I think we should recognize how much the abuse and neglect of communities of color in the US reflects the same attitude toward poor nations by the United States and other developed nations. Those in power offer a giant shrug to their suffering victims, domestically and abroad.
I've worked on divestment and boycott campaigns since farmworkers and South Africa, and did a lot of work to get the University of California to divest from fossil fuel holdings. Which is to say, I believe there is an important positive effect of making such assets toxic in public opinion, even if there is no direct financial penalty to the firms being divested. Still, I'd like to believe that there is such a penalty effect. However the rather complex analysis presented in this Freakonomics podcast casts doubt on that effect. I would love to hear a competing analysis or review of that analysis from your point of view.
Thank you for your post, Bill. I watched the film and it made me very sad. It feels very profound to me, especially after Vermont's severe flooding.
I don't excuse the awful Elon for lying about the range of the cars, but someone who has one tells me that some owners just don't learn to use the settings properly, e.g. leaving the car with interior heating cooling on during extreme weather will certainly ensure a need for re-charging before one thinks the car should need it. I think we have to admit that Tesla has done a huge amount for the acceptance of EVs in the US, mainly by putting chargers all over the country. Lying, however, is NEVER acceptable and people who lie should be held accountable, always.
INTENTIONALLY WITHHELD INFORMATION FOR SURVIVAL OF THE PLANET FOSTERING PROFIT OVER PEOPLE AND THE PLANET
1. Cutting CO2 emissions will not reverse a climate catastrophe. Only drawing down the CO2 in the atmosphere will do so. The most effective and elegant way to accomplish this in time is to mandate that all arable soil be regenerated to living soil with all agriculture mandated to be organic and regenerative. The pathway to this is known and includes subsoil (Key Line) plowing, no monocultural agriculture, holistic livestock management, subsidies for regenerative agriculture, subsidized agricultural waste fuel logs for cooking (The gathering of forest cooking fuel is the number one cause of worldwide deforestation and cooking fuel is only fuel not subsidized globally.), banning fishing as needed long enough to restore the draw down effect of vibrant oceans.
2. Enhancing the reflectivity of the Earth can be a relatively low risk project involving private and public efforts to paint rooftops, resurface streets, parking lots, airports and roadways with light reflecting materials, aerial dispersing of light sand (like gypsum) over darker soils, the spraying safe non-toxic and biodegradable floating material for oceans, reforestation and re-vegetation to create greater cloud cover once the fuel logs for cooking issue is solved and incentives created to preserve forested areas. Also holistic livestock management preserves existing forests and encourages new growth.
3. Researching and possible implementing of NASA's space shield at the L1 zone which NASA has claimed could cool the Earth by two degrees in a short period of time and be able to be controlled to manage its cooling effects. The concept works primarily due to the penumbra shadow of such a shield.
4. Subsidizing agricultural waste compressed fuel logs (rice chaff, sugarcane bagasse, sawdust, coffee pulp) to prevent further harvesting of forest wood for cooking worldwide and solving the number one cause of worldwide deforestation.
5. EV vehicles are not the answer for reversing climate disturbances. The manufacturing of the vehicles and the electric batteries, the charging of those batteries like the manufacturing of windmills and solar panels will dramatically increase the use of fossil fuels and accelerate the planet's slide towards extinction. All fuel injection cars on the road today can easily be retrofitted to run on biogas from livestock and unfracked natural gas reducing dramatically the amount of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. Other fossil-fuel free fuels exist for automotive transportation including hydrogen which could be retrofitted to existing vehicles once its production becomes CO2 emission-free.
6. Cooling and heating of homes and other buildings can be achieved with modifications (and, of course, especially in new construction) to utilize the Earth's atmospheric and geothermal heat. Enhanced natural chimney effect ventilation even in sky crapers coupled with evaporative cooling systems could replace hugely inefficient fossil fuel-driven heating and cooling systems.
7. Thermal mass heating and cooling systems heat and cool with highly efficient radiant technology much more efficient than “sensible” air heating systems.
8. Transitioning to a truly democratic direct voting Constitutional Democracy would make possible the mandating of the above critical measures now blocked by profit over people corporations concerned with the short term interests of their shareholders, not their stakeholders. Vote for a direct vote democracy at https://wethepeope.directvotedemocracy.com
9. The full disclosure of over 5,000 classified patents on suppressed inventions (including zero emission energy inventions) would spark an explosion of creative energy (renewable) dedicated to the survival of the planet and the creation of a regenerative future for human kind.
