Tag: fossil-fuels

Damn the Hedgefund Short-termists of the oil and gas Corporations – Climate Change is Here and Now!

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (4.3.25), originally seeking to make links between war and climate but edited to a narrow rant against BP and climate denial. I’ll return to war next week.

Climate Change is real and here now

The latest scientific report on what we call the Gulf Stream, more technically known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation system (or AMOC for ease) has reasserted evidence of it slowing down, predicting dire consequences for weather in Europe and the East Coast of the USA and Canada.
The Gulf Stream will turn-off. In the meantime its’ slowing down will produce worsening extremes in our weather. At the same time the Polar Vortex is crashing and the Jet Stream has gone into paroxysm too.
The climate is tipping. We are witnessing extreme floods and fires, seasonal dissonance, continuous temperature records broken, ceaseless increase in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere (the cause of global warming), yet we’re repeatedly told there is nothing to worry about.
Politicians act upon the words of the big oil companies to suggest we can overshoot the limits of stable climate, even if experiencing extremes of weather for a period, because new technologies will be developed that will reduce the emissions again and rebalance the climate.
This is a Big Lie! The limited tax-cash they are diverting into funding false solutions such as carbon-capture and storage and modular nuclear reactors are impossible to produce at the scale necessary or in time to stop climate and economic collapse, even if they can be made to work.
Yet we are told we can safely continue with business as usual: burn more coal and wood, extract more gas and oil, chop down more forests.
Oil and gas make higher profits than any other form of electricity generation or fuel supply, hugely exaggerated by over-pricing and tax-subsidies.
The fossil fuel corporations refuse to risk lower dividends, their shareholders now revolting against any shift away from continued extraction. As part of the class war, the fossil fuel companies are fighting back against climate action, determined to increase their already record profits.
Last week, British Petroleum (BP) announced a £10bn profit in 2024 but is shredding all plans for green energy production or any net-zero emission targets.
BP dropped its “Beyond Petroleum” pledge to cut oil and gas production by 40% by 2030, instead planning a 20% increase in investment in fossil fuel projects, slashing renewables by 70% and breaking its agreements with the UK Government.
Oil and gas corporations receive £billions in tax-subsidies. Banks are investing over $1trillion in new oil and gas extraction, UK-based Barclays even investing a fresh £1.7bn in coal-fired power stations!
Compare this. The UK government spending needed to achieve net zero in the UK by 2050 is only £4.3bn, some 0.2% of our annual Gross Domestic Product, less than all the subsidies currently paid-out to the corporations largely responsible for global heating emissions.
Wind and solar have cut energy costs by two-thirds and the majority of the world is moving away from fossil fuels. Yet right now, the UK and USA is shifting in the opposite direction in defence of oil.
“Drill, drill, drill!”
Climate science identifies that the accelerating changes to the climate will collapse these fossil fuel investments to pieces with as great a force as a world war. Without priority investment in climate adaptations, economies will be devastated by food shortages and disruption to production, the jobs reliant on the fossil economy no longer safe.
For the protection of the majority, trade unionists are clear: climate change is real, happening now and deadly; the cost of emergency transition away from fossil-fuelled production should be paid for by the fossil fuel corporations – not workers jobs, pay and social conditions; and international aid is essential to support climate reparations worldwide. Just stop climate denial!

Demand Action on Fossil Fuels

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (19.11.24) seeking to highlight the criminal hypocrisy of the COP29 Climate Conference. Climate is the overarching issue of this human era, bringing together all other issues and campaigns into a Big Picture far too overwhelming for the emotional intelligence of many. The resulting “it’s too late”, “grow your own” or hair-shirts responses are understandable but hopeless. And maybe that’s what is wanted. Just do nothing.

The projections of climate collapse in the very near future are illustrated by this year’s weather events as well climate movements. At least they published the mention of the of Saturday’s events, but the Press Release was never published.

Full text below:

Let’s have a look.

In the United States, super-hurricane Milton battered Florida followed by Helen, the strongest tropical storm ever recorded, which poured more than a year’s average rainfall onto North Carolina in less than eight-hours, destroying whole towns, houses and cars swept away. Seven weeks later local people have no fresh water to drink and the regional food production has been devastated. More than 200 people died.

