Even though I think we have missed the last exit, here are some things we can do right now!
We have more power than we realize but we have to use it!
Stop buying new things.
Stop eating meat and dairy products. Huge impact on environment, our health, and poor animals.
Boycott the major banks, BoA, Citi, Chase, Wells Fargo. Move you money to a Credit union!
Make signs -get out on the streets - make yourself seen and heard!
Boycott all name brands!
Stop watching TV!
Turn off your phone for at least 4 hrs a day, and talk to your neighbors/friends/co-workers about whatever they are concerned about!
Join a group that has the same agenda as you. If there isn't one, start one!
Stop spending money. You will need it when the SHTF!
Stock up on food. A month of food is not too much. Eat some of it as you go so it doesn't go out of date.
Grow a garden. Share with your neighbors. Build community!
Our only hope is for us to get someone like Katie Porter as Prez but they wont let that happen. We need a hard turn toward socialism and I dont see that happening. Things like nationalizing the Oil/Gas industry, the electric grid, making sure everyone has food, water, shelter, health care, etc. Lots to do but no one is listening!
Thank you Michael. Please galvanize us into a potent political machine!
PS: If China wanted to make us move to be sustainable, she is the only one that could do it!
Michael I saw your word " battle", and I struggled to stay in balance to find a few words that might inspire the change in course you call for. Let me try to make two points:
The gift of desperation from the pain we all feel has to be great enough that everyone can admit we need to change using new attitudes, strategy and method. Sorry to say we are not there yet or at least it seems so, yet wonders seldom cease when we look for them.
We need to shift our mind set away from war. We are embarking on a struggle to get things right with our planet who has nurtured us with kindness since history began. If we fight with nature as we fight amongst ourselves, we always lose with one rip off after another. The healthy solution to healing requires an all out effort where there is no room for war. Earth Gaia weeps with pain when we make war. We are at the point where it will kill us all. There's nowhere to hide now. All "sides" need to surrender and join the struggle
one billion obese people : feeding their gluttony; moving their too large bodies; an d no one sees this. If you don't look you can't see. Gluttony is a sin and America loves religion.
During the 2020 election, I was inspired by your ability to spread a useful message for how we could band together for change, and your in-depth coverage of events such as the protests in Portland, which provided me a level of understanding of events that year that I didn't get elsewhere.
Alas, here I am disappointed. I mean, you are basically just doing your own version of green virtue-signalling. No solutions here, a lot blame, and failure to outline the real issue.
Everything any of us does uses resources and produces waste. Heat, chemicals, destruction. That is thermodynamics and biology. It happens for people and giant chemical plants.
A safe environment for humans to live means balancing the inputs and the outputs, and mitigating the danger from the outputs. We must collectively, and with information from science, decide what is an acceptable balance of quality of life vs. the health of the environment and risks to our individual health.
This is really complex, and we have to treat it that way, and people here need to accept that the way forward is not to impose absolutes (e.g., no meat) on people but to educate toward sensible consensus.
Let's think for just a minute. Glass is more recyclable than plastic and generally less toxic. But if you package in glass, it’s going to cost a more to ship because glass is heavy, and it takes a lot of heat to make it (more than plastic? I don’t know). If you want to ship something not as far, you need to make locally. Does that mean a factory, that needs energy? Does that mean a greenhouse, that needs water and chemical foods? Where do you make the chemicals? What if you transport things farther, but you use electric trucks? But those huge batteries need lithium, and they might not last long, and you have mine that out of the ground. Guess where a lot of the lithium is? In China. Do I put it on a boat? Can I get it somewhere else? Oh yeah: in the Donbas, next to Mariupol. Anybody think this war in Ukraine is just about territory now? Really the best idea to just let Putin take Ukraine? (But let’s not start on this; if W and Cheney had paid more attention to Fiona Hill, all of this might have gone better: they had a halfway decent idea, and as usual, they did it completely wrong.)
Bird flu can still wipe out humanity, even if you go back to living as cro-magnons, and cooking fries cause lung problems.
I think we need to stop trying to "stop" things, and start trying to balance them.
Which brings me to the one thing you got "wrong": Nature isn't doing anything on purpose. Please stop anthropomorphizing. I don't care if you actually believe in some mother spirit or were just doing it for the emotional hook, but it promotes unhelpful ideas. We can only make the right decisions about what bad environmental consquences are acceptable by approaching the problem with science, it's the only possible and provable middle ground.