Founder and president of the Heart Mind Alliance (.com) which has launched the block-chain secured direct digital voting web site https;//wethepeople.directvotedemocracy.com)
Producer of the documentary "Bolivia Beyond Belief" (on You Tube) regarding the Bolivian Democratic Revolution I witnessed while living in Bolivia from 2005 to 2008
Initiated as an Andean Cosmovision Amauta
After working in 20 countries in community development I have created a You Tube channel with 135 videos of the most successful appropriate technologies I learned of: "Community-based Appropriate Technologies" (Now on the Northern New Mexico College portal for international access)
Served as Area Director for South America and the Caribbean for Habitat for Humanity
Reflexologist certified by the International Institute of Reflexology
Founder of Colorado's San Luis Valley Solar Energy Association and Alamosa Childrens' School
Founder of the Rio Arriba Bioregional Council and the Espanola Valley Community Council, New Mexico
Author of I Am: A Journey Through Times and Spaces and the book The Great Mandate (available via Kindle)
Our human civilizations of today, are so much more complex than bees or ants, that I'm never surprised when McKibben and other super-great environmental thinkers, go OMITTING notice of world's darkest dark corners of modernly-equipped CRUELTY. Somehow, it escapes notice that exclusively elegant saving the biosphere/ecosphere ignores the world's kindness/cruelty tug of war, and the outcome could be cold-souled folks as Musk, pushing their deluded hopes to colonize Mars while the rest of us die like overheated coral colonies. Right now, myself as ill-adept age 78, am urging activist voices to get the US-China negotiators to add one more (maybe two more) bargaining chips to their elegant bargaining games, namely, not only human rights, intellectual property rights, South China Sea and Taiwan Straits naval rights, but also add ANIMAL RIGHTS -- specifically, as to US over-speeded slaughterhouses and China's odd busy underworld of dog and cat meat kidnappings and killings with horrific tortures as part of fulfilling the ancient hopes for magical good health effects for the eaters of the torture-killed stolen companion animals (yes, if you haven't followed these China and US issues you'll think it's some Qanon conspiracy talk, but it's as was the case when world was diligently ignoring the Holocaust and even Ben-Gurion telling a meeting to drop the subject, and don't bomb the Auschwitz railroad or gas chamber buildings). China and the US negotiations could also build some anti-cruelty momentum toward jointly developing ecologically sound mass-production and mass-marketing of bio-science's new "no-kill/lab-grown" meats (and seafoods and dairy and other animal products as the ivory the elephants and rhinos are being killed-off for -- and more). But maybe it's asking too much of green-ness environment lovers, to ask them to widen focus to bloodily un-green cruelty scenes, as it also seems tragically hard to focus on the un-green issues of pharmaceutics to reduce population gently before a Putin or a US counterpart goes just slightly crazy enough to threaten new A-bombs, new Chernobyls, new world famines, perhaps new cuttings of the undersea fiber-optics and overhead satellite relays, without which this message wouldn't be going farther than my fingers on this keyboard (as I sit in air conditioned refuge from 90 F heat at age 78, in momentary semi-safety of being relegated to a real-life homeless shelter after July 6 brute lockout from my twelve-year's apartment by a local judiciary gone as loco as Putin himself). Again, I must bleat and blather that if environmentalism keeps omitting the world's ugly cruelty issues, we'll lose on the beautiful issues also -- we'll lose also on such issues as needing very UN-GREEN rocketry to stave-off asteroids -- as today, we fail to mobilize the ALSO UN-GREEN gargantuan aircraft fleets to effectively "waterbomb" the Canada wildfire complex grimly close to my forested New England, plus also soak down mass-killer city heatwaves now starting to dot the globe. [ If anybody can figure out how to make my Substack work, please transfer a copy of this to it -- thanks! ]
This REALLY should be about water, The Earth's natural cooling systems. these are flowing waters of many rivers ,located in the Arctic ,subarctic, Antarctic, subantarctic and equatorial regions. These rivers have been blocked from their natural flow. The main ingredient for the demise of our Northern Hemisphere Arctic initially started 70 years ago in northern Canada and Eastern Siberia with the Soviets damming some major rivers and the Canadians soon followed . This was done all along the Arctic Archipelago.
Rivers pushed back by dams, flooding inland over trillions of tons of carbon, sit Stagnant being Radiated all summer-long over permafrost. These events 70 years ago jump-started the climate feedback loops of today and this hydroelectric model still to this day is amplifying the feedback loops and continues to push the planet climate into no return. Bill, the scientists are all aware of this ....so what's up with you? Let's start with Vermont ..How about rejecting Arctic electricity that Hydro Quebec is selling to VT as clean renewable energy... Greenwashed lies!! Bill when are you going to get VT off of sucking the tit of Canadian Arctic energy?
