Voice of Reason Loc: Earth

To be fair, the same can be said about most topics on this forum. But you're right, it is getting tiresome. I'd already lost interest but had some time to k**l today and checked out of boredom, finding John had responded to a couple of my posts. I doubt I'll be participating much longer.

To l*****ts AGW alarmism is a religion. No amount of logic or reason will change a person's mind about their chosen religion.

John admitted as much with his OP. I'm paraphrasing, but he basically stated that he knows nothing about the facts and doesn't care. He just knows that the high pries..um..scientists of the left say AGW is true so he, like a good tribesman (tribesperson?), must agree and defend.

What's unusual about John is the fact that, notwithstanding his l*****t beliefs, he's literate. He writes quite well. He has a working understanding of phrasing, structure, grammar and even spelling. That puts him head and shoulders above virtually all of the other l*****ts on this site (and quite a few conservatives as well).

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/10/8/extinction_r*******n_global_actions_climate_crisis?utm_source=Democracy+Now%21&utm_campaign=b026a17966-Daily_Digest_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fa2346a853-b026a17966-191715297

This Is Not a Drill: 700+ Arrested as Extinction R*******n Fights Climate Crisis with Direct Action
STORYOCTOBER 08, 2019

GUESTS
Gail Bradbrook
co-founder of Extinction R*******n.

More than 700 people have been arrested in civil disobedience actions as the group Extinction R*******n kicked off two weeks of protests in 60 cities worldwide, demanding urgent government action on the climate crisis. Its members have superglued themselves to government buildings, occupied public landmarks, shut down roads and taken to the streets to sound the alarm about the impending catastrophe of g****l w*****g. Extinction R*******n, a nonpolitical movement, launched last year in the U.K. and rose to prominence in April, when it disrupted traffic in Central London for 11 days. For more about the significance of the coordinated global protests, we speak with Extinction R*******n co-founder Gail Bradbrook.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: “This is not a drill.” That’s the message of thousands of activists who took to the streets of major cities across the globe Monday to raise the alarm about the climate crisis, gluing themselves to buildings, blocking roads, occupying public landmarks and being arrested by the hundreds in the first day of a two-week protest led by Extinction R*******n. The group reports more than 700 activists, from Brisbane to New York City, have been arrested in just the first day and a half of protests.

Nearly 300 were arrested in London after shutting down major streets and taking over 11 sites in Westminster. One group superglued themselves to a parked hearse in Trafalgar Square as hundreds occupied the area. Other demonstrators shut down Westminster Bridge long enough for a couple to get married before the crowd. This is protester Jake Lynch speaking from the streets of London.

JAKE LYNCH: Well, it’s now five months since Parliament declared a climate emergency, and yet we’ve seen no emergency legislation brought forward to take effective action to stem the climate crisis. So we’re still subsidizing f****l f**ls more than any other country in Europe. Globally, carbon emissions are still increasing. We’re heading in precisely the wrong direction. We here at Extinction R*******n are taking action to interrupt the flow of normality, because it is that flow that is carrying us towards disaster.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Extinction R*******n launched in London last year and has since grown into a global movement. Prime Minister Boris Johnson attacked the group’s protesters Monday night, calling them “uncooperative crusties.” Climate activist George Monbiot responded, tweeting, quote, “I’m proud to be an #UncooperativeCrusty. #ExtinctionR*******n continues. Come and see why Boris Johnson h**es it so much, and how it challenges the life-destroying system he defends.”

AMY GOODMAN: In New York City, nearly 90 activists were arrested after staging a die-in on Wall Street, pouring f**e blood on the iconic bull statue outside the New York Stock Exchange. Dozens were also arrested in Amsterdam, Vienna and Madrid. In Brisbane, Australia, an activist hung from Story Bridge in a hammock for six hours. Activists also took to the streets in Chile, Colombia and Mexico. Brazilian protesters held a die-in on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro. Protesters shut down the street in central Paris near the Notre-Dame, and hundreds flooded the streets of Berlin to demand action to combat g****l w*****g. This is German climate activist and migrant rescue ship captain Carola Rackete speaking from Berlin.

