I have little doubt that a dozen-million people across the world joined in tears of shared grief and anger last night. The video of Greta Thunberg shouting at the assembled United Nations, crying out “how dare you”, red-faced and tearful, her young face full of forceful admonition, has been shared and re-shared towards infinity on-line.

The machismo-charged male-supremacist right-wing commentators were quick to dismiss the over-emotionality of this girl-child. And in any case, she has, they suggest, a mental health condition. Consequently, there was little mainstream coverage of what she said, just how she said it. 

The published photos of her glaring in anger at President Trump as he walked past her without acknowledgement were designed more to portray his power than hers. Trump later tweeted, “She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!” It’s called “taking the piss”.

Trump has shown him himself so many times to shed no tears for human suffering, and sees crying as a weakness rather than a re-energising release essential for survival. He considers children to be without understanding and therefore to be told and controlled, and women to be, in any case, too emotional to make the difficult decisions. And his type rule the world.

For those of us – we, the many – who are clear about the threat of catastrophe and extinction, it is vital we act as our own media, manage our own communication, and keep getting the message out “from below”:

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”

Here, she emphasised the climate science, the incredible speed of species extinction and the loss of human habitats alongside the animals. But this was an attack on the System without calling it out. Indeed, Greta offered an olive branch:

“You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.”

Sorry Greta, I don’t. In an apparently unconnected report published yesterday, equally naive in it’s observations, it was reported that the richest 5-10% of the global population share an all-but total lack of social obligation and an ignorance of the most simple realities of human life. In short, they don’t care about the poorest 90% of the world’s population even if they have ever casually glanced our way.

I am reminded of a much earlier report from the Joseph Rowntree Trust, which used an analogy to portray the results of a discursive inquiry where children from the entire span of social classes and conditions were interviewed. They concluded that, if you perceived the richest child to stand at the North Pole and the poorest at the South Pole, and then looked at the lives of those at the two tropics – Capricorn and Cancer – the children there experience no shared social characteristics.

Even the moderately rich and moderately poor live to very separate cultural norms, speak impenetrably different languages, conceive of the world in thoroughly separate ways and, of course, share no possible life-chances and outcomes (peers will even die 20 years or more apart). 

The rich live in a wholly different World from the poor. This is a cultural apartheid maintained by income and spending power. Capitalism has not only caused a metabolic rift between humanity and the natural world, it has created an emotional rift, nay gulf, that cannot be crossed. Humanity has been torn apart.

If it were the case that Greta Thunberg was calling upon the good will and empathy of the rich and powerful to do right by the poor, she’s championing a hopeless cause. I suspect she knows. Her speech contained a veiled threat: 

“You are still not mature enough to tell it like it is. You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal.”

Thunberg and groups like Extinction Rebellion hold a position that says we are not responsible for determining exactly how to prevent the catastrophe, we are simply going to act to ensure those with the power and wealth in society stand-up and take the action required. In essence, they are not evil, just complacent. They must be convinced.

I am convinced this will never happen. The ruling class may or may not be Evil (I find the term metaphysical and undefinable). In the material world of human society, it is the system of Capitalism that causes the alienation, competition and class warfare that damns both the environment and the People.

To that extent, Greta missed the point. It is the System that needs to be called-out and replaced, not just those who manage it.

Tuesday 24th September 2019

Yesterday I was guest speaker at the Penzance Peace Festival. It was World Peace Day, although few in the media noticed. It was a drizzly, grey-weather day. Despite the clouds, people were buoyed-up following a strong Climate March through the City centre the day before, and some very excellent live music all afternoon. Energy and enthusiasm for building a fresh anti-war movement was everywhere, including renewing the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament across Cornwall. 

CND, 63-years old Peace movement with the emblematic symbol that spans the world, has built a strong alliance with Extinction Rebellion nationally. Indeed, the synthesis between global heating and nuclear proliferation is extremely obvious. Well before the widespread catastrophe at the hands of climate change, there will be widespread war. War over water access, war related to climate migration, and war once again over oil. And the military-industrial complex, both armies in peacetime and war, are extraordinarily prolific emitters of global warming gases. The arms industry is profoundly profitable so long as there are wars to be replenished. 

The current troop deployment by the USA to strengthen Saudi Arabia alongside the counter-statements of preparations for war made by Iran stands testament to the volatility in the Middle East, not withstanding the continued horror and barbarism in Yemen, Syria, Libya and Palestine. And the USA’s withdrawal from nuclear treaties, building a new generation of “tactical nuclear weapons”, shows Trump to be gagging to show to the world the “supremacy” achieved by the mass destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 74 years ago.

Today, Europe’s fortified borders condemn migrants fleeing both climate droughts and war, and small but courageous groups protest against the totalitarian torturers in Egypt. And there is little space here to mention Trump’s alliance with Colombia and Bolsonaro’s Brazil against Venezuela. Of course, this general drive to global warfare is also exemplified by the currently cold economic tensions between the USA and China. 

The general global economic outlook is downwards towards recession. Some in the environment movements welcome this as helpful to our push for a no-growth carbon-neutral economy. On the contrary, the destabilisation caused by economic crisis will not result in the Capitalist System embracing zero-growth – the system that requires competition for accumulation will ensure survival of the fittest through a process of conflict. In such a situation, we must learn lessons from history.