Nature—the universe—is just there. Stuff in it bumped around and life happened, and life sometimes falls into balance for periods of time that are long compared to our lives, and short compared to how long planets are around. Life on Earth started out as anaerobes, in a carbon dioxide atmosphere something like what still exists on Venus and Mars—oxygen was a waste product, and weather and life cycles transformed our atmosphere, and the anaerobes poisoned themselves into hiding in extreme places without needing advanced tech.
That's the danger. Yes, Earth will still be here, and most likely something small will live to evolve another day, but "nature" did not make the coronavirus to teach us a lesson.
What separates us from unthinking nature is that we have better tools and we can try to engineer a balance.
What we are up against are the same drives that make animals overpopulate, translated into selfish, short-sighted behavior in capitalist and dictatorial societies alike. Anybody you want to point a finger at is just one end of a spectrum from Al Gore to Hooker Chemical (Love Canal) balancing those drives against morals or responsibility, human concepts.
It's the same thing in the way on this as in the way on voting rights or health care.
We have to have leadership on arguments about how to strike the balances that will actually convince people to support these changes (not, for example, being blanket anti- this that or the other). You could do that, or you could keep whipping up fervor. Fervor does work for the other side, but I just don't think that there is the same reaction to the carbon PPM count as there is to the budget. Maybe part of this is that no one has any idea what actually happens if the temperature goes up? (Not scientists, I mean regular people. Really. What do you think happens? What's the real danger? What's the actual sequence of events? Why is it a problem?)
Young people are already concerned. Give them something concrete, practical, and short-term to do that will help.
one billion obese people : feeding their gluttony; moving their too large bodies; an d no one sees this. If you don't look you can't see. Gluttony is a sin and America loves religion.
If Trump and his enablers get their way, how you experience your life would depend on whether you identified — and were identified — as a Trump Republican.
Donald Trump and Republicans are shoving America toward authoritarianism. That’s why many of us are shouting about a threat to democracy.
Authoritarianism wouldn’t happen overnight, but authoritarian regimes have shown us a road map. Here’s a picture of what it would look like here.
If Trump and his enablers get their way, how you experience your life would depend on whether you identified — and were identified — as a Trump Republican.
Identified as a Trump Republican by your bumper sticker, you would be more likely to get a warning instead of speeding ticket. You would gain the inside track for government jobs, grants, and needed permits. Decisions about government benefits, like unemployment and disability, would be more likely to go your way.
If, instead, you were perceived as a Democrat, or just an insufficiently Trump Republican, you would experience the reverse of what’s above. Tax auditors would focus on you. You would be more likely to be hassled by police, even jailed if you were too troublesome. Nasty graffiti might appear on your business or home. You would be accused of being un-American, a traitor. You would learn to keep your head down and be careful about what you said to whom.
Science would be interpreted or even suppressed to suit Trump Republican needs. History would be whitewashed to celebrate the regime and its version of events. School curricula and texts would similarly conform.
LBGTQ folks would closet themselves again. Fewer women would lead in government, business, or society. People who want to marginalize and discriminate against people of color, non-Christians, and immigrants would find cover to do so. Abortion and birth control would be illegal. Public education would wither as religious schools claimed more and more public funding. Air and water quality would suffer. Climate change would go unaddressed. The military could be used to put down dissent.
Again, not all of this would happen instantly, and we can’t predict how far the Trump Republicans would go. But this is the path that they are on.
So if you are a Trump Republican, perhaps all this sounds great. Finally, justice for my many grievances. Maybe that’s the country in which you want to live.
I hope and pray that the great majority of Americans will reject it.
(By Jim Chrisinger
a retired public servant living in Ankeny. He worked for both Republican and Democratic officials at multiple levels of government.)......
Thanks for this great episode. Even though I agree with almost everything you say, I believe you made some critical omissions:
1. When it comes to sustainability, science has failed humanity too. And I say this as a scientist. One problem is that research funding is highly political. The reason why so many scientists are working on technologies like carbon capture is not that they believe in the idea but because they can acquire research funding for doing so.
