Since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, man-made carbon emissions have risen steadily, dipping slightly in economic recession to resume as Gros World Product continues to expand.
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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has achieved nothing. In truth, it has achieved almost universal complacency that something is being done at the highest level. Targets are very useful for the complacent. They mean we can change tomorrow – not today.
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Meanwhile, democratically-elected governments focus on expanding their Gros Domestic Products as a measure for the success of their governance. GDP and climate heating follow identical trajectories on a graph. They are cause and effect.
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Today, for all the climate targets of the past, the moment has finally arrived – the terrible moment, when all targets have become too late. Action by governments, corporations and citizens, must be instant. Otherwise, humanity’s brief four thousand years or so of agricultural settlements is certain to come to a horrible end. Readers may be surprised that modern cultures – cities, towns, roads and railways – are agricultures. They shouldn’t be surprised.
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Yet still, nearly everybody says – This is too big for me. I must lobby corporations and governments. I must earnestly study the latest IPCC document about how we might change tomorrow. Then I must mention it to my friends, while wisely casting my vote in the ballot.
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Dear Everybody, it is too late for that. Faith in national and international institutions, commercial corporations and NGOs has pushed us to defer personal responsibility from ourselves to others.
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Yet how do those others exist? – By ourselves – by our purchases, donations and democratic requests. In short, we pretended to buy redemption. Instead, we bought cascading ecologies on which we all depend and catastrophic climate heating. We created the monster. Now we attempt to negotiate with it. Instead, why not de-create it – stop the purchases, donations and democratic requests. Instead, we can buy and sell between ourselves – butcher, baker, candlestick maker… We can think for ourselves, rather than through the conduit of a favourite NGO. We can begin a new political process. Of course, all those actions can only be done in transition from one place to another. Even so we must immediately make a start. We’ll make mistakes, but mistakes are where new truth is revealed.
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This is not too big for me. On the contrary, it is too big for governments, political parties, corporations and NGOs. We created all those things – those abstract ideas – and we created the physics of catastrophe. Abstractions such as governments and corporations can cause nothing, but through the physics of me. Yet our subscription-touting NGO send an endless flow of emails bosting of their expertise, requesting more money and saying not a word of our personal ways of life.
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NGOs and political parties argue about targets. They speak of the future, but the future does not exist. All we can know of the future, is that it is created by the present. The present makes the future, whichever way we choose. Zero carbon by 2030, or 2045 is a distraction from our almost universal moral failure to act as the times demand – that is, immediately.
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Unilateral action is all we have remaining. We can hope that others do the same, so that it becomes multilateral. But to negotiate multilateral agreement before we personally agree to act is suicide. Just as multilateral nuclear disarmament has led to the opposite, so it is on climate heating. The above is applicable to citizens, parishes, national governments and trade blocks, such as the EEU.
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I find it tragic that nearly all my friends, just about every left-leaning, or “environment-leaning” NGO and even the UK Green Party prefer to lobby from a multilateral “position of strength”. Strength itself is a problem, when every answer to the hubris of the times should be towards weakness – the utter dependence of the species on all the other species; the dependence of ourselves, on others. That essential new vision is also an old one, which is quite fitting for the flow of 1,500 years of UK cultures – has no one read of Christianity? We don’t need to be Christian to understand the truths it contains, or the ways it is woven into modern understanding. As an atheist myself, and one with a tendency to ancestor worship – the flow of inherited and bequeathed commons – I can also see that the best of Christianity (not the worst) has nurtured that flow – in sacred springs, local saints/ancestors – in the common follies of being human.
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Such a common ethics can guide personal change, while at the same time stimulating multilateral change by a shear mass of people – accumulating one by one.
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So called, unilateral change works right through the system. Personal change becomes simpler, when we are disentangled from the lives of others. Parish changes become simpler, when it is disentangled from government restrictions and advise. Government change becomes simpler, when disentangled from international agreements. In other words, change can be far more rapid when we act alone and others act alone also. Of course, all those things are tangled anyway from personal to government entanglements – we are obliged, concerned, contracted… So, what do I mean?
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This may seem to be high falutin’ or deliberately obscure, but this is what I mean – To consider our next footstep, we consult inner moral commons and shrug off the obfuscation of the enclosures – the trade agreements and so on. Thus, we remain entangled at the deepest level, but are disentangled at the ephemeral level. That deep entanglement can be contagious, because everyone is a part.
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If the UK government disarmed its nuclear arsenal, other governments would be more inclined to follow suit. It is a moral act and we all have morals.
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If the UK government decided to act on climate change by (as it must to succeed) nationalising or severely regulating the adverse behaviours of corporations, banks and profligate citizens – and by creating avenues in which citizens could participate, then other governments would be more likely to follow suit.
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We’ve seen how international climate agreements have led to increasing carbon emissions (the evidence is irrefutable). Less obvious to most, the EEU’s introduction of negotiated environmental and consumer protections has, in the same way, led to increasing emissions, increasing corporate power and increasing consumer dependency on that power.
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It is plain that to act quickly to limit environmental degradation and to reduce carbon emissions, UK must act independently of the EU, just as UK citizens must act independently of UK government. It is certain that the EU would vigorously oppose actions by its member states, which undermined its consumer/corporate contract by applying protectionist measures. In truth, any attempts to shrink national GDP, would also shrink the money flow of the Euro and so also the power of the EU. EU is obliged, by contract, to oppose the common good.
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Remember, we seek weakness not power – by shrinking our effects into just a part of the whole of every species under the sun. We must learn to be fitting. No one can do that for us. How do we join the evolving flow of common humanity, while shrugging off the ephemeral madness of the times? For that, only my reader can know. The moral is universal, but the physics of life is specific in all its parts and is peculiar to every one of us in particular ways.
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