The first victim of any drive to war is Truth. And our protests to prevent global heating, especially the push for “System Change not Climate Change”, will be in the way of the nationalism required for warfare. War requires a unification between the ruling class and working class at home against the “common enemy” abroad. Extinction Rebellion, pin-pointing the political and corporate classes as the drivers of catastrophe will not be acceptable to those driving warfare. We will undoubtedly be condemned as traitors.

Any research into the history of the Vietnam War, the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, the late ‘60s anti-War Movement or the 1980s Blair Government’s propaganda about the invasion of Iraq proves one thing. The Capitalist Governments will conjoin to demonise, isolate and break apart protest at home. This applies right now to the student strikes and environment movement just as certainly as night follows day. If the Establishment cannot combine to coerce and incorporate the Movement, soon it will seek to destroy us.

So how do we win? By numbers. The 3.5  percent that XR originally contrived to be the critical mass needed to win real political change, as suggested by Erica Chenoweth, has been proven as way below what is actually need. 3.5% of the UK population is over 2 million protesters. We had that in 2003 but it didn’t stop the war (although it did dent the subsequent imperialist aspirations of the US and UK governments). We need at least 5 times that amount. 

In my lifetime there have been serious attempts to have far smaller numbers drive major social change through the take-up of arms. It certainly always represented a frustration with the tiny size of revolutionary opposition, and often an elitist disbelief in the ability of the masses to rise-up. For them, instead of revolution fro below, the idea of redistribution of wealth and power by armed insurrection was an answer.

In the late 1960’s, as the Vietnam War became intolerably barbaric to both the civilians of Vietnam and the army grunts of the USA, small groups took-up arms inside the USA against “The Man”. They called themselves “The Weathermen” in reference to the Bod Dylan song. Undoubtedly, seeking to overthrow the most weaponised, nationalistic as well as imperialist State in the history of human society by force of arms was infantile as a strategy. 

Their 100’s of bombings of public buildings across the USA in 1969-70 led to a splitting of the anti-war movement, not a strengthening. It offered President Nixon to warn of anarchy and mindless destruction. In May 1970 the Police shot one dead at Berkeley University’s Peace Park during mass protests. Then the National Guard shot 4 students dead and wounded 9 more at Kent State University. 

College students continued to protest, closing 448 campuses. At Jackson State, an overwhelmingly Black University campus, the militia shot 14, killing two. The racist liar, Nixon, and his Generals called the Peace Protesters “the worst type of people inside the country” and the Establishment gained in popularity. 58% of the country supported the killings, standing together against “The Enemy Within”. 

Whilst the protests continued, and gave rise to the Black Panther Movement which powerfully exposed the racial and class discrimination and oppression in Capitalist society, the State won through. Of course, Nixon was ousted, just as in the UK the Poll Tax riots played a part in the fall of Margaret Thatcher, but the System stayed intact and grew stronger, better educated and updated in how to quell revolt. 

So how do we win? In all these uprisings of mass protest, the element under-used and least mobilised, and once again so obviously missing from the 2003 anti-war movement, was a sufficiency of numbers of trade union and organised workers downing-tools and walking out of work, stopping production and the profits of the bosses responsible for waging the warfare and environmental destruction.

This has to be the lesson for today’s climate movement. That is why many of us are trying to build mass support inside the trade union movement for strike action to force the change needed to prevent climate catastrophe. When workers down-tools, leave their offices, workplaces and factories and congregate en masse all together, there are not enough tanks and guns to drive us down again. We place roses in the barrels of our fellow workers-in-uniform, and seize the forces of production to shut down the emissions and those who profit from destruction. The history of all protest proves that ultimate power lies in the workplace. But for it to work, we need huge numbers, everywhere.

Sunday 22nd September 2019

This morning I was asked on-line how I felt about yesterday. I’m pondering. Intellectually I was stimulated by more than 2,000 mostly young people marching through Plymouth and enacting a die-in near to the Council House – the source of the local political administration. Again, cognitively, I challenged the Labour Party leader of Plymouth City Council – the only speaker to be invited to use the megaphone to the assembled masses – in his claim to support the Climate Emergency whilst calling for the reopening of Plymouth Airport and so adding to the carbon emissions we were all protesting against.

Having distributed all the 1,000 leaflets I had created and printed for the Extinction Rebellion group, and helped with the People’s Assembly process of group discussions on what is to be done, I met in the later afternoon with key local activists for a debrief and short beer in the back garden, and then watched the news, exhausted.

 “We’re so worried about this, we’re even scared to have children…” was the interview with a 15 year old young woman at the London demonstration. And finally my emotions kicked back in. The views of hundreds of thousands into millions of young people demonstrating in 148 countries and seven continents across the world (yes, including Antarctica) made me cry and feel heavy of heart, not elated.

How strange. Perverse? Earlier, in the debrief, a few of us oldies had acknowledged the potential power of the mass and at the same time the scale of the challenge. We recognised, solemnly, that we each had by now undergone a sustained period of mourning for what has already been lost and what is still to go. Perhaps advancing age does indeed allow us to face mortality more honestly. And probably its just as well that the youth cannot. 

