Thursday, December 24, 2015


Denier (Morano) admits: Humans cause "Global Warming"... With Windmills

One of Marc Morano's correspondents wrote as follows:

"The kinetic energy of wind, equivalent to ~10 billion barrels of oil, has in the past blown our ~6,000,000 billion tons of air at a speed of ~15 mph continuously around the Earth, bringing us rain and cooling.

But now, humans have built and are building more windmills that are reducing this natural cooling process. Present level of reduction is ~10%. There is no mechanism in nature that replenishes wind energy removed by humans."

Tear down all windmills!

Via email





California Governor Hails ‘Coercive Power of Government’

A genuine Fascist

California Gov. Jerry Brown raised some eyebrows while attending the U.N. Climate Summit in Paris this month, proclaiming that the “coercive power of the central state” is needed to promote good public policy, specifically when it comes to a cleaner environment.

Taking part in an onstage presentation with billionaire and climate activist Tom Steyer, Brown said government regulations force companies to adopt clean technologies.

After Steyer mentioned business frameworks, Brown said, “Tom, you used the phrase ‘policy.’ Good policy. But I want to unpack that term a little bit. Inside the policy, you need a law. You need a rule. You need the coercive power of government to say, ‘Do this.’ Now, you have to be wise and don’t say something stupid or order something stupid, but the fact is, the regulations supported by the laws drive innovation.”

The Sacramento Bee reported that Brown later urged a small crowd to “never underestimate the coercive power of the central state in the service of good.”

“You can be sure California is going to keep innovating, keep regulating,” the 77-year-old Democrat said. “And, shall I say, keep taxing.”

The Brown administration has been aggressive in instituting stricter environmental laws and regulations in California.

In October, the four-term governor signed legislation calling on California to generate half of its electricity from sources such as solar and wind by 2030. At the same time, the law mandates that homes, offices, and factories double their energy efficiency.

Such moves have prompted opposition from the energy industry, saying they will raise utility bills and gasoline prices, and Brown’s comments in Paris drew a swift reaction from critics, who seized on the “coercion” remark.

“Gov. Brown’s statement is a frank admission that politicians and government in the U.S. are out of control,” said Dan Kish, senior vice president at the Institute for Energy Research, a public policy organization that calls for free-market solutions on energy policy.

“The governor bragged about the ‘coercive powers of government’ and how his state would keep regulating and taxing. The United States was formed to put citizens in charge of their lives by putting a fence around government power and control,” Kish said in an email to Watchdog.org.

“Gov. Brown has shown he thinks people should be inside the fence, with government, and their crony business partners, using its coercive and taxing powers to make them do what the politicians say, and it’s illustrative he is doing it at the Climate Summit in Paris. This is how freedom is lost and tyranny and coercion prevail.”

Brown led a California delegation in Paris that includes Steyer; Senate President Pro Tem Kevin De León, D-Los Angeles; and other state legislators.

Brown made the remarks in a discussion about reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“This is an art and a science,” Brown said. “You have to push business further than they want to go, but within their capacity to reach it.”

Clean power companies have long been criticized for their reliance on federal and state subsidies and tax credits, with the bankruptcy of California-based solar company Solyndra used as a prime example. The U.S. Department of Energy awarded Solyndra $536 million in loan guarantees prior to the company’s collapse in 2011.

Green energy advocates have defended the subsidies, arguing that fossil fuel industries have long received tax credits and that government help is often a necessity to launch companies that require large start-up costs.

“Just as with any other major economic transition—the Industrial Revolution, the Marshall Plan, the fall of Communism—there is a role for government policy, finance and investment in speeding the adoption of the new, while easing the phaseout of the old,” Kate Gordon, vice chair at the Paulson Institute, said in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year.

At a news conference in Paris, K.R. Sridhar, CEO of the fuel cell technology company Bloom Energy, said it would be wrong to single out renewable companies, saying that taxpayers pay for highway and road maintenance that benefits gasoline-powered cars.

Clean technology, the Bee quoted Sridhar, only needs a “helping hand,” not a permanent subsidy. “For us,” Sridhar said, “it’s a feeding bottle and not an addiction bottle.”

SOURCE





Meet the House science chairman who’s trying to put global warming research on ice

The article below was apparently intended as a hit piece but I think it celebrates a doughty devotee of truth

When Republican House leaders appointed Texas Republican Lamar S. Smith to lead the House science committee after a headline-grabbing run as chairman of the Judiciary panel, it looked like the veteran lawmaker could head into obscurity.