In Spain, more than a month’s rain fell in less than one hour last week, flooding the the cities of Malaga and Valencia for second time in a month. Thousands were evacuated, more than 200 killed, many still missing, homes, shopping malls and bridges wrecked and 100,000 cars destroyed.

The farmlands that supply not only Spain but supermarkets here in the uk were decimated. Greenhouses, machinery and packaging plants were smashed, with crops destroyed and significant damage to fruit and vegetable production into the future. The floods destroyed more than 60% of Spain’s production of oranges, alongside thousands of hectares of tomatoes, peppers, salad and vines.

Emergency and relief authorities took days to appear and could offer little, the people left to fend for themselves and protest at the lack of care. Timely warnings were not broadcast and cash-relief only offered long after the immediate devastation. And in the USA, the most wealthy nation in the history of humanity, only the wealthy who could pay received help.

Such calamity is nothing compared with the Global South. Record rainfall is happening across the world, in regions with far less economic resilience and social infrastructure than Europe and the USA. And at the same time, fires and droughts across Africa.

Extreme weather is leaving tens of millions millions displaced, millions starving and thousands dead in Nepal and Vietnam, Tibet, Peru, India, China, and Indonesia. It snowed in the Sahara desert, an event never before recorded. Glaciers are melting in the Himalayas causing uncontrollable floods in Pakistan.

Parts of the Arctic are enduring exceptionally high temperatures — up 30 to 40 degrees above normal — because of multiple intense heat domes. 2024 will be the hottest year on record, the past decade recording the hottest global temperatures too.

Everywhere there is profound changes in the weather, swinging between extremes of wet and dry, hot and cold. In Britain one-in-six people live at risk of flooding.

But the United Nations Climate Conference held last week in the oil-dependent-economy of Azerbaijan has ensured no funding for concerted action on the climate emergency, and protected the fossil industries.

The emissions of global heating gases from the burning of fossil fuels is the cause. Emissions have to be reduced, as an emergency action by all nations across the world. And many countries will need help with that, or face complete disaster. That’s why we call for climate justice.

The poor and working classes of every country should not be left to pay the severe price of climate change, caused undoubtedly from the impact burning of fossil fuels since before 1850. Yet we are targeted by climate deniers telling us to keep quiet and carry on – a strategy that hasn’t worked anywhere else.

For every climate sceptic, there are hundreds of climate scientists who studied to get to university, then specialised in aspects of natural science and finally produced report after report of the extraordinary and unprecedented changes that are destabilising our land, oceans, atmosphere and wildlife. Tens of thousands of peer-reviewed and triple-tested scientific reports on all aspects of the climate collapse and sixth Great Extinction of life on Earth – happening now.

Yet those with power are denying these facts and encouraging baseless opinions formed from mythology, superstition and dogmatism. To say these are “conspiracy theories” is not sufficient. This is far-Right wing ideological claptrap, linking climate denial alongside anti-vaccines, anti-woke ultra-nationalism, supporting climate colonialism and racist denigration of the people of colour across the global south – lives that are less valuable than white humans of the industrialised North.

Whilst the super-rich buy-up land in New Zealand, projected to be the least and last to be affected by climate collapse, they tell us there is nothing to worry about. The climate deniers are leading humanity into a deep and accelerating mass disaster.

It is as if the far-Right ideologues want to see mass environmental destruction and human carnage in order to feed off the hopelessness, despair and conditions of dog-eat-dog survival, best suited for their political ambitions. President Trump demands “drill, drill’ drill” for oil during his second term, appointing climate denier Chris Wright as energy secretary.

Prime Minster Starmer is more covert, booting tax handouts for carbon capture and storage, biofuels and nuclear power, none of which represent carbon-zero energy suppliers and altogether taking tens of billions of pounds away from investment in renewables of solar, wind and wave power.

The COP29 United Nations Climate Conference proved that the fossil-fuel companies are in control, selling more oil and gas rights in the face of disaster, chasing short-term profits at the expense of human carnage and societal collapse.

The science of climate change is not based upon opinion. It is fact. The climate deniers, funded by the oil corporations, are leading humanity into a deep and accelerating mass disaster.