The bereavement process enacted by the physical images of climate change as well as the outrageous graphic displays of runaway emissions has informed the emotional intelligence of most activists in Extinction Rebellion. We were organising to stop the barbarism of social and environmental collapse. For most of the youth, shouting “whose streets, our streets, whose planet, our planet” and replying “Rebellion” to the call out of “Extinction”, this was a day of festival and release. A protest for the Planet, but as much an emotional release from the confines of school and college and work and good behaviour.

The Russian revolutionary socialist, Vladimir Lenin, writing in the wake of enormous social protests in 1905, called revolutions the festival of the oppressed and exploited. Yesterday’s protests are a far cry from any revolutionary upsurge, but echoed Lenin’s notion back to me. This was an outcry, the largest global protest against climate change ever, competing with the 2003 anti-War upsurge against the illegal and genocidal invasion of Iraq. The protests should offer an enormous sense of hope.

But I don’t feel that way. It may be resonant with the depression described by rock singers or football players that comes from the excitement of being adored by a stadium crowd only to now be alone in a hotel room. 

As such, I have left a sober evaluation for later. But these large manifestations I have found (and I have been on quite a few) to be a joyous experience only for the energy to evaporate into thin air by the following morning. The evaluation has to ask – what was built out of the event?

The striking students clamoured to be the ones to carry and brandish the “System Change not Climate Change” placards with their sub text of “One Solution – Revolution!”. Whether wittingly or by force of habit, the forces of the status quo – the Police, the local politicians and their cohort committed to winning parliamentary power and influence, the accompanying parents of school children and their teachers – were all there to contain and coral the energy and upset of this new generation. There was to be no question of revolt.

Greta Thunberg, struggling to avoid being the pin-up or stooge for the co-option of the Movement by the very System she has called to be dismantled, has her face across all media this morning. Her original cry that “there can be no more business as a usual” appears to be being co-opted by the Capitalist class and watered-down to a shabby set of pledges by business corporations to “go green” sometime soonish. 

Those who have studied the science know we face a minimum of 3-4 degrees warming, before which time all societal coherence will have been destroyed unless we stop extracting and using fossil fuels now. The accompanying Ecocide, already well-into the 6th Great Extinction, is fast making the world uninhabitable.

It is this “scale”, this magnitude, this all encompassing and fast-approaching Armageddon, that floods my senses and prevents me feeling the joy of yesterday. The millions on the streets did not represent the breakthrough needed for real change. The System that must be changed can easily suck-up, confuse, mitigate, divide and conquer such numbers which, in real terms, amounted to less than one percent of the population of Plymouth, and an infinitesimally smaller proportion of the world’s population. We need so much more.

Lenin, also wrote, “At no other time are the masses of the people in a position to come forward so actively as creators of a new social order as at a time of revolution. At such times the people are capable of performing miracles, if judged by the narrow, philistine scale of gradual progress.” There is a heady resonance from such an ancient observation as the pictures of the masses flood our morning TV screens. But we will need a Lenin’s “miracle”.

With every muscular sinew and clenched emotional determination, we have to build and magnify yesterday’s mass protests. We have yet to activate anything near to the critical mass of human revolt required for the scale of system change essential if we are to prevent extermination. Gramsci, the Italian Revolutionary, in an over-used posthumous quote from his prison cell, mused that revolutionaries have to operate with a combined “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the Will”. And so I will. 

Saturday 21st September 2019

It has been an emotional week. On the grand scale of things, Greta Thunberg addressed the Congress of the USA and dressed them down. At the same time, they accepted a Whitehouse paper blaming Iran for the destruction of two Saudi oil terminals, briefly limiting oil exports. Old allies quickly rallied to support their friends, with the UK Government over-quick to join the clamour for war, or what they term “retaliation”, whilst rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of more arms sales to Saudi Arabia. War is the biggest of all global warming gases.

More locally, the Labour Leader of Plymouth City Council, the viciously anti-Corbynite career politician, Tudor Evans, announced his support for the reopening of the Plymouth Airport, heralding the increase in aviation and its associated carbon emissions at the same time as speaking on platforms applauding the school students and declaring Climate Emergency. More planes. Such hypocrisy can only mean there’s a General Election in the offing, requiring those seeking personal power to face both ways at once.

Against his tide, we are all hectically building tomorrow’s Climate Strikes, holding meetings, leafleting workplaces and publishing like mad in print and SNS. This morning our focus was an old workplace of mine, full-up with the high-paid managers of health and social care in the City. Workers I had once hot-desked alongside told me the stark horrors of desperately eroded services for child protection, the threshold for services now absurdly high and the rate of referrals of adolescent self-harming sky-rocketed. There are no therapeutic services for self-harming or most other indicators of mental distress.

Two headteachers arriving for a high-class, highbrow, self-congratulatory meeting told my co-protagonist in no uncertain terms that we had all the science wrong. There is no emergency, the climate is fine and they are restricting environmental activities and learning in their schools to reducing plastic littering. Apparently, we were at liberty to believe whatever we liked but we were wrong. Plain wrong.

When I learnt at the weekend that some schools in Plymouth were establishing what they euphemistically terms “lock-downs” to prevent children leaving the premises (legally questionable it must be said), and even more threatening exclusion or even expulsion should students take part in the School Strikes, I penned a fuming screed fast and furiously to the local paper (see below). Children’s Rights appear to no longer exist.