He had previously championed an end to automatic citizenship for children born in the United States and riled up advocates for freedom of expression on the Internet. Yet Smith’s new role in 2013 as the House’s science boss seemed less influential, leading a committee viewed as a backwater and first stop for freshman lawmakers.

But he quickly remade the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology into a bulldog as ferocious as any in a Congress riven by partisanship. As the Obama administration escalated its fight against climate change with new environmental regulations, the lawyer from San Antonio, Tex. became a key player among the holdouts.

As lawyers and lobbyists were devising legal strategies to try to dismantle the president’s climate-change agenda, Smith became the lawmaker bent on debunking the science behind it.

Now finishing his third year as chairman, the Yale-educated lawmaker who has represented Texas Hill Country and parts of Austin and San Antonio since 1987 has used new subpoena powers to an unprecedented degree.

He’s called on the administration to account for air-pollution regulations he says are not backed up by science. He’s tried to slash NASA’s budget for earth sciences. He’s subjected grant reviews at the National Science Foundation to extra scrutiny. One of Congress’s most prominent global warming skeptics, Smith, 68, has railed against environmentalists and the media for buying into the “climate-change religion.”

In the fall he took on his biggest target yet, accusing federal scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of colluding to doctor data in a pivotal global warming study that refuted the long-held notion that the planet’s warming had “paused.”

“He’s taken the science committee to a new level,” said Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), a freshman who leads the committee’s oversight panel. “We’re challenging the status quo… You’re talking about very significant regulations imposed by this administration. We’re asking, ‘Is the science behind them valid?'”

His detractors accuse Smith of taking oversight to a new level of bullying by questioning the motives of federal scientists and threatening their freedom. Critics say he’s out of step with mainstream scientific thinking on climate change, which concludes that man-made pollution is behind the planet’s warming.

His confrontation with NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan started over the summer, soon after a team of scientists on her staff published their findings on the global warming pause in the peer-reviewed journal Science.

Smith accused the scientists of altering historical global temperature data and rushing to publish their research to advance Obama’s “extreme climate agenda.” The chairman subpoenaed the scientists and other NOAA staff and demanded that they turn over internal emails related to their research.

Sullivan balked for weeks, finally releasing about 100 emails from non-scientists last week that NOAA officials say contain none of the evidence Smith is seeking. Meanwhile, prominent societies representing thousands of scientists have rallied around her, warning the congressman in a letter in November that his efforts are “establishing a practice of inquests.”

“He is bringing more prominence to the committee by challenging the integrity of scientists,” said Rush Holt, a physicist and New Jersey Democrat who served with Smith in the House from 1999 until this year.

“It’s an interesting way to raise the profile of a science committee,” said Holt, now chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “In fact it seems to be Smith who is substituting politics for evidence and not the scientists.”

Smith, through his staff, declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this article or to answer questions by email.

He and his allies reject criticism that he is politicizing science as head of a committee that oversees space exploration, research and development and has jurisdiction over agencies from NOAA to the National Institute of Standards and Technology. They say it’s the government that’s doing just that in the service of excessive federal regulation of the environment, with mandates that threaten the economy and crucial industries like gas, oil and coal.

“His constituents see a man that’s fighting for the energy community here in Texas, which is a large part of the employment base,” said Charles McConnell, who served two years in the Obama administration as assistant secretary for the Energy Department, responsible for fossil fuels. Now at Rice University, McConnell has criticized new Environmental Protection Agency air quality regulations as “rampant environmentalism.”

“I don’t believe Smith is against regulation,” said McConnell, who has testified before the committee. “He’s interested in scientifically based regulation.”

As the climate change summit got underway in Paris in November, the science committee held a hearing whose title revealed precisely where Smith stands: “Pitfalls of Unilateral Negotiations at the Paris Climate Change Conference.”

Two of the three witnesses the Republicans called to testify were not scientists, but policy experts representing conservative think tanks, a common practice at hearings. Other witnesses have affiliations with the energy industry, Democrats complain.

Earlier this year, Smith issued a subpoena to compel the Environmental Protection Agency to produce text messages and phone records for Administrator Gina McCarthy as it investigated proposed limits on ozone it said would amount to the most costly federal regulation in history.

He has also demanded EPA cor­res­pond­ence with out­side groups on a range of en­vir­on­ment­al rules and reg­u­lat­ions, to show that they collaborated with the administration, for example in curtailing power-plant emissions.

