Painting: Cornelis van Haarlem - The Hesperides Filling the Cornucopia - oil on canvas, 1622 For some decades now, a steady stream of marvelous solutions to climate change have paraded past, to great fanfare…most of them false. Some of them have come by twice, like the glorious Hydrogen Economy, which now comes in several colors, and CCS—Carbon Capture and Sequestration. CCS wore the shiny black dress of “Clean Coal” last time and is now calling itself CCUS, with the U standing for Usage. Mostly this means using captured carbon dioxide to push more oil out of old depleted wells. Even if the CO2 stays in the old well, the oil it pushes out will release more emissions than are sequestered—yet there are fat subsidies for doing this, in the name of climate action.
I hesitated too long in posting this submission, because I'm not in full agreement with some of the statements it makes. I thought I'd propose some relatively minor changes for Mary to consider. But overwhelm in tasks had me procrastinating.
So I decided today to post it in just the same form it was submitted, hoping that others might point out some of the possible problems with the framing. But even these would be more a matter of opinion than of fact. Much remains uncertain about how the future will unfold. Let us hope -- and act on that hope -- that not all which Mary predicts will unfold as she says she imagines it will. Some of these are a pretty bleak set of predictions.
One of the most important lessons to learn from the pandemic: lockdowns are an absolutely terrible idea, and are all pain and no gain in the long run. And they are a major category error at best. So if anything thinks that "climate lockdowns" would somehow be even a remotely good idea for the climate crisis (and the polycrisis turned permacrisis in general), all one would have to do is point to the utter failure of the Covid lockdowns and extrapolate from that to show conclusively that they are dead wrong.
That is one silver lining of the pandemic, namely that we got a two to three year "free" trial (by "free", I mean it cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives) of what the diabolical Davos gang and various other fanatical elements undoubtedly wants to impose on the world's people.
Perhaps humanity deserves to go extinct then. Suddenly VHEMT (Google it) doesn't look quite so crazy after all. It may actually be the lesser evil in practice.
Or maybe, just maybe, perhaps there is a middle path between doomerism and blind cornucopianism after all?
Unfortunately, all "degrowth" will accomplish in practice to get us permanently stuck in a bad place and still destroy the Earth, albeit a little bit more slowly and much more painfully. There has to be a better way. The only thing that can truly kill the hungry beast of capitalism (and its inane and insane addiction to growth for the sake of growth, the ideology of the cancer cell) is ABUNDANCE. THAT is how you slay the wetikonomy, which needs scarcity to function. And the only real ethical solution to overpopulation is female empowerment and poverty reduction.
In any case, "degrowth" done from the top down would look an awful lot like Covid lockdowns, but permanent (and hopefully minus the ocean-killing masks and soul-killing antisocial distancing).
I hesitated too long in posting this submission, because I'm not in full agreement with some of the statements it makes. I thought I'd propose some relatively minor changes for Mary to consider. But overwhelm in tasks had me procrastinating.
So I decided today to post it in just the same form it was submitted, hoping that others might point out some of the possible problems with the framing. But even these would be more a matter of opinion than of fact. Much remains uncertain about how the future will unfold. Let us hope -- and act on that hope -- that not all which Mary predicts will unfold as she says she imagines it will. Some of these are a pretty bleak set of predictions.
One of the most important lessons to learn from the pandemic: lockdowns are an absolutely terrible idea, and are all pain and no gain in the long run. And they are a major category error at best. So if anything thinks that "climate lockdowns" would somehow be even a remotely good idea for the climate crisis (and the polycrisis turned permacrisis in general), all one would have to do is point to the utter failure of the Covid lockdowns and extrapolate from that to show conclusively that they are dead wrong.
That is one silver lining of the pandemic, namely that we got a two to three year "free" trial (by "free", I mean it cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives) of what the diabolical Davos gang and various other fanatical elements undoubtedly wants to impose on the world's people.
Perhaps humanity deserves to go extinct then. Suddenly VHEMT (Google it) doesn't look quite so crazy after all. It may actually be the lesser evil in practice.
Or maybe, just maybe, perhaps there is a middle path between doomerism and blind cornucopianism after all?
Unfortunately, all "degrowth" will accomplish in practice to get us permanently stuck in a bad place and still destroy the Earth, albeit a little bit more slowly and much more painfully. There has to be a better way. The only thing that can truly kill the hungry beast of capitalism (and its inane and insane addiction to growth for the sake of growth, the ideology of the cancer cell) is ABUNDANCE. THAT is how you slay the wetikonomy, which needs scarcity to function. And the only real ethical solution to overpopulation is female empowerment and poverty reduction.
In any case, "degrowth" done from the top down would look an awful lot like Covid lockdowns, but permanent (and hopefully minus the ocean-killing masks and soul-killing antisocial distancing).
Thanks, Mary. I, too, think we’re headed for Planet Hell. Unfortunately I don’t see a path to a better future, but I wish James and folks luck.
Beautifully put.