We protest! Plymouth’s trades unions are supporting the Climate Summit in Plymouth this Saturday, and marching to demand action now: cut emissions by 50% by 2030, and plan for the fastest possible transition away from fossil fuels! Join us!

May be an illustration of map and text

SSSSSHHHHHH!!!

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My weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald, reflecting on the Hurricane season in the USA. Since writing it, that is yesterday a new report says that in 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon. That’s a crisis alright.

The full version of my article here:

Ssshhh! We should talk about anything else but Climate Chaos. The two record hurricanes that killed hundreds, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, destroying entire towns across the Carolinas and Florida in the USA last week. This was passing news, fleetingly displayed and speedily dismissed.

Hurricanes Helene and Milton broke all records, Helene being one third more powerful than any previously recorded, including Hurricane Katrina.

The weather, once the few subjects that Brits have been allowed to talk about endlessly without any controversy, has now been weaponised. In our tense and polarised society, debate about the future is fraught with anxiety. It is as if we don’t want to face the facts, even when they flood our senses.

Climate Change is a case in point. For the far-Right, anyone calling for climate action is a “woke” enemy of freedom, seeking to end all personal liberties and regulate all personal choice. For those on the other side, concerned for the future of humanity and the planet, any public demonstration is to be ridiculed and any direct action quashed by unjust prison terms.

Before and after Helene there was a news blackout of the phrase, “climate change” across US media. Meteorologists and weather reporters received abuse and threats to their lives for mentioning the causes. Online, swathes of propaganda infected the internet with conspiracy theories that “the elite powers” had seeded clouds to produce the hurricanes. Scientists, it was claimed, had intentionally created the chaos to prove their unfounded theory of climate change, empowering despotic politicians to pass new laws banning cars and coal.

Conspiracy theorists had a field day. The thermometers that showed the increasing heat of the seas – the heat that generates the hurricanes – was not to be believed. Evangelists across the States proclaimed the floods as God’s wrath, warning us against alcohol and promiscuity, abortion and homosexuality. Prepare for the End of Times. As if they desire it!

The science that has charted the rapid concentration of global heating gases in the atmosphere over the past 150 years, all caused by the burning of fossil fuels as documented by the oil and gas corporations themselves, was instantly rebuked, rebuffed or downright denied.

And the list of extreme weather events, beating all records just as 2024 matches the hottest global average temperatures in millenia, was not to be advertised. In the last two weeks there have been devastating floods in Nepal, Oman, Spain, Tunisia, Thailand, Mumbai, India; Mexico; Ecuador, Oklahoma, Florida, Tennessee and the Carolina’s. And it’s not nearly winter.

We even experienced mild flooding in Plymouth caused by Hurricane Kirk as a record three hurricanes whooshed across the Atlantic at once. Those preaching individual freedom had better beware – they are not immune. As global warming gas emissions continue to rise, the world is set for worse extremes and greater destruction. And, because the corporations and governments refuse to take the actions required by lowering emissions and ending reliance on fossil fuels, it will be the working class and poor who will pay the price.

Those of us on low incomes and in poor housing have the least protection from extreme weather. One-in-five homes in the UK are built on flood plains, the insurance companies protecting their profits by refusing support or quadrupling their premiums. Floods and droughts abroad are creating food shortages that will soon hit our supermarkets.

And, if the USA is to go by, the employers who have done little or nothing to plan for climate change will force workers to stay at work amidst the havoc, or lose pay if they don’t clock-in on time and remain producing whilst the waters rise.

“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster”, according to the latest science report from Oxford University. “This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.”

We need a revolution in the way energy is produced and organised. Decentralised renewable energy, insulated homes to reduce use, and widespread free public transport. This transformation would create millions more jobs than those in the fossil fuel industry, and offer a beacon to the rest of the world for the action required to stop climate collapse.

The Trades Union Congress has proposed support for a National Climate Service to coordinate and fund emissions reduction. Instead, Starmer’s government has copied the Tory funding for a £23bn carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS) project, unproven as a technology and a simple foil to allow fossil fuel companies to continue operating.

This denial of the Climate crisis must be challenged by all means necessary, if we are not to reap the whirlwind.