CAROLA RACKETE: [t***slated] As Extinction R*******n, we demand that net emissions be reduced to zero by 2025 as part of an emergency program, as well as an immediate halt to the loss of biodiversity. What we also demand, and this is the interesting part, is that there be a citizens gathering which v**es on the necessary measures. Extinction R*******n will never make concrete policy proposals. We are saying the issue has to be handed back democratically to the citizens, who then decide on the measures together.

AMY GOODMAN: Protests continue today in cities around the world. In London, Extinction R*******n plans to plant at least 800 trees outside of Parliament.

For more, we go to London to speak with Extinction R*******n co-founder Gail Bradbrook.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Can you talk about the scope of the protests? And once again, remind us how Extinction R*******n was founded and got its name.

GAIL BRADBROOK: Yeah. Good afternoon, Amy. And I just wanted to say what an honor it is to be on Democracy Now! You asked how this started. I think the first thing to say is this movement stands on the shoulders of our elders across the world who have been protesting about the environment for many years. In many countries, that means death. I mean, 200 environmental activists die each year across the world. And I would include Democracy Now! as one of our elders. You have many fans in the U.K., so thank you for your broadcasts over these years. You’ve kept us going, actually, with your t***h and ability to forward the voice of ordinary people and of activists across the world.

We got going because we did quite a lot of research, actually, into social movements. We looked at social science. We also looked into our hearts about how we were feeling. And we said that a movement would need to be driven both by some techniques called momentum-driven organizing, and we had some training by a fantastic organizer based in the States called Carlos Saavedra from the Ayni Institute. And we also did a lot of research into people like Gene Sharp, the father of civil resistance.

And we welcomed people to feel how these times are for them. And I think the fuel of grief is important to our movement, and the fuel of fear, in all honesty, because what that means is that people are willing to open their hearts up and feel the love for life on Earth and say, “Actually, I am not willing to put up with this anymore.”

I guess the thing to add to that, in a way, is, especially for Westerners like myself that sit in a degree of — quite a degree of privilege, is that there’s something about consumer capitalism that both traumatizes us and then offers us a lot of comforts to stay quiet and silent and to just keep our heads down and keep sort of slightly stressing about keeping our jobs going and so on. And somehow, I think this movement has helped break through that mold by welcoming grief and feeling, and then encouraging people to get on the streets and take risks with the possibility of getting arrested.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Gail Bradbrook, what are the immediate demands of the Extinction R*******n movement?

GAIL BRADBROOK: So, we have three demands. The first one is for government and other institutions to tell the t***h. And also, in that way, it is not just a lip service by declaring emergencies and then carrying on with business as usual. That also means reversing policies inconsistent with that t***h, so stopping immediate harms that are happening. In the U.K., what that means, for example, is that we have fracking happening in this country. We’re opening up new coal mines. We have the planned expansion of the railway system, but through what’s basically an aviation shuttle service called HS2, that’s going to deforest Britain bigger than has happened since World War I. So, tell the t***h and reverse inconsistent policies.

The second demand is for net zero carbon emissions by 2025 and halt in biodiversity loss. And the reason we have such a tight target there is that this is definitely and absolutely an emergency. And what we need is for governments to act like it’s an emergency. If Britain — again, I know the U.K. situation more — carries on as it’s doing with very, very minor reductions in its emissions, it will have run out of its so-called carbon budget — I don’t believe there are any carbon budgets myself, actually — within a few years’ time. And they keep missing targets. So this idea we can have a 2050 target is nonsense.

The third thing is, then, how do you go about seeing these changes. What policies should we have? Should we have carbon budgeting or carbon taxes? Should we put pressure on people to stop flying or go vegan or wh**ever? Should we look at the farming community and how they could farm differently? Well, within all of that are loads of great ideas and loads of debate, and Extinction R*******n is very clear it’s not up to us to have a position on any of that. Within the movement, there have been lots of opinions and so on and lots of debates.

We want a citizens’ assembly. It’s a form of democracy that comes from the older times, from Greece, from Athens, and it was actually how democracy used to be. It wasn’t all about v****g, by a long way. Most things were done by citizens’ juries. So, you select, through a lottery system, like a jury, a demographically representative sample of your citizens, and they’re given critical thinking sk**ls. And they are given lots of information by experts and well facilitated. And they tend to come up with really good policy solutions. And it’s a really good way to handle these kinds of issues, that, frankly, our current democracies are just not able to deal with.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: One of the things you mentioned earlier, consumer capitalism and its ability to basically disarm the population in dealing with the climate crisis. You’ve talked about the relationship between the mushrooming debt in the world and the climate crisis. Could you expand on that?