I had previously written to Devon County Council, by way of a heads-up. They were spending £250k on a new team to manage preparations and adaptations for the Climate Emergency stated by the Councillors. There were to be special committees linking together most departments into a strategic plan of action to manage the social impacts of extreme weather, food shortages, power cuts and social unrest, but the Plan did not include direct links to those services (now outsourced and neo-privatised) responsible for safeguarding children or adults. The catastrophe will not be responded to with care, but control.

Most others who bothered to stop this morning to receive a leaflet flipped through their car window, their new cars nevertheless guzzling gas and spewing emissions, saying they had heard nothing of the student strikes and weren’t interested. More than a few said they did not have children themselves so wouldn’t know. These, for the record, were the very same people who make the policies and produce the services to all children in Plymouth. Yet, apparently, children’s concerns about future social breakdown were not on their radar, nor of interest to them.

By the end of leafleting this morning it had dawned on we precious-few leafleteers, whilst we had woken too early on too many occasions to leaflet the City, and bedded-down far too late at night after desk-top publishing and printing, that only a tiny handful of the population were aware of tomorrow’s Global Earth Strike, and few of those were ready to take part. 

We have had a few hundred school children actively engage with the previous actions, out of a City population of 48,000. Tomorrow, we hope, up to a thousand people of all ages will protest in Plymouth City Centre, and we will engage a new cohort of University under-grads and Primary School placarders into our Cause. Most importantly we will, by sheer effort, have wedged a foot in the door of the trade unions with the potential to activate five-and-a-half million workers.

The issue here is scale. The sheer magnitude of the task. The World will come to an end with a significant proportion of the human population denying its coming as they gasp their last. We can only persist in seeking to activate a sufficient number on the other side – tens of millions in every country – to produce the critical mass needed to overcome the stuffed-up anti-science prejudices and hubris of the narcissistic deniers, and save the Earth.

We have a world to win, but will have to wrench it forcibly from the rapacious cupidity of the powerful and their over-pampered bureaucratic courtiers. But right now, I’m off to mend the megaphone!

18th September 2019

The Capital of Indonesia, Jakarta, is at imminent threat of devastation from rising sea levels and extreme weather events. So much so that the nation is naming another, inland city as its capital and making plans to relocate fifteen million people away from Jakarta. It took time for me to fully appreciate this fact. This is 2019. Climate Change is with us, not some distant prediction.

Greta Thunberg spoke on USA TV last night, watched by millions, and observed that in America the issue of Climate Change is something people either choose to believe or not. In Sweden, it’s a question of science and fact. But even if you don’t read the science, the images from the Bahamas or the Amazon or Indonesia cannot fail to offer a sense of something different, something happening, something powerful.

The real problem is the failure of the politicians and their media empires to tell us the facts or anything approximating to the Truth. The IPCC offers the most conservative of estimates, excluding impacts of feedback loops and other phenomena that accelerate the warming impacts (they’re quick to note the aspects of climate that may de-escalate the process). The Committee on Climate Change, the adviser to Government in the UK, chooses to carefully downplay the IPCC report, reducing its concerns to the practical aspects of adaptation rather than prevention:

“…the UK needs to reduce food waste, promote healthy diets, use land sustainably, and improve the condition of habitats; including planting more trees and restoring degraded soils. All of these steps will help to improve people’s lives, improve resilience to climate change and reduce the harmful emissions which cause climate change.” 

And so the media focuses on reducing use of plastics (a singular bi-product of oil) and encouraging us to eat less meat. Their suggestions are fine but won’t stop the catastrophe. This is not so much a lobby group, it’s “independent status” particularly suspect from the start, but a propagandist for business almost as usual.

The CCC is quoted at the very start of the Trade Union Congress resolution this week, calling for a Just Transition to carbon neutral economy by 2050. One conservative summation of the science after another ends up being so weak and distorted as to effectively prevent any action of the scale required to prevent the catastrophe.

The question raised again and again is, exactly what does the Establishment, the Capitalist class, their governments and media propagandisers, intend to happen as cities are flooded, food shortages intensify, viruses spread as pandemics, droughts spark water wars and hundreds of millions migrate toward razor-wire fences and mass internment camps?

Many of us, having leaflets the local factory or office, attended the weekly organising meeting, smiled back at rabid abuse hosted towards our street stalls, or finished a little gardening to escape the anxiety-inducing news broadcasts, sit and ponder the global state of ruling class intransigence. They can’t possibly “believe” that they can survive where billions cannot. Can they?

The accumulation of unconscionable wealth in the hands of the very, very few has escalated unimaginably in the last few decades. Is that a symbol of some level of preparation by the rich and powerful for them to afford safe places, sheltered habitats, guarded living space behind high walls in which their families “ride-out” an almost unimaginable holocaust of most of humanity and current life on Earth? 

It is possible. Theirs is a belief in their System (from which they have profited so well). They may feel it impossible to contemplate not only their own demise but that of the world they rule, the power they sense and impose on others. Belief is fed by emotion and feeds back into our senses as a loop. It may well be that the Capitalists are no more able to honestly face the Truth and contemplate societal breakdown than the rest of us. Or maybe, just maybe, that’s what they want. A mass cull of the unprofitable poor of the world. But that’s for another Blog.