Restore Nature – and the Climate – Now!

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (18.6.24) remonstrating against the silence and denial of all parties standing at an election devoid of debate on the acute seriousness of climate change. I am beside myself with angst and anger at the sheer stupidity and ignorance of candidates so self-obsessed and party-disciplined as to refuse to see what’s happening all around. Don’t give me any lip about caring for the future if you’re not acting, right now, against climate collapse.

Leaders are Protecting the Status Quo

It is in the nature of parliamentary democracy for politicians to argue over day-to-day promises. A couple of pence tax-deduction, more doctors, or so many new homes to be built are references to the continuing crisis of enforced austerity being experienced by the “working poor” (as at least seven million of us are so labelled).

The manifestos and “contracts with the people” all speak of reforming Capitalism when in reality, the entire economic and social system is in a depth of crisis that threatens all stability and, indeed, existence. The ruling class cannot and will not allow reform of their system that is so destructive. The demand to a speedy end to fossil-fuelled production actually represents the demand for the end of Capitalism.

So beneath the empty pledges of careerist individualists tied to the machinery of the Capitalist State lies a deeper ideological intent. The “masses” may be demanding real change, but the politicians are there to protect the status quo.

They insist there can be no real alternative to the current system of capitalism. Whilst the richest 1% become richer still, we, the working class, are expected to believe “there is no money”, “the exchequer is bare”, “it will take two parliamentary terms to turn things around”.

We are already required to vote on the basis that what we have is the best that can be hoped for, and anything better is so far away as to be pie in the sky. More of the same is all we should expect.

Except things are not going to stay the same. Their “stability and growth” is the real pie-in-the-sky. In truth, the next ten years will see such changes as to make today a halcyon dream. Real change is coming, courtesy of the natural environment.

Last week the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, warned of the deepening climate and ecological catastrophe affecting all nations across the world. He spoke of “planetary destruction” and stated that Governments across all wealthy nations have not kept their previous pledges. Global warming emissions from fossil fuel gases have risen to a new record level last year at a time when they must be halved by 2030 to avoid the worst climate effects.

“It’s we the Peoples versus the polluters and the profiteers,” he said. “Together, we can win. But it’s time for leaders to decide whose side they’re on.”

The speech was a rallying call by a UN leadership concerned that the climate crisis has slipped down the list of priorities. This “slippage”, bordering upon denial, was then proven at the June meeting of the powerful G7 group of countries, where world leaders including the UK Prime Minister repeated the same broken pledges, as if we should believe them this time.

In the real world, record breaking heatwaves were causing death and crop destruction from southern China, through India and North Africa to the southern states of America. 52C was recorded in Delhi, human beings were collapsing amidst water rationing of thirty million people, and monkeys and birds were seen falling from trees, dead from heat exhaustion.

Climatologists in the USA and Europe confirmed evidence that the Gulf Stream is slowing, producing extreme and unpredictable weather patterns. In the UK, despite harvest failures this Spring, the mainstream parties in the election continue to cut their previous pledges on addressing the climate emergency.

Parties of the Right have published manifestos that deny the threat of climate change and call it all a conspiracy.

Working people are worried about the observable changing weather patterns and seasons. We want protections from the threats of flooded homes, transport disruption and high food prices. And our children are most concerned at the very obvious “6th Great Extinction” of insect and animal life taking place as a result of the pollution and heating of our oceans and lands.

Next weekend, against all the political denial and obfuscation, tens of thousands will be marching in London, calling-out to all political candidates to take this overarching issue seriously. ‘Restore Nature Now!” is our serious demand uniting conservationists, environmentalists, climate activists and trade unionists for immediate action to stop environmental destruction. Cut fossil fuel emissions and invest in the living environment!After all, why would anyone vote for extinction?

Another Year of Inaction on the Climate Disaster

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald published on 14th December 2023. The protests in Plymouth this year were small, the core of climate activists here depleted dramatically from the thousands pre-COVID lockdown. It’s hard to know why the issue has so little resonance at present, other than the cost-of-living crisis and general emotional sense of vulnerability seeing into the consciousness of the entire working class here. It’s a time for shutting the front door, keeping the outside outside and seeking some solace in the warm hearth of the holiday period (if you can afford the heating). Our climate march, joined with the local Palestine protest, managed over 120 people, whilst the Climate Summit, heavily publicised and built towards over the previous 6 months, drew 50 people – all already in the know. These are increasingly hard times, but a Movement of millions must be built quickly if we are to survive.

