For zero cultural CO.2 emissions, plainly we must change the culture. I’d say, we must evacuate the culture and occupy another, so that human causes sit inside a ration of Earth. It is futile to think we can electrify what we have. What we have is no longer possible. It never was possible. We’ve lived a lie – a vicious lie. Few of us want to be vicious. Well, let’s evacuate and be what makes us happy – to be kind.
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To live within our ration, we must also abandon those parasitic hierarchies, which prey on balanced and circular economic activity – rent for enclosures of money as property (usury), land as property (rent) and status as property (rent for professional status in law, medicine, architecture, planning…) Without that abandonment, we’ll not live within our earthly means. We must pillage to pay rent.
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Coronavirus has forced some steps towards living within our ration, suspending some of the parasitism listed above. And, we’ve seen banking and aviation teetering on the brink of collapse. If we are to stay within two degrees of warming, we’ve only fifteen years to plan their demise. Is that possible? It is not likely – near impossible. Collapse is the miracle we need – the only practical solution. To live a good and kindly life, we must pray for the miracle. Remember, two degrees of warming will still be highly unpleasant. It means the flooding of coastal and island communities – violent storms, terrible droughts…
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The tragedy of casino collapse, means that people may come together to build their own economy on solid ground. By casino, I mean usury, currency manipulation, trading of stocks, bonds and shares and the gambling on rising rents. Those rents are extracted from wealth gained by true economic activity. Most powerful politicians, journalists and “business” people today, belong, not in the economy, but in that casino. To be plain, they have no sense of reality, levitated as they are on an upward flow of money from the real economy, which they predate.
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In my dream, the ethics of home and family – the fair rationing of land, food, things, chores and pleasures, become the model for a renewed economy – the good housekeeping of every trade and governance. It means the return of the common and the end of enclosure. It is a very strong dream, because I think nearly everyone has dreamed it – as Rob Hopkins says, what if?… It has recurred throughout history and in every place, but it has been almost universally supressed from reality. Today, if it does not become reality, then two degrees of warming will very swiftly become four and it will be sans dreams, sans history, sans future, sans everything. Remember, we’ve only fifteen years to shrug off the parasitism and to live within our physical means.
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Coronavirus illuminates both the possible and the likely. They are far from the same. I’ll not hide it. My heart is breaking. Here in the UK, many people are behaving very badly indeed – fighting over what seems, in the end, most precious to them – toilet rolls. Government looks likely to behave very badly indeed by pouring billions into airlines, corporations and banks. Toilet roll manufacturers have done quite well and have asked for no support. It seems everyone needs their suicidal way of life, fearing the virus and its effects, but having a kind of hysterical, psychotic forgetting of the utter terror they will cause, only a few decades away. It is not lack of education. The major causers of climate heating are the climate-educated middle class and the rich. In that category, I include every jet-setting climate activist, and every “climate scientist” who has attended any Earth Summit, since 1990. Plainly, they’ve not changed a thing. Surely, they must also own large stashes of casino money, to afford both those fights and the leisure to make them. They are rather like those New Labour politicians, who have destroyed the Labour Party with the backing of Mr Rupert Murdoch. The consensus of IPCC is to green the status quo with the backing of “industry”.
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But many other people in the UK are behaving very well, devising networks of support – that is living a good life by their “family values” – acting out commons of good and kindly behaviour – without support from government, corporation, or bank.
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What if…? – instead of massive gifts of money for suicide, authorities put the same (I think much less would do) into the inherited skill, ingenuity, dexterity and moral probity of communities, so that what is parasitic on those things would collapse and something beautiful, true and appropriate could emerge from beneath the ashes?
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Coronavirus has forced some governments to do just that – suspending parasitic activity (rent, mortgage and so on) and providing cash for those who must isolate from their work places.
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In developed economies, most manufacturing is destructive and useless. Most travel is destructive and useless. Most “economic” activity is destructive and useless. What if…? – we decided to live good, happy and kindly lives together. It is a very, very powerful and also a very ancient dream and it is, yearningly – just faintly stirring – a possibility. But first, we must actively choose “economic” – that is, total casino collapse – total collapse of the ways we developed and so-called, educated people live today. Viewed from a passing satellite nothing much will have changed. Fields, woods and the solid infrastructures of towns, roads, harbours, bridges… will all remain untouched – awaiting occupation. At night, many pinpricks of light will be quenched and at day those vapour trails, which were once teased out by the wind into semblance of cirrus clouds – will be gone.
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