Friday 13th September 2019

I am overjoyed and angry at the same time. The Trades Union Congress of the UK agreed unanimously yesterday to support the school student strikes on Friday 20th September and to campaign for a Just Transition to Green Jobs. Oh Joy! And then, they add that the UK should become carbon neutral by 2050 – more than 20 years further on than the IPCC’s conclusion that we have less than 12 years to do so. How bloody stupid!

It’s a step forward but not the strident pace, nay the sprint, that is essential for survival. The denial of the emergency, whilst stating this is an emergency, is mind boggling. My experience of attempting to achieve policy changes in two trades unions over 25 years is one of denial: physical denial of the space requested to discuss the facts, and denial by workers in the carbon industries of the need to change.

The worst case scenario offered by scientists is the extinction of human life within the next 80 years. In Health & Safety planning, reduction of hazards begins with the consideration of worst case scenario and working back from that to determine what has to be done. Trade unions invest a great deal of their collective power into health and safety issues in order to force better working conditions, yet when it comes to the potential of human extinction, they deny this tried and tested process. 

It may be that it’s too painful to face-up to the facts. The System based upon debt also ties workers into the surety of pay today over the surety of a catastrophic collapse tomorrow. Human beings are not good at dealing with a crisis until it is upon us. Cognitive change is not the issue. You’re not going to change unless you’re emotionally engaged! The thought of voluntarily ending your well-paid job working on an oil rig, or in the highly-technical munitions industry, or even if only reasonably paid in a car plant, requires a clear vision of the future that admits the need to change.

The trade unions also defend today’s status quo rather than take risks. When, at a national policy conference, I moved a motion arguing for Unite the Union to not support the replacement programme for Trident nuclear weapons, the entire membership in the nuclear industries threatened the General Secretary that they would move on block to another union (the GMB) if the policy was passed. Needless to say, the unions income and power derived from its membership inside the military industries over-ruled any argument that £200billion could be better spent.

The same occurred inside the climate debates. The competition between different unions panders to the “Now” of workers’ consciousness rather than their future best interests. Collapsing the car industry in favour of wind turbine production isn’t a winner at the moment. This may be because the leadership is not sufficiently engaged with the scientific predictions of the near future, although heaven knows we’ve tried to tell them. They may also have more than a passing personal interest in supporting the bosses and their profits in order to show they are a safe pair of hands in co-managing the workforce. It all adds up to denial of the facts.

And those of us who have faced the catastrophe have to deny the denial.

When asked about the emotional resistance to considering the possibility of climate catastrophe, Roger Hallam of Extinction Rebellion recognises that “The World isn’t simply materialist, it is also psychological and emotional…”. He speaks of the traditionally defensive protests of the Left in which we seek to hold the political space against attack. The defensive posture has usually failed and is likely to fail. His proposed tactic is to throw ourselves at the space, get battered or arrested in huge numbers, and effectively expose the repression and invalidity of the State’s response to protest. 

The barrier to accepting the science is a social addiction problem. 50 years of fossil fuel-enabled technology has created an emotional as well as material dependency on the stuff we have now. Suffering from dependency requires, firstly, the acknowledgement of the dependency and then a discussion about what to do about it, and finally the liberation from the dependency whilst recognising the danger of slipping-back into it unless we maintain personal vigilance and internal emotional management.

Jem Bendell writes of this as Deep Adaptation. It is necessary to face the addiction head on. The analogy works: a collective withdrawal from dependency; the necessary “cold turkey” of pain of recognition of the loss; and the straight-spined determination to behave in new ways and walk the talk.

We are on the verge of inevitable social collapse and most of us will be living into this era. Accelerated heating, global dimming and feedback loops mean that even if all carbon emissions are stopped today the heating will carry-on up, certainly up-and-over over 2 degrees and probably 3. The environment will suffer the impacts of the poison for decades to come even if humans stop our emissions right now.

The trade union Unite was able to win a policy yesterday with the hopeless target of 2050 because their leadership and the politicians have denied the facts. The locked-in temperature increase is defined yet excluded from the Paris Agreement and IPCC Reports. Is this the most deadly act of denial or the addicts’ condition prior to acceptance? Do we really have to hit rock bottom before accepting our perilous state? The emotional call for action against catastrophe, to stop the apocalypse, can be motivational or disarming. Were it a personal diagnosis of cancer we would have the choice of taking the medicine or letting nature take its course. It’s unlikely that we’d just take an Aspirin and carry on. Given the probability of deterioration towards extinction, why not act now, and act to survive? The longer the wait for treatment, the worse the prognosis. 

Perhaps, yesterday, the unions at least began to accept the need for a change of diet. But the resolution was still a mañana moment. Let’s talk about abstention from fossil fuels some other time. Yes, human beings are not good at dealing with a crisis until it is upon us. And yes, cognitive change is not the issue. We’re not going to change unless we’re emotionally engaged! Mourn now for the conditions we are living through in the 6th Great Extinction. Grieve for the loss of habitats. Accept the advance of the crisis that will most certainly burst through our front doors very soon. And make the change required, now. Above all, Deny the Denial.

Wednesday 11th September 2019

The economics of complacency

Complacency is an emotional condition. Those with are always scared of being without. Such fear demotivates. And so we choose not to think about it. Someone else will deal with the threats to life, we have more than enough to cope with in getting to work each day. Until, out of the grey, they the job no longer exists and no-one comes to help. 