Supporters say the chairman’s roots in Texas —a state that has objected strenuously to EPA rules slashing ozone levels and pollution from coal-fired power plants —form the core of his skepticism.

“Scrutiny of global warming started here,” said Michael Nasi, an Austin air-quality lawyer who represents many of the state’s electric power producers. “It’s incumbent on any federal lawmaker to be asking, are we looking at controls that will really have legitimate health benefits?” Texas regulators, for example, have questioned whether EPA’s emissions crackdown would really improve public health.

On the foundational question of whether human behavior is behind the earth’s rising temperatures, Smith has been called a truth seeker, a climate skeptic and a climate denier. He is fond of saying that “good science” should rule the day, while his detractors say it’s Smith who has lost sight of good science.

Just before he was installed as committee chairman, Smith said in a statement in response to questions from reporters that he believes climate change “is due to a combination of factors, including natural cycles, sun spots, and human activity.”

“But scientists still don’t know for certain how much each of these factors contributes to the overall climate change that the Earth is experiencing.”

SOURCE





Don’t believe the eco-hype: For all the optimism about wind and solar, renewables are nowhere near viable

After COP21, the Paris conference on climate change, it’s time to puncture green euphoria about renewable energy

Among greens, technological innovation is the new black. After all, dissing the plebs for their ignorant and greedy, carbon-guzzling behaviour hasn’t proved very popular. Similarly, protesting coal-fired power stations in Asia has cut little ice. So now environmentalists have conveniently discovered that technological innovation in wind and solar power will rapidly supply much of the world’s electricity.

Since 2008, the US has wanted wind power to account for a fifth of its electricity generated by 2030, up from 4.5 per cent today. Likewise, presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton envisages America as the ‘clean-energy superpower’, one where renewables generate ‘at least a third’ of electricity as early as 2027. Now the Paris Agreement upholds what it calls ‘universal access to sustainable energy in developing countries, in particular in Africa, through the enhanced deployment of renewable energy’. Indeed, at the Paris talks, US secretary of state John Kerry proclaimed ‘clean’ energy to be ‘cheaper against today’s alternatives’.

Is any of this credible? No. We are in no shape to make renewable electricity supplant the conventional sort within the next 15 years.

The dishonesty of green tech

During COP21, the US, much of Europe, China, India and several other major nations launched Mission Innovation, aimed at doubling research and development (R&D) into renewables by 2020. Significantly, Bill Gates and 28 other billionaire investors joined the mission. For Gates, this intrepid group of ‘patient’ capitalists has a philanthropic goal: the investors’ aim is ‘as much to accelerate innovation as it is to turn a profit’. Gates hopes that, over at least a decade, photovoltaic panels might morph into ‘solar paint’; rechargeable electrolyte in batteries, or ‘flow batteries’, might beat the lithium-ion sort; and sunshine might help make hydrogen and hydrocarbons in a process he calls ‘solar-chemical’.

While Gates believes that renewables need big improvements in clout and cost, Kerry imagines they’re already profitable – even without the subsidies they bask in. As he told COP21, renewables today are ‘one of the greatest economic opportunities the world has ever known’, and investors can now ‘do well and do good at the same time’. To complete the euphoria at the Paris talks, solar power in developing countries enjoyed special support. Thus, on top of Mission Innovation, a second key initiative emerged alongside COP21. Launched by India and France, the International Solar Alliance brings together around 120 tropical nations to attract $1,000 billion of investment in solar by 2030. The aim: to cheapen existing solar technologies, but also develop new ones ‘tailored to the specific needs of members of the Alliance’.

What dishonesty surrounds green tech! Today, ‘tailoring’ solar to the reputed needs of developing countries won’t build them the kind of electricity capacity that can continuously power ‘factories, skyscrapers, and other large consumers of energy’, as Gates rightly observes is necessary. Drawn up by international elites and the United Nations, the official programme for developing countries in solar is paltry by comparison. It plans to give the rural poor ‘access’ to electricity that’s ‘decentralised whenever possible and based on clean energy’.

As ever, climate negotiations form a diplomatic charade that only reveals the West’s grimy conception of how the developing world should develop – with just enough low-tech, low-output green electricity-lite to power a village hut, no more.

The idea that solar panels have now reached ‘grid parity’, or price equivalence with fossil fuel-powered electricity, is another charade. According to the US Energy Information Administration, the efficiency of solar (12 per cent) and wind (26 per cent) remains way below the efficiency notched up by conventional power plants, such as gas (42.9 per cent).