Why shouldn’t we be angry about the COP28 idiocy? A hugely expensive jamboree in the oil-rich Police State of UAE where 90% of the population are disallowed citizenship or human rights, protests are dangerously illegal, the government ministers and fossil fuel corporate executives packing-in 5-times the numbers of any citizen or NGO representatives, the rich flown-in on private jets to proclaim that it is the rest of us who have to tighten our belts because of the climate crisis whilst the poor remain voiceless.

Indeed, apparently, the climate catastrophe already killing millions each year and displacing millions more as climate refugees, is not the fault of greenhouse gas emissions. The President of COP28 this year, Sultan Al Jaber, head of the UAE State oil and gas company, says there is “no science” showing that we need to phase-out fossil fuels to restrict global heating to 1.5C.

After 30 years of this farce they’ve done nothing other than to protect the oil companies and their own voracious demand to get as rich as rich can be at the expense of people and planet. Yet thousands of scientific papers, peer-and-government reviewed before publication and published through the same United Nations entity, proves the precise opposite. These oil-rich billionaires should be considered as scum (a term recently judged by a UK court to be a perfectly legal derogatory term). 

The global average temperature in 2023 – the hottest year on record – actually reached 1.5C for a period. In fact, for three days it reached 2C. Whatever we do now, the changes to the earth’s climate have past tipping points that will ensure undeniable change everywhere – floods, fires, crop-failures, transport disruption and sudden extreme weather conditions displacing and killing people even here in wet-and-to-be-even-wetter England.

Unless we leave fossil fuels in the ground we have absolutely no hope of preventing climate breakdown. We are still putting more emissions into the atmosphere than we are stopping by moving to wind and solar. It doesn’t matter how many wind turbines you put up, or how many solar panels, unless you are scrapping the fossil fuel infrastructure and ensuring, through legislation, to leave coal, gas and oil in the ground, the Planet is going to boil. 

The highly effective and lethal fossil fuel lobbying, both inside the COP Conferences since 1992 and all day and night, every day and night, year-in and year-out, since the Second World War and before, has prevented most if not all effective action.

This has thwarted the simple things that need to be done. And while we sit and the years tick by, and we have so few years left now. We’re going to have to take drastic action if we’re going to avoid what could well be Earth systems collapse. This is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced, and by design – as a result of the enormous oppressive and exploitative power of the fossil fuel industries.

And now they want the working classes of the world to pay for the clean-up, with our lives. Whilst the well-off and already entitled middle classes join the call for working class people to buy electric cars, eat pulses and wear hair-shirts, we live hand-to-mouth. One-third of Plymouth’s children are living in the poverty of damp housing, poor nutrition, rationed and paltry public transport, and charity-shop clothing, topped-up with food banks unable to meet the accelerating demands. 

Don’t you dare preach to us about buying an electric car or heat pump! Individually we haven’t the wherewithal. We challenge all moralising against the masses – individual actions are of little consequence given the scale of the challenge – it is the emissions at the point of production that have to be shut down, the rest will follow. The System has to change. 

The fossil fuel companies receive tax incentives to the tune of £11.5billion each year from the taxes we pay despite making record profits from energy bills three times the cost of 5 years ago. It is they, collectively, who should pay for this climate crisis, their billions in profits to be paid back-in to our society to immediately insulate and damp-proof our 14 million homes and decaying hospitals and schools, to renationalise and invest in decent free-to-use public transport, and train and recruit the millions of people required to change all production away from fossil fuels. 

We are in crisis right now – it’s visible. And that means we’ll have to change how we live, either by choice or necessity. But the lack of action by governments and corporation has shown we can’t rely upon them. Politicians will not legislate to stop all extraction of coal, gas and oil, and the corporations can’t transition in time, even if they wanted to. It’s the System of Capitalist exploitation – private profit -that has to be replaced or we face a torrid and barbaric future. 