How many people routinely consider the state of the economy? Or properly understand it. Politicians often, and falsely, compare national economics to household budgeting. In reality there is no comparison – families can’t print money or determine wage-rates, governments can. And we live so far apart from those who govern us.

Other theorists create analogies between societal economies and the human body, yet again there is no comparison. A society has no heart, a stock exchange is a gambling casino not a liver, and a government is not a brain. The System is made and sustained by people living in an environment that sustains them, or doesn’t.

Society is comprised of millions of complex human organisms, co-operating or competing and at all times struggling to interpret and manage the sensations of the world around us. And at all times we are only semi-autonomous at best. 

We are wholly reliant upon each other, our social organisation, the collective whole, including Nature. Economists attempt to make some sense of this matrix of human interactions.

So does social psychology, recognising that all our behaviours influence the behaviour of all others. At the level of the individual, the emotion influences the intellect and the intellect the emotions. And all behaviour can be understood as the result of the interaction between intellect and emotion – at base, the dual-drive for identity and survival, as a person and as a group.

We struggle constantly with the challenge of valuing ourselves and others, and the interaction required to maintain our needs and feed our desires. Sufficiently loved, fed and housed we seek to conserve, hold on to what we’ve got, and so invest in the status quo. Change becomes a threat, comfort the bulwark to hide behind.

Human maturity can be defined as the growing acknowledgment of our own tendencies and triggers, and the effective management of both in order to function. To do so we have to be in touch with ourselves, to be honest about our faults and fears as well as our strengths and beauty. Some have labelled this as emotional intelligence.

Humans have a narcissistic capacity, especially so when encouraged in a society based upon individualism and competition. Some wallow in our own emotionality and see ourselves as the centre of our own universe, separating ourselves from others. This ego-centricity serves to not have to worry about how we’re seen by others, or how we behave towards them. 

Conversely, many espouse the dominance of the intellect and distinguish ourselves as having greater knowledge and understanding, feeling and behaving as superior to others and of being a member of an under-recognised elite. This ego-centricity imposes and seeks to dominate others.

Through both or either tendency we are alienated from others. We are also in a constant state of self-delusion. Little wonder. The illusion spun by the current individualist industry selling notions of emotional intelligence is their offer of “feelings’ as the panacea for a better life. “Listen to your gut instinct.” 

Experience will prove that the human can no more trust her or his emotions than we can trust our intellect. Knowledge changes over time, and emotions swell and dive minute by minute. A mature and independent approach is to check out our emotions through exercising knowledge, and check out our intellect by engaging our senses. Such an approach minimises complacency, for sure.

In so far as we are products of our history and environment (and we feel as well as know this to be probably true), our own behaviour is a reflection of society at large. The Capitalist System in which we all live portrays itself as rational, always seeking to be more efficient, demanding of us ever-better time-management, proscribed behaviour and objectivity over emotionality. 

In reality, Capitalism operates in exactly the opposite way – anarchic, reactive, unplanned and compulsive. It’s little wonder than many of us mirror the dysfunctional chaos of the System in our personal lives. 

Little wonder, also, that we are in a state of near-denial about the threat from global heating. For a start we have been corralled into living in our own tiny privatised worlds. And secondly we have hardly any say in our wider society. Those who have real influence over the economy – the global Capitalist class – are ploughing forward with the carbon economy and it’s emissions in complete denial of the very obvious sensations of global heating all around us.  

In response, we continue to seek employment by them to earn a wage in order to consume and derive a modicum of pleasure from life. The society in which we live appears oblivious to the coming catastrophe and therefore so do we. 

In our condition of assumed powerlessness, and despite all the scientific evidence and the nagging anxiety of an uncertain future, most choose to deny the peril of global heating.

It is self-evident, both emotionally and intellectually, that the longer we live in a condition of denial, the harder the crash when reality finally hits us. The global economy is slowing and many countries, including the UK, are sliding into a recession probably more painful than in 2008. In addition, the environment is weakening far faster than predicted, with food harvests declining rapidly due to extreme weather events, insect extinction and the changing climate. Drinkable water, the stuff of life, is already a luxury for billions of people. 

The responsibility for this is not equally shared. The global economy is run by, and has been created to benefit, a super-rich tiny elite who exert all-but total power-and-control over the vast majority of humanity. They manage us as their “subjects”, and pacify and infantilise us by distributing a heady mixture of fear and its antidote of opiates. The general complacency is the result of alienation, not choice.

Had the majority been empowered to create a society from scratch, few if any would have designed Capitalism. When we open our eyes, this dehumanised, environmentally destructive and emotionally distorting system of capitalist greed, private accumulation at the expense of others, alongside the wanton destruction of the natural world doesn’t feel right and makes no sense. 

It’s time to seek human maturity, to get back in touch with ourselves and manage our tendencies of complacency and narcissism. We must stop being economical with the Truth. We must get a grip of our emotions. We must demand true suffrage and self-determination. Crucially, if we are to prevent human extinction we have to understand the need for system change, and replace Capitalism. It’s time to come to our senses.

Sunday 8th September 2019

Carbon use has risen by 60% since 1990. This stands in sharp contrast to the majority view of climate scientists stating that we need to end global heating emissions and become carbon-neutral by 2025. How certain is this? In a recent interview with a right wing podcaster (Mallen Baker, a Corporate adviser to big business: https://Malle Baker.net/podcast), Roger Hallam of Extinction Rebellion explained he is influenced by complexity theory – a model suggesting that the construction of the future is complex and cannot be wholly predicted.