Yes, solar efficiencies have improved, but it has taken decades – and strides have mostly been made in laboratories, not under the more arduous conditions of everyday use. The economies of scale and subsidies enjoyed by Chinese manufacturers of solar panels have bankrupted their rivals and lowered prices. Yet with improvements in efficiency so slow, panels will go on occupying a lot of land, or roof space, for years and years. That will keep their installed costs buoyant, as well as counteract the falling costs of installation, maintenance and financing that US solar-services firms have recently achieved.

As Gates’ proposal for solar paint suggests, buildings and especially homes, not expansive ‘farms’ of panels, remain the principal units of account for solar power. Yet how can household panels, still less those mounted atop blocks of flats, provide enough reliable energy to power fleets of computer servers and trains, still less the processes involving heat that are at the core of making steel and cement? Solar can never be an easily concentrated, continuous source of baseload power in the way that fossil-fuel-fired and nuclear-power stations can be. Every spurious exaggeration of solar power’s capabilities in developing countries consigns them to stunted development – to intermittent, weak electricity.

Perhaps better battery storage of energy – including flow batteries – offers hope. Yet here, too, illusions are enormous. Storage will add to the costs of wind and solar. Moreover, even the breakthrough lithium-air battery, just announced by Dr Clare Grey at Cambridge University, will require at least a decade to be commercialised.

Why we need R&D

One of the chief dangers emerging from COP21 is that the misconception that renewables are saving the planet, along the lines of Germany’s disastrous, nuclear-free ‘energy transformation’, will now be taken as given.

Now, of course, no silver bullet will solve the issues of energy supply; so, for all their depressing intermittency, wind and solar power deserve, in principle, the kind of large and long-term R&D budgets that fossil fuels and nuclear power ought to enjoy. But, in fact, R&D expenditures by the West on renewables are, like those on fossil fuels and nuclear, utterly negligible. In 2014, Europe spent just $1.52 billion on R&D for renewables, while the US and Canada spent $1.08 billion. As for R&D in fossil fuels, Europe spent a mere $0.57 billion; the US and Canada, just $0.8 billion.

Yes, on a good day wind turbines can now generate a lot of a country’s electricity; yes, the price of solar electricity is now going down; and yes, innovation always needs to think about the longterm. But in the case of renewables, reliably generating a quarter of the world’s electricity at prices that compare well with fossil fuels and nuclear will have to wait until 2040 or later, not 2030. Even then, renewables will still need a lot of fossil-fuel backup to ensure continuous electricity generation.

Governments, and now philanthropically minded capitalists, may stress the ‘creative’ side of the creative destruction of the fossil-fuel and nuclear industries. Yet the preference for renewables has up to now meant subsidising yesterday’s technologies more than spending on tomorrow’s R&D. So, despite all the self-loathing of the fossil-fuel and nuclear industries, and despite the relative lack of profitability of nuclear, renewables will not wreak destruction on them for a long time to come.

There is simply not enough investment being made in new industries to eradicate the old. Capitalism is barely interested in general investment and innovation – let alone investment in energy, where the installed base and sunk costs of fossil-fuel infrastructure will only be overcome over decades.

John Kerry can claim that ‘over the next 15 years, $17 trillion is expected to be invested in energy, and the vast majority of that is going to be in clean energy, thank heavens’. But such a flow of investment into renewables is about as likely as the widely ridiculed ‘flows’ of renewables promised to developing countries by developed ones.

The numbers say it all. Kerry promises trillions of investment, when, in fact, the amount of credit extended by the West to help companies sell wind and, to a much lesser extent, solar power to the richer developing economies (‘middle-income countries’) was just $1.6 billion in 2013-14. And North America and Europe’s R&D budgets for renewables, are, as we have seen, even less than that.

So, don’t buy the hype: for a quarter century or more, renewables won’t make much of a difference to the world’s electricity supply.

SOURCE





How the Post-Soviet Left Latched Onto Climate For its Crusade on Capitalism

By CONRAD BLACK

The opening of the Paris conference on climate change will be the occasion for the customary lamentations about the imminent demise of life on Earth if we do not pull up our socks as a species and reduce carbon emission levels, and thus avoid the toasting of the world. The adduced scientific evidence does not justify any such state of alarm.

