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Feb 17, 2023Liked by Bill McKibben

Great minds lyricize alike - I "adapted" Santana's Evil Ways lyrics on Dec 19, 2019 when 350Marin.org joined other protesters and sang the song to Jamie outside of the Chase bank in San Anselmo, CA:

You’ve Got to Change Your Oily Ways, Jamie

Before I Start Banking With You

You’ve got to Change, Jamie, and Every Word that I Say is True –

You Lend to Frackers, and Pumpers, All over Town,

We’ve Got to Keep... Tar Sands Oil, Deep in the Ground,

This can’t go on,

No, no you’ve got to change!

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I liked the comment about SAP. Is that a Climate acronym? Does it mean Save A Planet activist? If so, I am calling all SAP people to join me in Vermont this June for the inaugural Bernie Sanders SAP Lovefest and 2024 Presidential fundraiser.

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Some encouraging news in this. It’s scary down here in New Zealand with our 5 million population how utterly dependent we are on the rest of the world doing better to slow down climate change. This has really hit home this month with massive flooding in Auckland followed by a tropical cyclone basically wiping out a major food (and wine!) production area with more floods, towns destroyed, bridges and highways gone, lives lost.

And followed up by a 6.2 earthquake which fortunately didn’t cause any further damage.

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David, I would have been here sooner but was researching the acronyms you refer to! Do not wish to display ignorance but when excited about information regarding our 🔥burning planet 🌎 where not drowning or being blown away, I momentarily lose focus. You make an excellent point. LOVE that Malpass is on his way out the door and other tidbits shared, many from “Nature”? Must be excellent source for wannabe (shall I spell that, too, just to be consistent😂?) climate activist or simply responsible citizen of the Earth, caretaker, best word? Thesaurus not readily available.

Suggest images useful, too, in attracting attention. The opening one here was great.

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Bill! Acronyms do to the flow of prose what a dead cow does to the flow of a stream! SDG, ESG, Gi-Ber-rish! It takes just seconds longer to write the words in the acronym, but many seconds longer, or even minutes longer, to find out what the damncronym means!

Some of us who love your substack do not frequent the inner reaches of the bureaucracy--which would give us more knowledge of the acronyms. And looking up the acronyms takes time that we could otherwise be using to get the word out on global weirding (GW). Thanks! David

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Love the Naomi Klein quote about caring for people, serving their basic rights and staying hopeful while in action. That’s exactly the subject of our podcast in production, Building Hope: https://open.substack.com/pub/buildinghope?r=4cg2x&utm_medium=ios

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World Bank would be a good place to establish one of many climate impact funds - to compensate the global south for all the climate-change damage caused by the global north.

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Great! What do you think of a campaign to encourage EV chargers at every gas station and Solar/battery EV chargers at every car dealership? great fir a power outage to have every dealership able ti charge.

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Bill, we have a HUGE problem with how economists in general "measure" the effects of Catastrophic Climate Change on world "GDP". Steve Keen is one of the few economists that understands the MASSIVE threat to human civilization from Catastrophic Climate change.

Radio Ecoshock February 15, 2023

Mass Extinction with Apocalyptic Economics

SNIPPETS:

WARMING COULD CHANGE THE WHOLE ATMOSPHERIC CIRCULATION SYSTEM (which leads to a very different ☠️ planet…)

During the interview, Keen points to a hair-raising possibility: the entire atmospheric circulation system could shift during global warming. The result would be a band of deserts around the mid-latitudes (like America, China, and Europe) as we now find in the Middle East. High amounts of rain and snow would pour down at both Poles. ... ...

STEVE KEEN: INSANE ECONOMICS TAKES US TO RUIN

An Ecoshock listener wrote: “you have got to hear this!” We all need to hear Australian economist Steve Keen explain why corporations and governments are operating on crazy economic theories about the impacts of climate change.

I remember when the Garnaut Climate Change Review was released in Australia, back in 2008. Garnaut talked about the cost to Gross Domestic Production of a 3 to 4 degree C warming. It would be costly, but business would go on as usual he thought.

Starting in the 1990’s, Yale economist William Nordhaus started us down this dangerous track. Without a real basis in science, Nordhaus assured the world that 2 degrees C of warming would be the upper “safe” limit. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change went along with that for a couple of decades, even as their own scientists raised more and more damages coming not just at 1.5 degrees C, but right now at just over 1 degree warming.

But I’ve read plenty of business-oriented reports suggesting 3 or 4 degrees C. warming is no big deal. Now we know that would be disastrous, likely a civilization-ending event. Business does not go on. Maybe humans do not go on, at least not billions of us.

Steven Keen blows up the Nordhaus theology and all the fellow-travelers who operate as climate minimizers, sometimes with fossil fuel related funding. Keen was an associate professor of economics at University of Western Sydney. He became Head of Economics at at Kingston University in London, and now does independent research. This man knows economics, and he is 📢🚨 blowing the whistle.

Keen tells us: it’s not just corruption. It is just what economists believe. They can become a zealot for capitalism. They reject any opposition or criticism. William Nordhaus said 85% of workers will not be affected by climate because they work indoors, in controlled environments.

By their formula, 6 degrees C of warming leads to an 8% fall in GDP. Keen calls it crazy. He is working on a research project on this right now.“ It’s just nonsense”.

Keen thinks only a major disaster will bring any change. Until the public is freaked out, they will not accept mandated changes to their lifestyles. Politicians cannot get too far ahead of that. To have a chance to maintain a civilization, he says we need to have some reserves, like grain stored in case of disaster, and a ration-based economy, so everyone gets a share. We need a World War Two mentality to deal with the real breakdown of nature.

In the second half of this show, you hear “Exposing Apocalyptic Economics with Steve Keen” as posted January 30, 2023 by theAnalysis.news.

LIsten to the Steve Keen interview in the second of the Radio Ecoshock 🔊 Podcast:

https://www.ecoshock.org/2023/02/mass-extinction-with-apocalyptic-economics.html

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Great update !

From the big picture perspective: We are faced with the transition to a new value system. Boss / Money of the Industrial Civilization to the new Society / Environment Values of the Electronic Civilization. We all need to do everything we can personally to get a EV, Greenhouse, Eco -Architecture home, Direct Democracy voting App, and get out of debt and off money as much as possible ( IRTA.com) Electronic Exchange and Universal Income created at the small community level are the keys along with keeping up the PR pressure on the big Corps Fossil Fuel world. Thx TD : UniTown.us

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