Indeed, we cannot say with a certainty that we are correct about climate change, and we don’t need to. The science is probe-able. We can do no more than delve deep into the gathered scientific facts in order to develop a probability analysis based upon current evidence. Compile the data. The context of probability offers human beings a collective assertion of emotional humility in which we don’t have to be certain to be potentially correct. There are no absolutes. 

The scientific facts detail that extinction within our lifetimes is a real possibility. Even if, as in the most conservative of estimates, only half a billion people die prematurely as a result of climate change within the next 50 years, the emotional impact upon those who remain will be socially destructive. 

The precautionary principle suggests we should act as if extinction is likely in order to stop it from happening. If the science says you’re likely to die, the debate is not over the probability but over the action required to lessen the potential. To do so, and in defiance of any scepticism, there will have to be a fundamental change in the way the System works and society manages itself, just in case.

This raises the probability of authoritarian state control in the coming period of deep crisis. How else, for example, will the majority of humans be convinced to give-up their private cars and the diesel-lorried goods filling-up supermarkets with seasonless nibbles? How do we end all notions of continuous growth and development? How do we consent to become carbon-neutral by 2025 – the probable date of no-return? 

Top-down governments have never been particularly sensitive to environmental concerns and will probably lead the descent into barbarism rather than prevent it. Absolute power in individual hands will determine who’s to live and who’s to die. Wealth and influence will dominate survival. Even Hallam admits that Right-wing politicians usually put the ideology of individualism in front of the facts.

The issue of consent is therefore important in this process of major social and economic change. How the majority of the People can be convinced remains the issue. Hallam is convinced that peers can convince their peers. So people like you convince people like you. Hence we need ordinary people randomly picked from across the political spectrum to share with those they know the understanding and information received from attendance at the Citizens Assemblies.

As an attempt to prevent totalitarianism the formulation by Extinction Rebellion of The Citizen’s Assembly process is highly appealing. It is a jury-style democratic decision-making process for deliberating on what is to be done. Lottery-picked jurors will be advised by specialists and expected to tell politicians what needs to be done. The replacement of one set of membership with a new set will ensure inclusion of our entire community.

There are no guarantees in life, suggests Hallam, but the historical record of such “deliberative democracy” offers the possibility of huge empowerment and radical solutions. It is suggested that the Jury system remains the most just method of calibrating degrees of doubt and proof. At the very least, Citizens Assemblies are a creative and inclusive solution. Probably.

Emotional Climate

06.09.2019

Global Heating, the recently revised term for what is happening to the Earth’s climate, is accelerating at an unpredicted rate. Not only had the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) failed to include acceleration in it’s 2018 forecast of a 1.5degree rise in global temperatures, but the best scientific modelling has proved to be decades out in its predictions of fires and floods.

This week alone we have seen three super-hurricanes form and develop at the same time, historically unheard of. Dorian caused storm surges, floods, widespread death and devastation across the Bahamas. At the very same time, uncontrollable fires blaze across all corners of the globe, not just the Amazon but the Arctic, Africa and Australia. 

Anyone watching must experience at least a passing surge of anxiety. Anyone directly involved will be experiencing trauma, with lasting effects. There is no peace from the recurring memory of a firefighter friend dying fighting a fire, a neighbour drowned in a building collapsing under water, a relative trapped in their car.

Now consider what it is for a child or young person perceiving these events. With the rest of their lives spanning a length difficult to perceive when young, the image of global heating excites a fear and despondency equitable to the feelings of youth in the late nineteen thirties or during the broadcasts at the time of the Bay of Pigs. 

We face a catastrophe. Many in the know suggest we face extinction. School students have taken strike action and will, once again, in 26 countries and over 1,000 cities worldwide on 20th September. This time the school refuser and environmental activist, Greta Thunberg, has called on adults for support. We can’t leave the future to the kids.

We can stop the coming Climate Catastrophe, but, as detailed by Extinction Rebellion rather than the IPCC, we have to go to a global war footing and diminish all use of carbon-based fuels towards zero emissions by 2025. This requires such a radical transformation of production and consumption that only mass mobilisations of millions of humans worldwide can ensure politicians and corporate bosses are forced to comply. 

The question of the hour shouts out; have the People the emotional resilience to take part and sustain system change? Will the repeated images of horror caused by human-made “Acts of Nature” become too awful to watch or too numerous to evoke any emotional response? Like civilians in a war zone, will we be rendered powerless? Like soldiers on a battlefield, will we become dehumanised and heartless?

There is a great need to speak the Truth about climate change. An essential ideological battle to be won, here and now, against The Deniers. But in so doing, the individual trauma faced by each of us as we perceive the coming catastrophe has to be openly acknowledged and managed.

We have to talk about global heating. We must feel we can do something, such as offering solidarity to the flooded of the Abaco Islands and those driven by flames in New South Wales. We must link arms to challenge the unnatural anti-human, anti-environment, anti-science nonsense of Trump and Bolsonaro.

We must challenge the Great Denial in all its forms. And to do all this we must acknowledge the emotional impact of our times, manage our inner pain, and offer solace and support to each other in this unprecedented tense and anxious emotional climate.