Every sane and informed person in the world is concerned about pollution and demands vigilance about any clear trends of climate change and any convincing evidence that human behavior influences the climate. Because the Copenhagen climate Conference of 2009 had promised agreement on imposition of dramatic measures to reduce fossil fuel use and resulting carbon emissions, thus avoiding apprehended rises in world temperature, and broke up in acrimonious farce and recrimination, the Paris conference has been more carefully and less ambitiously prepared.

At Copenhagen, the demand arose from developing countries that the economically advanced countries had permanently impaired the under-developed countries and that the $100 billion compensation fund that President Obama had promised to raise for the less-advanced countries was completely inadequate, mere reparations instead of a serious response to a moral debt that could only be quantified in trillions of dollars. (Mr. Obama had no takers, including his own Congress, when his Democrats controlled it, for one cent of such payments.)

Mr. Obama was unable even to get an interview with the Chinese prime minister, a historic first in lack of access for a U.S. president, as the Chinese, by far the greatest carbon emitter and polluter of all countries, cheekily set themselves at the head of the G-77 countries who with cupped hands and in stentorian voice, demanded immense monetary compensation for the sins of the carbon emitters, also led by themselves.

The world’s temperature has risen approximately one half of a centigrade degree, or almost one Fahrenheit degree, in 35 years. There has been minimal global warming for 18 years, though carbon emissions in the world have steadily increased throughout that period. It is indisputable that the world has been warmer several times in its history than it is now, so whatever impact man may have on it, the world’s temperature is evidently subject to fluctuations for other reasons.

There is also legitimate disagreement about the consequences of such warming as might occur. Recent research at the University of Sussex, widely recognized for its expertise in this field, indicates that warming up to 3.5 centigrade degrees from where we are now would have no appreciable impact on anything, except a positive impact where increased volumes of carbon dioxide increase arable area and make crops more drought-resistant.

Also there has been a good deal of reciprocally corroborating research in different countries by recognized experts that uniformly demonstrates that the world’s temperature is much less sensitive than had long been feared to increased carbon use. Antarctic polar ice is thickening and world water levels are not rising. Apocalyptic statements of imminent consequences of not reducing carbon use have been fairly thoroughly debunked.

Not only is the evidence of the effects of increased carbon use unclear, but the economic consequences of discouragement of carbon use are very clear and very harmful to the most vulnerable countries. China and India, the two most populous countries and the first and third carbon emitters, are eagerly pursuing economic growth, which is the only method for pulling the many hundreds of millions of desperately poor people in those countries upwards out of poverty, and they are not going to change policy to accommodate the militant ecologists of the West.

They don’t attach the slightest credence to the alarmist comments of the more strident ecologists, other than as an excuse for demanding monetary compensation for how the economically leading countries have disadvantaged them. The International Energy Agency estimates that the underdeveloped countries as a group, will emit 70 per cent of the carbon output of the world in the next 15 years, and will be responsible for all of the increase in carbon use over that time.

President Obama has called the Paris conference a “historic turning point,” but it isn’t, and claimed (in February) that climate change was a greater problem than terrorism. He and John Kerry (secretary of state), have several times called it the world’s greatest problem. This is bunk. The pope stated that we are “at the edge of suicide.” If so, it is not for climatic reasons. (The Holy See has placated the greens, but emphasized that “The Church cannot take the place of scientists and politicians.”)

Many in those groups are more impetuous in their assertions. And everyone seriously involved with the Paris conference knows that it is not really going to accomplish much. As Lord Ridley pointed out in the Wall Street Journal on November 28, the NGO spokespeople attending at Paris will scream like banshees of imminent disaster, for fear of having their budgets cut, despite contrary evidence and although it is now clear that decarbonization is much more harmful to the world than increased carbon emissions.

Alternate sources of energy, such as wind and solar, are hideously more expensive and much less productive, a luxury no country can really afford, and certainly not the poorer countries. But the conference will be hamstrung. Countries will volunteer their own individual targets for reduction of carbon emissions, called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, or INDC’s.

The INDC of China only predicts that such emissions will meet their peak by 2030, while, for all his militancy, President Obama’s U.S. INDC will be a reduction of between 26% and 28% in ten years, yet the outline of hoped-for gains, which the Congress will not endorse, and for years Obama will only see as a private citizen, only calls for half the volume reduction of emissions necessary to meet his pledge. The American INDC is a scam.