GAIL BRADBROOK: So, yeah. What I would say is that in its first iteration, Extinction R*******n is really about democracy, by calling in for these new democratic forms for people to have their power. And frankly, in many countries of the world, democracy is in just absolute shambles. It certainly is in the U.K. As people understand that there’s an emergency, there’s — this democracy is not working. There’s going to be two directions of travel. One is in the direction of more democracy, and so that means people’s assemblies and really understanding how we can work together. And the other is in the direction of less democracy, which is the very great risk of ecof*****m. So that’s the focus on democracy.

What some of us are looking at, and it’s an early focus, and as a movement we will write papers and share ideas for feedback, but we’re talking about how we’re going to take on the finance system. So, we have an economic system that essentially is k*****g life on Earth. Let’s put it that way. It’s very simple. As one economist once said — Kenneth Boulding, he said that to expect that you can have exponential growth on a finite planet, you either have to be a madman or an economist.

And I think, increasingly — and I’ve spoken to members of the elite really recently, to investment bankers and so on — people are frightened. And actually, their children are putting a lot of pressure on them. And they know some kind of change has to come.

And in Extinction R*******n, we are generally not — well, I’m not speaking for everybody personally, but as a movement, we’re not ideological. We’re not taking a position against one kind of economic system or for another. We’re saying, basically, this is not working. We need to have a grown-up conversation about what kind of system do we need, both politically and legally and culturally and economically, that will stop this ridiculous, outrageous harming that we’re doing to ourselves and the planet. And obviously, there’s some people absolutely on the frontline of the crisis. And it’s an intergenerational injustice. And how do we then move into a situation where we can repair the harm that we’ve done?

So, what I think we’re going to need to move into is a mass debt refusal, where we say we’re not going to pay the debts that we have, and some of us with some privilege might take on some debts and actually give the money to people at the frontline of the crisis. That’s the kind of direction I’d like to see us move into.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Bradbrook, we played the clip of the German climate activist, the migrant rescue ship captain, Carola Rackete, who makes that link between immigration and climate. Since this is such a key issue all over the world, the issue of migrants and the industrial, polluting countries blocking migrants from coming in, can you talk about that link, climate refugees?

Continues:

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

Continued from previous posts.
GAIL BRADBROOK: Yeah, and I think this is this issue of ecof*****m. Up to one in 10 people will be on the move, without wanting to be, due to mass drought, due to places becoming too hot, due to flooding. And the idea that we can sit in our r****m and close our borders is simply not going to work for us. Obviously, it’s a moral issue. Also, there will be mass migration within countries. So, in the U.K., 10% of the population will be on the move by 2050. That’s the predictions. Actually, the recent IPCC report, which was about the cryosphere and the ocean sea level rising, yet again said that things were worse than thought and that flooding events that were once every hundred years are going to move into being every single year in many locations. So there’s going to be mass migration, and that’s already happening. We’ve already seen some of that. And what we need to do is have a very compassionate approach to how we tackle that issue and how we look after a planet that is destroying places so that they become uninhabitable. And obviously, the people on that frontline, as well, who are doing the migration, tend to be the people that did the least to create this damage. And so we have a moral responsibility to take care of people.

I’m very in favor of, and I’d like to see it actually placed in some international demands — again, the movement needs a conversation about that — with the law of ecocide, which is a law that the lawyer Polly Higgins was working on, and she has a team taking it forward — she died, unfortunately, earlier this year — which would put a fifth crime against peace in at the Rome Statutes level, at the U.N. level. And what that would do would be to criminalize mass damage and destruction of the environment, so many of these damaging actions that are happening in indigenous lands and elsewhere, created by corporations, would literally be criminal.