7.9.2019

Forced migration

The question is posed: how will the human world respond to the scale of forced migration caused by global heating. The rising of the seas is now inevitable, the seas already warming faster and higher than for millions of years past. Island nations and cities are already being swamped. 

Just as dramatically, migration raises emotional heat. There can be little doubt that Europe has become a fortress against those from the South seeking to escape drought, famine, war and all the ensuing poverty so produced. Symbolically at least, the White governments of the North are barricading their peoples against any possible Black insurgency.

The repeated images of drowned babies on Mediterranean beaches and imprisoned children torn from their parents grasp on the border between Mexico and the USA seer into some peoples conscience. At the same time, politicians explain away their barbarity by claiming to represent the selfishness of human nature or the primary protection of their own Nation. 

The emotional climate is an ideological battle ground. What children are taught in school, how parents explain the media images, what acceptable chat is apparent on the streets and in the playground, all congeal into the accepted truth and “common sense”. The current discourse purveys a sense of them-and-us if not dog-eat-dog. 

Thankfully, children who have not experienced the worst of early traumas develop with a strong sense of justice, fair play and feelings of what’s Right. Pubescent adolescents, their frontal lobes in a state of rewiring to cope with the rigours of independence, feel things most starkly. The human ability to empathise, a condition learnt and built upon rather than simply innate, is the kernel of all hope for the future.

The student strikes to demand action in this era of Climate Emergency are evidence of the most decent and progressive potential of human behaviour. Each young person has their own micro-motivation and at the same time share sensations of anger and outrage at the continued destruction of the environment and the impact upon human beings.

As with any emotion, anger can drive positive or negative behaviours. Anger is a survival-emotion first and foremost. In a racist atmosphere it can be turned against others, the outsiders, the threats. In a collective and inclusive environment it can be shared, arms-linked, to challenge the destructive status quo and force positive change.

The ideological battle comes from outside of ourselves. Are we encouraged to care for fellow humans or given palliatives that limit our expectations of what can be done and turn towards self-survival? Are we subject to the glib statements of silly old men (it is usually men) suggesting “it’s too late to do anything” and “you just have to let Nature take its course”, pushing innate hope into self-destructive despair? 

And to what extent does the current emotionally addictive zeitgeist of consumerism, individualistic and avaricious as it is, quash the gregarious norm of empathy? The struggle to prevent the coming climate catastrophe includes the struggle for decency over barbarism, inclusion over racism, social justice over competition, empathy over selfishness, and hope over despair. In short, the inner-strength to hold out your hand to others.

6th September 2019

Global Heating, the recently revised term for what is happening to the Earth’s climate, is accelerating at an unpredicted rate. Not only had the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) failed to include acceleration in it’s 2018 forecast of a 1.5degree rise in global temperatures, but the best scientific modelling has proved to be decades out in its predictions of fires and floods.

This week alone we have seen three super-hurricanes form and develop at the same time, historically unheard of. Dorian caused storm surges, floods, widespread death and devastation across the Bahamas. At the very same time, uncontrollable fires blaze across all corners of the globe, not just the Amazon but the Arctic, Africa and Australia. 

Anyone watching must experience at least a passing surge of anxiety. Anyone directly involved will be experiencing trauma, with lasting effects. There is no peace from the recurring memory of a firefighter friend dying fighting a fire, a neighbour drowned in a building collapsing under water, a relative trapped in their car.

Now consider what it is for a child or young person perceiving these events. With the rest of their lives spanning a length difficult to perceive when young, the image of global heating excites a fear and despondency equitable to the feelings of youth in the late nineteen thirties or during the broadcasts at the time of the Bay of Pigs. 

We face a catastrophe. Many in the know suggest we face extinction. School students have taken strike action and will, once again, in 26 countries and over 1,000 cities worldwide on 20th September. This time the school refuser and environmental activist, Greta Thunberg, has called on adults for support. We can’t leave the future to the kids.

We can stop the coming Climate Catastrophe, but, as detailed by Extinction Rebellion rather than the IPCC, we have to go to a global war footing and diminish all use of carbon-based fuels towards zero emissions by 2025. This requires such a radical transformation of production and consumption that only mass mobilisations of millions of humans worldwide can ensure politicians and corporate bosses are forced to comply. 

The question of the hour shouts out; have the People the emotional resilience to take part and sustain system change? Will the repeated images of horror caused by human-made “Acts of Nature” become too awful to watch or too numerous to evoke any emotional response? Like civilians in a war zone, will we be rendered powerless? Like soldiers on a battlefield, will we become dehumanised and heartless?

There is a great need to speak the Truth about climate change. An essential ideological battle to be won, here and now, against The Deniers. But in so doing, the individual trauma faced by each of us as we perceive the coming catastrophe has to be openly acknowledged and managed.

We have to talk about global heating. We must feel we can do something, such as offering solidarity to the flooded of the Abaco Islands and those driven by flames in New South Wales. We must link arms to challenge the unnatural anti-human, anti-environment, anti-science nonsense of Trump and Bolsonaro.

We must challenge the Great Denial in all its forms. And to do all this we must acknowledge the emotional impact of our times, manage our inner pain, and offer solace and support to each other in this unprecedented tense and anxious emotional climate.