacific Ocean temperature increase? THANKS! in peace and solidarity, glast
It is a 3.2 degree anomaly from the average temperature in a baseline ares of the Pacific used to measure the intensity of El Niños. The heat will discharge and increase the global,average temperature, but not to that level. It likely will cause this year to be the hottest on record, or near.
Saw your post on Resilience.org. Since they have canceled me, let me post a brief comment here. Yes we should have listened to Jim Hansen. BUT . . . If YOU would have listened to US fifty years ago, WE wouldn't be in trouble NOW. I started saying this when Reagan became president, starting with ten years, then 15 years, etc.
As for Degrowth, it is just a channeliing mechanism to keep the developed world going a little longer. What we need is contraction of the economy, something that is anathema to the Degrowthers. Whether you (plural you) like it or not, recession, depression and collapse is bake in. The smart move is to get our of the city, grow some of your own food and build community.
Yes this is abundantly clear at least: we need to radically stop our pursuit of a consumer society now.
A ridiculous but very specific example, we should stop production of all cosmetics (deodorants...) now. We can live without them.
Will anything that is clearly necessary and possible, in effect be done? Maybe in a hundred years!
We're doomed.
Will we wake up before then, driven by increasing catastrophes? Will we do it in time? I think crop failure in multiple breadbaskets leading to a global food crisis is the effect that will be most widespread across human populations. My hope is that enough will pile up to finally cause popular willingness to act and demand for action.
This comment was removed for a disparaging and accusatory tone. I do civil discussion here.