Reply to Yanis Varoufakis’ Reply to Chomsky, Fuentes & McPherson Debate on Abrupt Climate Change.
With all due respect to a fellow Greek, progressive and leftist, Mr. Yanis Varoufakis, whom I have consistently found as a voice of reason in a world where such voices are dwindling and/or being silenced, I must disagree (perhaps for the first time!) with his opinions in his full piece which is here.
Mr. Varoufakis writes, “As I was reading Miguel Fuentes’s and Guy McPherson’s rejoinders to Noam Chomsky, I was struck and concerned by their embrace of defeat. Sure enough, I understand their radical rejection of baseless optimism and of those who treat ecological disaster as a technical problem.”
“Even if it is too late, at least let’s go out with a revolutionary bang. Let the last feeling we have be that we did what we could, albeit belatedly. To accomplish this, we must inspire the multitudes to join our rebellion. But to inspire them, we need to articulate a Program that addresses people’s hearts and minds. What should that Program consist of? This is the pressing question..”
“Let me begin with Noam’s position, which I understand intimately having myself been a proponent of a Green New Deal since 2001. A large public investment in humanity’s green transition (Noam suggested 2%-3% of global GDP, I raise this to at least 5%) can make a decisive dent in our collective carbon footprint. Public financial instruments can be constructed to mobilise these funds globally.”
Varoufakis takes issue with Fuentes and McPherson and concludes the following, “-it would be a terrible defeat for progressives to dismiss the capacity of science, technology, and public finance to be part of a Program that succeeds in saving humanity and the planet. Giving up on humanity and its collective ingenuity may be tempting in times like the present, when war is once more turbocharging the fossil fuel industry. Alas, such defeatism is impermissible for progressives. This, our darkest hour, is precisely the time when we, progressives, radicals and revolutionaries, must give back rational hope to those who have been deprived of it.”
The debate is linked below.
https://metacpc.org/en/climate-catastrophe-collapse/
First of all, it is too late for “rational hope.” Hope being a lie at best and a false prophet at its worst. Rational? Those two words, rational and hope, are as antithetical to each other as oil to water. It’s like asking for a peaceful war, impossible. Chomsky’s suggestion for an economic tax to save the planet was rightly criticized by Fuentes, and for Varoufakis to double down on that disconnect with 5% GDP, as if that will increase our odds of avoiding a dead planet in the very near term, shows how little both of these brilliant men actually understand the crisis we are in.
Let’s be honestly rational. Without the lie of “hope.” To admit the patient is in stage four of an incurable cancer is not defeatist, nor irrational. Professor McPherson has been arguing against the idea of hope since he discovered the predicament of the Aerosol Masking Effect. I know this because I live with him and we work closely on helping people understand the danger of the situation and work towards acceptance. Telling a patient with an incurable disease to have hope is as good as offering thoughts and prayers to parents who lost a child in a school shooting. Allow me to give an analogy to our current situation with two scenarios based on the stage-four, cancer patient:
Scenario 1: I and many others have watched some of our sickened loved ones fail to admit they are dying or even going to die, and who instead of creating an environment of love, comfort, and honesty about their condition, they have waged war on their bodies with experimental treatments, refused to speak honestly with their children about their fears of death, and died miserable, agonizing deaths anyway taking their stories and secrets to their graves without proper closure. My own mother refused to discuss death even as she could barely speak on the phone to me.
In the second scenario, the opposite response comes from people who recognized and embraced, albeit reluctantly (no one wants to die), their imminent fate, and their rational response was to enter hospice care. They surrounded themselves with beauty, good friends, good food, open and honest conversations with their children about death and dying, and strove for quality time rather than quantity time and, of course, as much pain relief as they could bear without being unconscious. Their deaths were still tragic but not miserable and lonely. Stephen Jenkinson worked in hospice for decades and is a wonderful resource on the topic of death and dying with dignity. https://orphanwisdom.com/
The end outcome in both scenarios is death. The difference is in choosing how to die. To choose wisely between these two we need information. What is the nature of the disease? Is there a cure? If so, what are the chances of the cure actually working, and for how long? If there is no cure, how long does one usually survive with this disease? Could there be variations in survivability? What might extend one’s survivability? Is it painful? Is it worth it? Who gets to decide?
On being rational and honest: The current “Green” New Deal is not going to give us the second scenario of hospice, nor will it extend our lives or this beautiful planet’s life. First of all, this “deal” is neither green nor new. It’s just another corporate giveaway. Mining the Earth for its remaining bits of rare Earth minerals to create toxic batteries for a handful of billionaires to sell to us is a terrible idea. Proponents of nuclear and “green” hydrogen are equally deluded for similar reasons. There is no need for me to go into the myriad of statistics on the mining and shipping of Earth’s rare and dangerous ores and the gigatons of fossil fuel required to do so. It’s a zero-sum game. Not to mention the child slave labor used in many of these mining endeavors in other countries, but let’s mention it because child slave labor is antithetical to anything rational, humane, or decent.
Ruining other people’s lives and homes to run our electric cars is just shifting the load from one type of planetary robbery to another. We cannot keep pretending that incremental change is good. And to assume that embracing the fake green new deals dumped on us by corporate shills will somehow shift the people’s consciousness is self-delusion. We are out of time to wait for people to realize that they have been tricked by a psychotic system that robs and murders them and their only home, Earth.