And then, secondly, what that law also does is it bakes in the insistence that there’s a repair of the harm that happens, which includes compensating people, finding homes for people. And actually, in order to do this repairing of the harm, that needs to happen, you’ve got Sir David King, the former chief scientist of the U.K., who’s setting up a climate repair center and saying that, actually, we can’t even go to one-and-a-half degrees C. You know, the ice is already melting. We’re already over 410 parts per million. What really needs to happen is we have to go into drawdown. We have to be bringing carbon out of the atmosphere, and we can’t wait for these magical technologies that are somehow going to suck the carbon out of the atmosphere in the future and mean we can do business as usual. And so, what we have to do, what we’re going to need to do, is really work with nature to repair the climate. And that’s also going to tackle this evil twin or evil triplet, you know, of biodiversity loss. We’ve got the evil twin of ocean acidification and how we’re wrecking our oceans. All of this has got to be cleaned up.

And what that means is we need, like, a lot of human labor. So, humanity has to rise up in a really beautiful way and tend to the damage that we’ve done. And that needs all of us, and it needs all of us together in the places of the Earth that’s going to sustain life, working together to rewild areas, to restore ecosystems, to clean up the rivers, to plant trees, you know, to basically sort the plastic out in the ocean and so on. And I actually think that there’s so many beautiful innovations out there, and humanity could do that together. And it needs all of us. And, for me, this is part of reweaving a human family back together again. It’s part of dealing with s******c r****m, w***e s*******y and the wounds of patriarchy that want to separate us, make us feel powerless and, you know, destroy our togetherness and make us think that the whole planet is kind of scarce, when actually nature is abundant and it replenishes itself.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to ask you about those who — your response to those critics who agree with the goals of Extinction R*******n but oppose your tactics. For instance, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she supports the right to protest, but, quote, “Blocking people from being able to go and do their day-to-day job doesn’t necessarily take us any closer to the climate action they are calling for.” London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan has said something similar. Your response?

GAIL BRADBROOK: Well, when you look at the results of the protests, if you look at the graphs of how much people are talking about the ecological crisis, it absolutely spikes when the protests happen. So, there’s like two data points here. One is how many people are active in our social movement. And we know from the research of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan that you need between 1 and 3.4% of the population to come together and to be willing to support people to get on the streets and be on the streets themselves. And that, by the way, means that people can be part of Extinction R*******n without being willing to get arrested, because it’s not right for everybody, for many people. They might have caring duties. We can’t guarantee that black people will be treated in the same way as white people and so on. So, this is a movement for everybody. There is a space for everybody.

Now, that doesn’t mean that everybody likes our tactics. And people don’t have to like us in order to start talking about the crisis. What happens if you stand passively by the side of the road with a placard saying, you know, “Stop c*****e c****e” is you just get ignored. When you get on the street and block it, people start to have a conversation about this existential situation that we’re in. When we say “existential threat,” what we mean is we’re in an apocalyptic situation. You have to use biblical language to talk about what it means to be in a sixth mass extinction event. And that’s the only way to get that information over to people — that I understand, anyway — is to be disruptive.

And when people say, “Well, we agree with your message, but we don’t like how you’re doing it,” my my general answer is, like, “If you’ve got a better plan, tell us.” Because, literally, we’ve tried all the other stuff — writing to our MPs and our politicians and doing petitions and going on marches. I don’t see what else there is, other than getting on the streets.

And frankly, as this crisis worsens and we face things like food shortages — you know, the academic term actually is “multi-breadbasket failure,” when across the planet either droughts or floods mean that the farms can no longer produce enough food. When we’re facing that, and, literally, people are fighting over tins of beans in the supermarket, people are going to wonder why more of us weren’t on these streets in these times, when there was still the possibility of two things. One is making the harm less. The other is, you know, starting to repair the harm.

And the other thing that we have to do is professor Jem Bendell’s agenda, which is to start to adapt to the conditions that are going to meet us and are going to meet our children in the future. We have to start planning for, for example, the flooding of nuclear power stations and what that means, planning for localizing food systems and food crises and that kind of thing.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Bradbrook, we just have 10 seconds. Your response to your prime minister, Boris Johnson, calling you “uncooperative crusties”?