Here's just one supporting article by NASA and the truth is that evaporations and the huge amounts of Water Vapor coming from Hydros seas-size containments and also now freshwater river discharges increasing at 5-10 x normal river flow only in wintertime, and only to make electricity then when the waters have warmed above freezing and hit cold Arctic air. (Steamy Relationships: How Atmospheric Water Vapor Supercharges Earth’s Greenhouse Effect by Alan Buis, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, February 8, 2022) https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/3143/steamy-relationships-how-atmospheric-water-vapor-supercharges-earths-greenhouse-effect/
just posted remark re short additional note about plastics focus for Earth Day... but Dream Hampton's video deserves more than comments: it shifts our historic, geographic perspective ––not only regarding Belle Isle and Detroit; and not only about the flooding and crumbling foundations and erasure-by-mould of Black family archives –– but as the title indicates, our view of these fateful days and years and our inter-woven communities through the lens of water and the endangered lives embodied in it...
#TheBeatGreens wrote and recorded "Stop Using Plastic" in the early '90's: alas, not too many folks head it! (though our US Rep. Gerry Studds enthusiastically shared it with his staff...)
Glad to see the fight for the environment! I think we need to differentiate between climate and pollution! I wrote this piece because some of the "measures" for climate change are actually detrimental to humanity:
Glad to also see you called out Tesla! He takes a big game, but does a lot of damage with his companies. I also call out SpaceX (what's his thing with 'X' anyway) in this article here:
But looking forward to making the earth a greener place. I just hope we aren't led to turn over the world's resources to big corporations like BlackRock that decide to cut down entire rain forests and replace them with solar panels ... "for the good of climate change."
PS: Don't know if you've seen the movie, "What Happened to Monday?" but it gives a really good picture of what happens if we let EVERYTHING politicians have free reign if they say its about climate change:
I think we should recognize how much the abuse and neglect of communities of color in the US reflects the same attitude toward poor nations by the United States and other developed nations. Those in power offer a giant shrug to their suffering victims, domestically and abroad.
I've worked on divestment and boycott campaigns since farmworkers and South Africa, and did a lot of work to get the University of California to divest from fossil fuel holdings. Which is to say, I believe there is an important positive effect of making such assets toxic in public opinion, even if there is no direct financial penalty to the firms being divested. Still, I'd like to believe that there is such a penalty effect. However the rather complex analysis presented in this Freakonomics podcast casts doubt on that effect. I would love to hear a competing analysis or review of that analysis from your point of view.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/are-e-s-g-investors-actually-helping-the-environment/
In any case, thank you more than I can say for your research and advocacy. I always take time to read your New Yorker and substack pieces carefully.
Thank you for your post, Bill. I watched the film and it made me very sad. It feels very profound to me, especially after Vermont's severe flooding.
I don't excuse the awful Elon for lying about the range of the cars, but someone who has one tells me that some owners just don't learn to use the settings properly, e.g. leaving the car with interior heating cooling on during extreme weather will certainly ensure a need for re-charging before one thinks the car should need it. I think we have to admit that Tesla has done a huge amount for the acceptance of EVs in the US, mainly by putting chargers all over the country. Lying, however, is NEVER acceptable and people who lie should be held accountable, always.
INTENTIONALLY WITHHELD INFORMATION FOR SURVIVAL OF THE PLANET FOSTERING PROFIT OVER PEOPLE AND THE PLANET
1. Cutting CO2 emissions will not reverse a climate catastrophe. Only drawing down the CO2 in the atmosphere will do so. The most effective and elegant way to accomplish this in time is to mandate that all arable soil be regenerated to living soil with all agriculture mandated to be organic and regenerative. The pathway to this is known and includes subsoil (Key Line) plowing, no monocultural agriculture, holistic livestock management, subsidies for regenerative agriculture, subsidized agricultural waste fuel logs for cooking (The gathering of forest cooking fuel is the number one cause of worldwide deforestation and cooking fuel is only fuel not subsidized globally.), banning fishing as needed long enough to restore the draw down effect of vibrant oceans.
2. Enhancing the reflectivity of the Earth can be a relatively low risk project involving private and public efforts to paint rooftops, resurface streets, parking lots, airports and roadways with light reflecting materials, aerial dispersing of light sand (like gypsum) over darker soils, the spraying safe non-toxic and biodegradable floating material for oceans, reforestation and re-vegetation to create greater cloud cover once the fuel logs for cooking issue is solved and incentives created to preserve forested areas. Also holistic livestock management preserves existing forests and encourages new growth.