2. Calling for action is easy, but it does not help unless you have a plan. We are up against a very profitable system based on fossil fuels, and we cannot hope to fight capitalism with altruism. We are simply not as evil as they are. Therefore, we must throw a wrench into the works of the capitalist machine. We need something that immediately invalidates any business model based on fossil fuels. One such idea is Global Carbon Compensation (www.global-climate-compensation.org). It turns out that a couple of hundred CEOs could stop climate change tomorrow if they wanted to. We must help them make the right decision.
A draft of a whitepaper describing the idea is available. Please get in touch if you want it.
Regards,
Henrik -- "Giving Our Children a Reason Not to Hate Us" (www.nordborg.ch)
Michael you are my brotha’ from anotha’ motha’! You just said everything I have had stuck in my craw for about 40 years but I didn’t have the wherewithal to articulate it as you have done so masterfully. What you just expressed should be piped into every airport, airplane, bus station, train station, public restroom in the country. It should be played on the P.A. system in every high school in the country. If you will please forgive me for just a minute here, people in this country need the shit scared out of them! I knew a long time ago that this beautiful planet will be just fine and she will heal herself once she gets rid of her infection which it breaks my heart to know is us. 💔
Even though I think we have missed the last exit, here are some things we can do right now!
We have more power than we realize but we have to use it!
Stop buying new things.
Stop eating meat and dairy products. Huge impact on environment, our health, and poor animals.
Boycott the major banks, BoA, Citi, Chase, Wells Fargo. Move you money to a Credit union!
Make signs -get out on the streets - make yourself seen and heard!
Boycott all name brands!
Stop watching TV!
Turn off your phone for at least 4 hrs a day, and talk to your neighbors/friends/co-workers about whatever they are concerned about!
Join a group that has the same agenda as you. If there isn't one, start one!
Stop spending money. You will need it when the SHTF!
Stock up on food. A month of food is not too much. Eat some of it as you go so it doesn't go out of date.
Grow a garden. Share with your neighbors. Build community!
Our only hope is for us to get someone like Katie Porter as Prez but they wont let that happen. We need a hard turn toward socialism and I dont see that happening. Things like nationalizing the Oil/Gas industry, the electric grid, making sure everyone has food, water, shelter, health care, etc. Lots to do but no one is listening!
Thank you Michael. Please galvanize us into a potent political machine!
PS: If China wanted to make us move to be sustainable, she is the only one that could do it!
Brilliant and so inspiring Michael! Thank you!
Thank you Mike TRUTH.
Battle
Michael I saw your word " battle", and I struggled to stay in balance to find a few words that might inspire the change in course you call for. Let me try to make two points:
The gift of desperation from the pain we all feel has to be great enough that everyone can admit we need to change using new attitudes, strategy and method. Sorry to say we are not there yet or at least it seems so, yet wonders seldom cease when we look for them.
We need to shift our mind set away from war. We are embarking on a struggle to get things right with our planet who has nurtured us with kindness since history began. If we fight with nature as we fight amongst ourselves, we always lose with one rip off after another. The healthy solution to healing requires an all out effort where there is no room for war. Earth Gaia weeps with pain when we make war. We are at the point where it will kill us all. There's nowhere to hide now. All "sides" need to surrender and join the struggle
A kind heart is a garden
Kind thoughts are the roots
Kind words are the flowers
Kind deeds are the fruits.
"And in the End... The Love you Take is Equal to the Love you Make".
Lyric, Lennon and McCartney. You got me singing again!
Message
Love yourself and all the living beings around you.
When everything looks hopeless, you’re the hope. - Marcus Raskin
Do your part and go #SustainableLiving 💚
Thank you Mike TRUTH.
one billion obese people : feeding their gluttony; moving their too large bodies; an d no one sees this. If you don't look you can't see. Gluttony is a sin and America loves religion.
TRUTHS LOST HORIZON
I had a dream last night.......
Driving down the highway called America,
I came across huge trees that had been cut down and left to rot. All that remained were the stumps, and each stump was an Indian Nation.
And before my eyes, each one turned to smoke and disappeared into the night sky.
Before I was awake, I asked the stars if they would ever return to plant more trees on this world.
They answered, "No! Only those who have lost the seeds of truth can find and replant them!"
Sailing through space on this blue gem, we spoil the world along with all her inhabitants!