Even the Obama administration is demanding an involuntary international verification mechanism (much more rigorous than what it settled for in the rather more urgent matter of Iranian nuclear military development), and the elimination of the so-called “firewall” of separate arrangements for the developed and under-developed (or developing) countries. The developing countries, led by China and India, refuse, unless they are solemnly promised a $100 billion a year climate fund, as Obama imprudently pledged at Copenhagen.

This remains completely out of the question and furnished the justification in advance for the developing countries to fall short of their INDC targets, which will provide the cover for the developed countries to do the same. Everyone will solemnly announce ambitious INDCs, but there will be no verification, ample excuse for non-compliance for everyone and this charade will continue to the next portentous and verbose conference.

What seems to have happened is that the international far left, having been decisively routed with the collapse of the Soviet Union and of international communism, has attached itself to the environmental movement, usurped the leading positions in it from the bird-watching, butterfly-collecting, and conservation organizations, and is carrying on its anti-capitalist and anarchist crusade behind the cover of eco-Armageddonism.

While this has been rather skillfully executed, many office-holders and aspirants, including Mr. Obama, have used dire environmental scenarios to distract their electorates from their own policy failures, much as Arab powers have long diluted anger at despotic misgovernment by harping on the red herring of Israel.

SOURCE





Global warming: deluge first, wisdom later

Some breathtaking wisdom from Uganda below.  It probably makes sense to Greenies

The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference was recently held in Paris, France.

Also known as COP21 alias CMP 11, it was attended by 196 state parties and led to the Paris Agreement aimed at reducing the rate of climate change (global temperatures). The agreement talks of reducing global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, self-review every five years and promises of financial transfers from rich to poor countries.

Despite self-congratulation by states and the UN, the agreement is not legally binding; the 13 days in Paris with per diem have now been added to the 23 years wasted since the UN started crying foul about the global climate crisis.

From the first such conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the root cause of the crisis – a socio-economic model that treats life not as harmonious relationships between humans and with all other creation but as unlimited private appropriation and aimless consumption – is deliberately dodged.

Lessening use of fossil fuels or emissions of greenhouse gases per se is not enough to rescue planet Earth and human beings from the impending catastrophe. It requires reduction of per capita energy exploitation and general destabilization of the various natural systems and cycles.

The fashionable concepts ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ are even a misnomer; the situation is outrageous natural destabilization. Humankind has destabilized the natural foundation that helped it build civilization – in quest for super profits and dominion – and any simplistic sentimentalism will solve nothing.

The solution would require a big change in our worldview and lifestyle, more so abandoning the ones promoted by the UN under grand projects like Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals, and certain religious beliefs and practices that divide humankind rather than unite it.

Like with earlier agreements on climate, the states (read politicians) will renege on their promises and even forge statistics. No wonder many scientists and social activists feel betrayed already.

In the absence of a legitimate global authority that can whip each country or social grouping, trusting politicians who come to power through national elections after wild materialistic promises and protecting their domestic (economic and military) policies is a daydream.

Politicians and their economic advisers will never care about the common good for nature and other humans. The agreement doesn’t show any pathway to achieving even the shady goal, as if mere signing of aspiration leads to compliance.

The United Nations, as a club of states, cannot alone manage the problem of climate change. The minimum effort would involve participation of religious organisations, corporate institutions (directly rather than acting through politicians) and civil/social movements so as to bring to table all relevant issues.

There must be serious opposition to social monotonization (by promoting diversity in ideas, beliefs, ideals, and lifestyle), anthropocentrism, (the belief that only humankind is created in the image of God, that the world purposely exists to be dominated by and serve humankind) and the delusion of linearism (belief that we are ever on a continuity to higher progress), among others.

Otherwise, it is going to remain the same business as usual until three extra-human interventions take place: cumulative mass destruction as a form of natural self-purification and throwing off an unbearable burden; or a great sudden deluge, something like the biblical flood or collapse of the tower of Babel. Second will be the multiplication of new breeds of surprise leaders and individuals, the likes of Pope Francis, President John Mafuguli, former president Jose Mujica and whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Third, will be a spiritual revival around a global prophetic movement without a spatially-localized nucleus and not requiring paternalistic evangelization waves.

However, in the meantime, let the wise and concerned embark on social (activist/solidarity) movements working across all strata and nations to boost those already suffering the effects of nature destabilization, and expose and sabotage various criminals and ignoramuses responsible for the brewing catastrophe.

SOURCE

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1 comment:

TucsonBob said...

Wow! I think I've seen similar verbiage from professors at Harvard and Yale. Sounds like the author thinks we need a world government led by a strong greenie communist.