3. Researching and possible implementing of NASA's space shield at the L1 zone which NASA has claimed could cool the Earth by two degrees in a short period of time and be able to be controlled to manage its cooling effects. The concept works primarily due to the penumbra shadow of such a shield.
4. Subsidizing agricultural waste compressed fuel logs (rice chaff, sugarcane bagasse, sawdust, coffee pulp) to prevent further harvesting of forest wood for cooking worldwide and solving the number one cause of worldwide deforestation.
5. EV vehicles are not the answer for reversing climate disturbances. The manufacturing of the vehicles and the electric batteries, the charging of those batteries like the manufacturing of windmills and solar panels will dramatically increase the use of fossil fuels and accelerate the planet's slide towards extinction. All fuel injection cars on the road today can easily be retrofitted to run on biogas from livestock and unfracked natural gas reducing dramatically the amount of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. Other fossil-fuel free fuels exist for automotive transportation including hydrogen which could be retrofitted to existing vehicles once its production becomes CO2 emission-free.
6. Cooling and heating of homes and other buildings can be achieved with modifications (and, of course, especially in new construction) to utilize the Earth's atmospheric and geothermal heat. Enhanced natural chimney effect ventilation even in sky crapers coupled with evaporative cooling systems could replace hugely inefficient fossil fuel-driven heating and cooling systems.
7. Thermal mass heating and cooling systems heat and cool with highly efficient radiant technology much more efficient than “sensible” air heating systems.
8. Transitioning to a truly democratic direct voting Constitutional Democracy would make possible the mandating of the above critical measures now blocked by profit over people corporations concerned with the short term interests of their shareholders, not their stakeholders. Vote for a direct vote democracy at https://wethepeope.directvotedemocracy.com
9. The full disclosure of over 5,000 classified patents on suppressed inventions (including zero emission energy inventions) would spark an explosion of creative energy (renewable) dedicated to the survival of the planet and the creation of a regenerative future for human kind.
Looking forward,
Bob Dunsmore heartmindalliance@gmail.com
Founder and president of the Heart Mind Alliance (.com) which has launched the block-chain secured direct digital voting web site https;//wethepeople.directvotedemocracy.com)
Producer of the documentary "Bolivia Beyond Belief" (on You Tube) regarding the Bolivian Democratic Revolution I witnessed while living in Bolivia from 2005 to 2008
Initiated as an Andean Cosmovision Amauta
After working in 20 countries in community development I have created a You Tube channel with 135 videos of the most successful appropriate technologies I learned of: "Community-based Appropriate Technologies" (Now on the Northern New Mexico College portal for international access)
Served as Area Director for South America and the Caribbean for Habitat for Humanity
Reflexologist certified by the International Institute of Reflexology
Founder of Colorado's San Luis Valley Solar Energy Association and Alamosa Childrens' School
Founder of the Rio Arriba Bioregional Council and the Espanola Valley Community Council, New Mexico
Author of I Am: A Journey Through Times and Spaces and the book The Great Mandate (available via Kindle)
Grandfather of three
Our human civilizations of today, are so much more complex than bees or ants, that I'm never surprised when McKibben and other super-great environmental thinkers, go OMITTING notice of world's darkest dark corners of modernly-equipped CRUELTY. Somehow, it escapes notice that exclusively elegant saving the biosphere/ecosphere ignores the world's kindness/cruelty tug of war, and the outcome could be cold-souled folks as Musk, pushing their deluded hopes to colonize Mars while the rest of us die like overheated coral colonies. Right now, myself as ill-adept age 78, am urging activist voices to get the US-China negotiators to add one more (maybe two more) bargaining chips to their elegant bargaining games, namely, not only human rights, intellectual property rights, South China Sea and Taiwan Straits naval rights, but also add ANIMAL RIGHTS -- specifically, as to US over-speeded slaughterhouses and China's odd busy underworld of dog and cat meat kidnappings and killings with horrific tortures as part of fulfilling the ancient hopes for magical good health effects for the eaters of the torture-killed stolen companion animals (yes, if you haven't followed these China and US issues you'll think it's some Qanon conspiracy talk, but it's as was the case when world was diligently ignoring the Holocaust and even Ben-Gurion telling a meeting to drop the subject, and don't bomb the Auschwitz railroad or gas chamber buildings). China and the US negotiations could also build some anti-cruelty momentum toward jointly developing ecologically sound mass-production and mass-marketing of bio-science's new "no-kill/lab-grown" meats (and seafoods and dairy and other animal products as the ivory the elephants and rhinos are being killed-off for -- and more). But maybe it's asking too much of green-ness environment lovers, to ask them to widen focus to bloodily un-green cruelty scenes, as it also seems tragically hard to focus on the un-green issues of pharmaceutics to reduce population gently before a Putin or a US counterpart goes just slightly crazy enough to threaten new A-bombs, new Chernobyls, new world famines, perhaps new cuttings of the undersea fiber-optics and overhead satellite relays, without which this message wouldn't be going farther than my fingers on this keyboard (as I sit in air conditioned refuge from 90 F heat at age 78, in momentary semi-safety of being relegated to a real-life homeless shelter after July 6 brute lockout from my twelve-year's apartment by a local judiciary gone as loco as Putin himself). Again, I must bleat and blather that if environmentalism keeps omitting the world's ugly cruelty issues, we'll lose on the beautiful issues also -- we'll lose also on such issues as needing very UN-GREEN rocketry to stave-off asteroids -- as today, we fail to mobilize the ALSO UN-GREEN gargantuan aircraft fleets to effectively "waterbomb" the Canada wildfire complex grimly close to my forested New England, plus also soak down mass-killer city heatwaves now starting to dot the globe. [ If anybody can figure out how to make my Substack work, please transfer a copy of this to it -- thanks! ]
This REALLY should be about water, The Earth's natural cooling systems. these are flowing waters of many rivers ,located in the Arctic ,subarctic, Antarctic, subantarctic and equatorial regions. These rivers have been blocked from their natural flow. The main ingredient for the demise of our Northern Hemisphere Arctic initially started 70 years ago in northern Canada and Eastern Siberia with the Soviets damming some major rivers and the Canadians soon followed . This was done all along the Arctic Archipelago.
Rivers pushed back by dams, flooding inland over trillions of tons of carbon, sit Stagnant being Radiated all summer-long over permafrost. These events 70 years ago jump-started the climate feedback loops of today and this hydroelectric model still to this day is amplifying the feedback loops and continues to push the planet climate into no return. Bill, the scientists are all aware of this ....so what's up with you? Let's start with Vermont ..How about rejecting Arctic electricity that Hydro Quebec is selling to VT as clean renewable energy... Greenwashed lies!! Bill when are you going to get VT off of sucking the tit of Canadian Arctic energy?
Here's just one supporting article by NASA and the truth is that evaporations and the huge amounts of Water Vapor coming from Hydros seas-size containments and also now freshwater river discharges increasing at 5-10 x normal river flow only in wintertime, and only to make electricity then when the waters have warmed above freezing and hit cold Arctic air. (Steamy Relationships: How Atmospheric Water Vapor Supercharges Earth’s Greenhouse Effect by Alan Buis, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, February 8, 2022) https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/3143/steamy-relationships-how-atmospheric-water-vapor-supercharges-earths-greenhouse-effect/
just posted remark re short additional note about plastics focus for Earth Day... but Dream Hampton's video deserves more than comments: it shifts our historic, geographic perspective ––not only regarding Belle Isle and Detroit; and not only about the flooding and crumbling foundations and erasure-by-mould of Black family archives –– but as the title indicates, our view of these fateful days and years and our inter-woven communities through the lens of water and the endangered lives embodied in it...
#TheBeatGreens wrote and recorded "Stop Using Plastic" in the early '90's: alas, not too many folks head it! (though our US Rep. Gerry Studds enthusiastically shared it with his staff...)
https://soundcloud.com/jerushamusic/stop-buying-plastic
Glad to see the fight for the environment! I think we need to differentiate between climate and pollution! I wrote this piece because some of the "measures" for climate change are actually detrimental to humanity:
https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/why-climate-change-is-wrong-dangerous
Glad to also see you called out Tesla! He takes a big game, but does a lot of damage with his companies. I also call out SpaceX (what's his thing with 'X' anyway) in this article here:
https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/the-great-spacex-deception
But looking forward to making the earth a greener place. I just hope we aren't led to turn over the world's resources to big corporations like BlackRock that decide to cut down entire rain forests and replace them with solar panels ... "for the good of climate change."
PS: Don't know if you've seen the movie, "What Happened to Monday?" but it gives a really good picture of what happens if we let EVERYTHING politicians have free reign if they say its about climate change:
https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/covid-and-climate-change