Our uncontrolled growth, the never ending greed of profit is planet cancer, devouring our home!
Greedy people do not think logically.
Universal Love is the only medicine that will cure the violence of selfishness.
During the 2020 election, I was inspired by your ability to spread a useful message for how we could band together for change, and your in-depth coverage of events such as the protests in Portland, which provided me a level of understanding of events that year that I didn't get elsewhere.
Alas, here I am disappointed. I mean, you are basically just doing your own version of green virtue-signalling. No solutions here, a lot blame, and failure to outline the real issue.
Everything any of us does uses resources and produces waste. Heat, chemicals, destruction. That is thermodynamics and biology. It happens for people and giant chemical plants.
A safe environment for humans to live means balancing the inputs and the outputs, and mitigating the danger from the outputs. We must collectively, and with information from science, decide what is an acceptable balance of quality of life vs. the health of the environment and risks to our individual health.
This is really complex, and we have to treat it that way, and people here need to accept that the way forward is not to impose absolutes (e.g., no meat) on people but to educate toward sensible consensus.
Let's think for just a minute. Glass is more recyclable than plastic and generally less toxic. But if you package in glass, it’s going to cost a more to ship because glass is heavy, and it takes a lot of heat to make it (more than plastic? I don’t know). If you want to ship something not as far, you need to make locally. Does that mean a factory, that needs energy? Does that mean a greenhouse, that needs water and chemical foods? Where do you make the chemicals? What if you transport things farther, but you use electric trucks? But those huge batteries need lithium, and they might not last long, and you have mine that out of the ground. Guess where a lot of the lithium is? In China. Do I put it on a boat? Can I get it somewhere else? Oh yeah: in the Donbas, next to Mariupol. Anybody think this war in Ukraine is just about territory now? Really the best idea to just let Putin take Ukraine? (But let’s not start on this; if W and Cheney had paid more attention to Fiona Hill, all of this might have gone better: they had a halfway decent idea, and as usual, they did it completely wrong.)
Bird flu can still wipe out humanity, even if you go back to living as cro-magnons, and cooking fries cause lung problems.
I think we need to stop trying to "stop" things, and start trying to balance them.
Which brings me to the one thing you got "wrong": Nature isn't doing anything on purpose. Please stop anthropomorphizing. I don't care if you actually believe in some mother spirit or were just doing it for the emotional hook, but it promotes unhelpful ideas. We can only make the right decisions about what bad environmental consquences are acceptable by approaching the problem with science, it's the only possible and provable middle ground.
Nature—the universe—is just there. Stuff in it bumped around and life happened, and life sometimes falls into balance for periods of time that are long compared to our lives, and short compared to how long planets are around. Life on Earth started out as anaerobes, in a carbon dioxide atmosphere something like what still exists on Venus and Mars—oxygen was a waste product, and weather and life cycles transformed our atmosphere, and the anaerobes poisoned themselves into hiding in extreme places without needing advanced tech.
That's the danger. Yes, Earth will still be here, and most likely something small will live to evolve another day, but "nature" did not make the coronavirus to teach us a lesson.
What separates us from unthinking nature is that we have better tools and we can try to engineer a balance.
What we are up against are the same drives that make animals overpopulate, translated into selfish, short-sighted behavior in capitalist and dictatorial societies alike. Anybody you want to point a finger at is just one end of a spectrum from Al Gore to Hooker Chemical (Love Canal) balancing those drives against morals or responsibility, human concepts.
It's the same thing in the way on this as in the way on voting rights or health care.
We have to have leadership on arguments about how to strike the balances that will actually convince people to support these changes (not, for example, being blanket anti- this that or the other). You could do that, or you could keep whipping up fervor. Fervor does work for the other side, but I just don't think that there is the same reaction to the carbon PPM count as there is to the budget. Maybe part of this is that no one has any idea what actually happens if the temperature goes up? (Not scientists, I mean regular people. Really. What do you think happens? What's the real danger? What's the actual sequence of events? Why is it a problem?)
Young people are already concerned. Give them something concrete, practical, and short-term to do that will help.
one billion obese people : feeding their gluttony; moving their too large bodies; an d no one sees this. If you don't look you can't see. Gluttony is a sin and America loves religion.
