It’s a movie plot : "In a world assaulted by carbon pollution, a world from which life is beings sapped by a greedy elite, many are hypnotized by events, but some are determined to beat the trend. How determined? Got ice?" trigger the bombastic action scenes a la Xmen or Transformers. Title : The 2 Degree Army, you’re recruited.
This is no joke. The New Zealand and Australian farmers that see their crops wither and dry out can point out the culprit : Wall street dominated financial markets. The carbon credit system. The world seems to try to eat the US and it’s dollar currency alive (considering Australia and China agreed to use Remnimbi in direct trades, not dollars, just like some BRIC countries). English farmers dito, having to slaughter cattle because you can’t grow enough gras to feed it through winter. And how about the US farmers? The country where Monsanto is now above the law, it can not be prosecuted, while it can prosecute farmers whose carefully developed grains or wheats became contaminated with patented genes (owned by Monsanto).
What about food stamp recievers, already bumped out of the currency, living in the JPMorgan Chase owned alternative currency system, in the US and the UK. But then the foodstamps stop and you have nothing to feed yourself. Banks own everything. Land being grabbed as it lies fallow. Industry exported to China and no local cultural and skill network for people to provide value for themselves. Fresh produce markets outlawed and raided? Look at the above video, can you imagine why people would have to go hungry, be jobless or recieve foodstamps?
But cute will stop when intensive farming keeps failing. Australian farmers are switching to gras farming because they can’t take the risk anymore to run into a drought. That risk is financial, their farming operation is fuel based (ten carbon calories to one produced ususally) requiring credit, instantly creating a price for the produce on the ‘market’. Farmers are politically incapacitated (since Nixon in the US and everywhere if the methods are intensive). Try a farmer strike for a year and the land will have changed hands again. Unfortunately for intensively farmed land there’s a gap in which no crops will grow once you stop using the chemicals, poisons and fuels. The soil needs to load itself with nitrogen first, which takes about five years. This promises to be a major food calamity we dubbed the "Petro/eco food gap".
“Loss of topsoil, salting from irrigation, the dependence on petrochemicals..are evidently not sustainable. This approach can not be sustained” (CEO Monsanto Shapiro tov Society of Environmental Journalists in 1995)
A bit of anger management is in place, because there are no pretty stories to cling to. Like the dreamy response to the nuclear threat from North Korea, the fact we don’t see beyond our supermarkets should not make us believe it’s some magic forest (getting used to abundance is natural, if the abundance has a natural source like a dense healthy forest), it should define our position as unsettlingly intransparent. What are we going to eat if something comes between us and where the food is produced? If logistics fails because fuel does not arrive because someone else bought it or is fighting over it or it’s just not there anymore? Global Katrina? Right now : No fuel logistics means no logistics.
Who is shooting the dogs?
What if the plants and animals now withering and culled where the dogs in your neighborhood? "Hector is flooded by climate change, drowns". Wtf? Who is behind this? "Fifi blown away by a violent local thunderstorm, due to carbon emissions". "Brazilian loggers shoot environmentalist (yes they do), and your labardor Bello!". You’ll think "I don’t give a damn, but this has to stop!"
Shimkus : The bible says it’s gonna be all right! But he is even making part of his quotes up
Try discussing this and you will run into the media and pundits, in some cases really from nowhere that will sit on parlementary panels and spout lies. But you know there is no debate since 1988, not if you go look since 1980, 1957 or 1912 for that matter. No other reason to make the Keeling curve than a nagging realization something was going wrong, and people where expecting it since the 19th century. No news or article can change the fact we can see for ourselves things are going wrong.
On the flip side we can see industry can make devices, huge machines that provide us with energy to do almost anything. Wind farms are pushing out gas and even coal in Europe as we speak. Changed colder days with sun mean more PV power to drive any electrical process. The real punch comes from the percentage of power that helps create what we really need : Food, clothes, transportation etc. Wealth comes from the production side, not the consumption side. Of course the wealth potential of renewables is infinite. It is because no one will witness the end of our Sun.
Making renewables with renewables will remove the limit to the capacity we can build
So who’s in the 2 Degree Army? Well, you if you are worth more than a penicillin loaded chicken shit. Who do you adres? Anyone making the problem worse. How? In the most annoying way possible. You are not alone. The goal is to gain control over the carbon streams, render it in the hands of those that know how to turn them into abundand renewables and phase them out, then how to start cutting into the CO2, methane. Those that know how to do large scale projects that will not need fuel after the initial setup, but will claim carbon from our atmosphere for years to come, while generating food and other wealth (like us 😉 ). It’s possible : A global shift to carbon sequestring gras farming (with equivalent productivity) can recapture all the emitted carbon since the start of the industrial revolution. That is how possible this is. No symbolism, no cute narrative, but a change of strategy.
The US is turning into tha bastion of all the players that are on the wrong side of history. Against the will of it’s inhabitants by the way. Companies like BASF in Germany, making the nicotinoid bee killing incenticides that cut the bee count in the US by 30%-40% (according to Al Gore) is thinking about moving to the US for it’s shale gas. Good riddance, no more poison in our Dutch rivers. The US doesn’t shrink from 56 million gallons of nuclear waste, so…
Are you in the 2 Degree Army? Think of how you can help this fight. Cute marches by day, and whatever you like at night. The only way to survive this one is to fight.