Climate Conference Wake-up Call

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My weekly column published in the daily Plymouth Herald on 24th November. This is the local lead-up to our 10-days of actions and events coinciding with the COP28 United Nations Climate Conference in Dubai, UAE from next weekend. There is too much to say in less than 600 words, at a time when Climate is off the agenda and all protest actions are correctly focussed upon the genocide in Gaza. My attempt is to link the protests locally, identifying the common cause of climate collapse and genocide as Capitalism, and its most powerful presentation in the form of imperialism. the call for a joint protest march through the City centre is quite a gamble.

The TV news scenes flashed-up cars under water in Dubai following flash floods this week. The terms, “unprecedented” and “record-breaking” were spoken gravely for all the salaciousness and excitement that pulp-journalism could offer. They omitted to mention that Dubai will host the annual United Nations Climate Conference, a gathering of all interested parties next week. Corporations and their police allies will dominate the agenda.

This will be the COP28, in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, chaired by the oil magnate Sultan Al Jaber, managing director and group CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. Over the past thirty years (they missed-off a couple of meetings) the COP process have intended to agree on policies to limit global temperature rises and adapt to impacts associated with climate change. 

They’ve failed miserably, the targets constantly revised upward, and with 2023 now witnessing the first period where global temperatures reached 2degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels, the COP target being 1.5C. So much for greenwash talk. No wonder we’re protesting. 

Earlier this month, 9 women faced court charged with causing half-a-million pounds worth of criminal damage to the Canary Wharf headquarters of HSBC. None of the defendants, aged between 23 and 71, denied that, in April 2021, they used hammers and chisels to crack the windows of the Corporate headquarters and glued-on stickers reading “£80billion invested fossil fuels in the last five years” – “Just Stop Oil!”. 

The prosecution argued that, whatever their motives, there was no lawful excuse for what they did. last Thursday, the Jury disagreed, and unanimously found the women “Not Guilty”. Groups like this may be dismissed as troublemakers, but that was how people once responded to the suffragettes and those who marched in the Civil Rights Movement. 

Our attitudes may depend on how we think about Climate Change, and that will depend upon where in the World we live. After the case, one of the women, Susan, a retired community worker, said she’d spent her life caring for others. She quoted a UNICEF report detailing that weather disasters, exacerbated by climate change, permanently displaces 20,000 children from their homes every day. 

Most of us agree with Susan that our lives are inextricably linked with everyone else’s, not just inside our national boundaries but across the world. After all, the changing climate knows no national borders or separations caused by language of culture. What happens in the Antarctic has a direct bearing on weather conditions here. When people are permanently displaced by the destruction of their birthplace, happening now across the continents of Africa or Asia of South America, the countries of the North, so far less ravaged by fires and floods, and the desertification caused by high temperatures impossible to live through, feel the pressure of mass migration – Climate Refugees. We are all connected.

Scientists now observe that 2023 is the hottest year since records began. Indeed, global temperatures reached peaks not recorded in the evidence from trapped ancient gases in some half-a-million years – that is, before the dawn of our human species. That’s worth thinking about.

The UK government, alongside most across the world, is actively denying there’s a problem. Those who support them, and those who actively seek an early catastrophe, Armageddon in their lifetime, bullishly advertise and promote Climate Denial. There is a new movement, not those of us deeply concerned about the immediate threat of extreme weather to lives and livelihoods here as well as abroad. This far-Right movement has been named “Clexit”, and they, too are on the streets. Shouting out “Climate Exit”, they want complete withdrawal from all actions to limit Climate Change: the end of push towards electrification of transport; no investment in home insulation or heat pumps; more support and more money for new oil and gas fields. Let’s burn, burn, burn!

The Sunak Government has acceded. Most of even Johnson’s meagre measures to curb the emissions that cause global heating and climate collapse are being withdrawn. That’s the sub-text of this week’s Autumn Statement by the Chancellor. Where action to create new Climate Jobs and a low carbon economy can reflate and protect our economy, the domination of the oil corporations heralds ever-deeper disaster. Capitalist Business as usual in an era of fundamental change to our Planet. Absurd!