What authoritarianism would look like in America
If Trump and his enablers get their way, how you experience your life would depend on whether you identified — and were identified — as a Trump Republican.
Donald Trump and Republicans are shoving America toward authoritarianism. That’s why many of us are shouting about a threat to democracy.
Authoritarianism wouldn’t happen overnight, but authoritarian regimes have shown us a road map. Here’s a picture of what it would look like here.
If Trump and his enablers get their way, how you experience your life would depend on whether you identified — and were identified — as a Trump Republican.
Identified as a Trump Republican by your bumper sticker, you would be more likely to get a warning instead of speeding ticket. You would gain the inside track for government jobs, grants, and needed permits. Decisions about government benefits, like unemployment and disability, would be more likely to go your way.
If, instead, you were perceived as a Democrat, or just an insufficiently Trump Republican, you would experience the reverse of what’s above. Tax auditors would focus on you. You would be more likely to be hassled by police, even jailed if you were too troublesome. Nasty graffiti might appear on your business or home. You would be accused of being un-American, a traitor. You would learn to keep your head down and be careful about what you said to whom.
Science would be interpreted or even suppressed to suit Trump Republican needs. History would be whitewashed to celebrate the regime and its version of events. School curricula and texts would similarly conform.
LBGTQ folks would closet themselves again. Fewer women would lead in government, business, or society. People who want to marginalize and discriminate against people of color, non-Christians, and immigrants would find cover to do so. Abortion and birth control would be illegal. Public education would wither as religious schools claimed more and more public funding. Air and water quality would suffer. Climate change would go unaddressed. The military could be used to put down dissent.
Again, not all of this would happen instantly, and we can’t predict how far the Trump Republicans would go. But this is the path that they are on.
So if you are a Trump Republican, perhaps all this sounds great. Finally, justice for my many grievances. Maybe that’s the country in which you want to live.
I hope and pray that the great majority of Americans will reject it.
(By Jim Chrisinger
a retired public servant living in Ankeny. He worked for both Republican and Democratic officials at multiple levels of government.)......
Hi Michael
Thanks for this great episode. Even though I agree with almost everything you say, I believe you made some critical omissions:
1. When it comes to sustainability, science has failed humanity too. And I say this as a scientist. One problem is that research funding is highly political. The reason why so many scientists are working on technologies like carbon capture is not that they believe in the idea but because they can acquire research funding for doing so.
2. Calling for action is easy, but it does not help unless you have a plan. We are up against a very profitable system based on fossil fuels, and we cannot hope to fight capitalism with altruism. We are simply not as evil as they are. Therefore, we must throw a wrench into the works of the capitalist machine. We need something that immediately invalidates any business model based on fossil fuels. One such idea is Global Carbon Compensation (www.global-climate-compensation.org). It turns out that a couple of hundred CEOs could stop climate change tomorrow if they wanted to. We must help them make the right decision.
A draft of a whitepaper describing the idea is available. Please get in touch if you want it.
Regards,
Henrik -- "Giving Our Children a Reason Not to Hate Us" (www.nordborg.ch)
Ok, you're not doing these things, you might want to start:
- Turn off your cable box every night. they uses a lot of energy
- Unplug your phone chargers when not in use
- compost your food waste
- Turn off your dishwasher when not in use
- Unplug your coffeepot if your don't use the preset
- Turn off your router at night
- Make sure your city composts your yard waste, otherwise, do it yourself
- Check with your electricity provider to install a usage analyzer. this will detect "always on"devices
- Take public transit or ride a bike to work
- People of Michigan, vote for funding for public transportation
- The most important of "Reduce, Recycle. Reuse" is REDUCE!
Michael you are my brotha’ from anotha’ motha’! You just said everything I have had stuck in my craw for about 40 years but I didn’t have the wherewithal to articulate it as you have done so masterfully. What you just expressed should be piped into every airport, airplane, bus station, train station, public restroom in the country. It should be played on the P.A. system in every high school in the country. If you will please forgive me for just a minute here, people in this country need the shit scared out of them! I knew a long time ago that this beautiful planet will be just fine and she will heal herself once she gets rid of her infection which it breaks my heart to know is us. 💔
Thank you Michael! All good points. I don’t know how to get people into the streets! What will it take to make the people mad and fuel them to action?