Most importantly, no one is talking about the elephant in the room, the Aerosol Masking Effect (AME), which has wreaked havoc on the planet since the Covid lockdowns. If we stop industrial production we lose the AME and the planet cooks faster and extinction of all life happens very quickly. If we continue industrial production we die a little slower and maybe billionaires will see a windfall profit the next quarter. Tim Garrett, professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Utah writes in 2014 “Theoretical and numerical arguments suggest that when growth rates approach zero, civilization becomes fragile to such externalities as natural disasters, and the risk is for an accelerating collapse.” https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2013EF000171
However, maybe some clever engineer or evolutionary biologist might figure out how to replace the AME with mirrors and that buys us time, the time needed for a revolution of spirit and consciousness, and an evolution of our humanity. Despite the crickets we hear in regards to the AME, there are numerous articles on the AME that go back to 1929. The Aerosol Masking Effect is no laughing matter and even Professor James Hansen has papers on it in 2011 and 2017. I helped Professor Guy McPherson explain the AME for the layperson with this short video, https://youtu.be/SNBpt5IUIMI
- 1929: https://www.jstor.org/stable/519399
- 2001:
- 2002: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/08/020808075457.htm
- 2008: 70,000 death toll in Europe, after switching to nuclear power in 2003, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1631069107003770
- 2011: https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha06510a.html
- 2013: Levy & Horowitz paper on AME magnitude. 32% reduction causes 1c temp rise. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jgrd.50192
- 2017: https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/8/577/2017/
- 2019: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aav0566?intcmp=trendmd-sci
- https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190122104611.htm
- “What they discovered is that the cooling impact of the aerosol particles, much of which is pollution that humans have been pumping into the atmosphere, is nearly twice what scientists previously thought.”https://www.sustainability-times.com/environmental-protection/research-cooling-from-atmospheric-particles-may-mask-greater-warming/
Had anyone with any real power been serious about the “Green New Deal,” the AME would have been the first crisis on the list to address. Without addressing the AME first, nothing else we do will matter. We all know what the “Green” New Deal really is, another giveawy to billionaires and more corporate socialism. We’ve been scammed again and got nothing to show for it. Had our corporate leaders of the world really been serious about saving the planet, they would not have created the political environment that has led to another war among the many continuing resource wars of convenience led by the US. The proxy war in Ukraine now gives rise to conjectures of nuclear winter if nukes are used and the very badly mistaken idea that a nuclear winter might be a good thing on a warming planet. This ludicrous and dangerous idea is all over social media and begs the question, did anyone take any science class in high school at all? Has the memory of Chernobyl-which is in Ukraine, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island been somehow washed from most people’s memories?
Cooling our planet with deadly ionizing radiation is like sticking your head in a gas oven to warm up on a winter day. Don’t do it. You’re gonna regret it.
Let’s go back to the stage four cancer scenarios. People in hospice have not given up, they are not defeatist, nor are they doomists. Their lives have reached a crossroad and the reality of it has not escaped them. The young man I knew who had a new wife, a new child, a budding career and an ALS diagnosis did not give up when he realized there was no cure. Instead he championed for a better quality of life for other sufferers of ALS. He championed for funding for research into a cure. In his final months he confessed that he felt more enlightened by his situation and even happy despite the tragic nature of the disease. Behind the scenes he had made a difference in people’s lives and raised awareness so that more funding went into research. When he died no one called him a failure for embracing the reality of his condition. He died a hero even though he never believed there would be a cure in time for him or perhaps anyone.
Our planet is dying. When the oceans go, we go. When there is not enough habitat to grow grains at scale, we go. Not if but when industrial civilization collapses abruptly, we then lose the AME, and then we lose habitat. There are nearly 70 self-reinforcing feedback loops that have already been triggered that lead to extinction of all life on Earth. We have been in the 6th, or 7th, or 8th Mass Extinction Event for a few decades. It’s not a good prognosis, dear patient. We might be able to buy us some time to become better people, smarter people, actually wise apes as we deign to call ourselves. However, if we keep blowing up each other, and focusing on only the economics of every planetary resource including our own ability to be creative, we will never get out of our own way long enough to wonder if something as simple and inexpensive as mirrors might have been the answer, or at least a stop gap to finding a long term solution to our diseased societal system and malfunctioning climate.
Right now, Dr. Ye Tao of MEER.org is trying desperately to find funding for one of the most realistic, simple ideas to cool the planet quickly as civilization collapses. He doesn’t even need millions of dollars, but not a single billionaire has stepped up to the plate to offer a hand. Instead we hear billionaires’ monologues about buying Twitter, or shooting cars into space, or rockets to the Moon or Mars, and such nonsensical waste of planetary resources and human ingenuity when everything, every living thing is on the line on Earth. We should all be supporting this simple engineering idea. Most of us are not scientists or engineers, but that doesnt’ mean we can’t support them and champion their research to save the planet. We non-scientists can also be working towards creating a more just society, even if we only have a handful of years or months left. Right action is always right. Planetary hospice means housing the homeless, sharing food and palliative medicine equally, ending all the resource wars, giving all people a basic income, legalizing personal euthanasia, helping people prevent and/or terminate pregancies on demand with no exceptions, and many more palliative sources of care as we prepare to exit. Of course our leaders won’t do any of that. It would be admitting to decades of corruption, lies, failures, and self serving greed to now tell people they are about to go extinct along with the Dodo bird, dinosaurs, passenger pigeon, as well as seven or more species of humans before us. For the handful of us who do know, and still try to live with grace, decency and beauty, while supporting the research of a tiny handful of scientists and engineers who bravely tell the truth and search for answers, Planetary Hospice is how we live each day. We rationally gave up on the hope that politicians would solve this and embraced the truth that at the edge of extinction only love remains, if you choose it. Being alive and fully present in reality is truly one of the most non-defeatist acts a human can do. It is true freedom and as Mr. Varoufakis entreats us to achieve, “Even if it is too late, at least let’s go out with a revolutionary bang. Let the last feeling we have be that we did what we could, albeit belatedly. “