GAIL BRADBROOK: I’m sending him a lot of love. He actually met some Extinction R*******n people recently, who sang to him a Taizé song about listen to your heart, let love lead the way. And he actually started to cry and to shake. So, I don’t think anyone is beyond redemption. His father is interested in ecological crises, as well. So, we have to reach out to everybody and say, “Join us, because you know this is real. Stop messing about, Boris, and get on the streets with us.” Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Gail Bradbrook, we want to thank you for being with us, co-founder of Extinction R*******n, speaking to us from London, England.

JohnCorrespondent

Thanks. Your paraphrase is partly true -- perhaps mostly true. My OP (opening post) admitted I'm no expert and that I'm following authority; however, that doesn't mean I "must" follow. There are a few times when I disagree with authority (in society or in life or in the workplace), occasionally as a result of some difficult experience which awakened me to something authorities left out or were wrong about.

If I had explained the whole nuanced situation that led to me believing what the science organizations say about c*****e c****e, the OP would have been even longer. My belief depends partly on how I think society works:

I think that the oil industry has a very large monetary interest in publicizing doubt or denial about anthropogenic g****l w*****g so that it can continue making its large profits, similarly as the tobacco industry sowed doubt about the link between smoking and lung cancer, so that it could continue making its large profits for many years.

Additionally, people in general don't like to have to change their habits (such as driving everywhere in big chunks of metal powered by internal combustion engines). And they would not want to face a big problem which is not only frightening but also might cause them to have to change their habits.

Be that as it may, all of us typical human beings do depend a lot on authority, anyway -- just as I tend to do regarding c*****e c****e. For example, we use medicine that a doctor prescribes but the medicine technology is beyond us as individuals. I believe the Earth is round, and also I believe that disease is often caused by "germs", in large part because I got such information from authority figures. There's some logic that goes along with those ideas, but I cannot always keep up with the logic. If I had to reason everything out by myself then I wouldn't be able to keep up with normal society.

I've been gone a few weeks from here, but I dropped in today because I found an answer to a question someone here asked about a time "lag", regarding CO2 in ice cores, behind temperature increases, by hundreds of years. I scanned here but could not find the post where that question was asked. I found the answer in: https://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm
In summary, it says that historically the _initial_ "changes in temperature during [a given] period are explained by changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, which affects the amount of seasonal sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface." Then the temperature change leads to a rise in CO2, and that increased amount of released CO2 becomes a (big) contributing cause of (much) _more_ temperature change.

The article ends with the humorous "Chickens do not lay eggs, because they have been observed to hatch from them." which is such a great (and relevant) (and sarcastic) line that I think it will lead people to read and understand the whole article.

I also found this (about another subtopic, within the topic of c*****e c****e): https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/global-warming-data-f**ed/ (people said data was f**ed, but that data was not f**ed). I find the snopes article credible because it seems to fit how science works and how society sometimes reacts to it.

JohnCorrespondent

(That was in response to my "Capitalism doesn't seem to have done very well with health care".)

It's related to "health care" "insurance".

My encounters with the health care systems involve seeing doctors and looking at insurance papers. The insurance papers appear needlessly complex. It costs me too much time and effort to look at them. Just this week I was looking at four letters that I got from Kaiser (a health care organization). (The papers were mainly regarding various parts of health care "plans" which are insurance.) The end result was that I didn't need to do anything at all. The papers were confusing even to an expert on the phone. I had to spend a few hours and a few phone calls before finally being told I didn't need to do anything (and finally understanding that). My experience over my lifetime is that insurance papers are complex, and I've long been suspicious of complex papers, especially if they look legal (with "legalese" language) which insurance papers often do. Health care insurance papers are just an example of that complex legalistic paperwork in our society.

The health care insurance industry exists mainly to make profits. But it wastes too much of our time and energy. I believe health care doesn't have to be that complicated. The insurance industry is a middleman between doctors and patients. This middleman has made itself into too big a role. The bigger it gets, the more profits it makes, and the more of our time and energy it wastes.

(In this post, the "profit" concept is closely related to the "capitalism" concept.)

The insurance industry _adds_ to the cost of health care. I admit that insurance is a valid concept and that insurance companies can be worthwhile; but in the health care insurance industry the profit motive has driven it to become too big, too time-consuming for patients and doctors, and too costly for patients.

I've read that other countries have more economical health care systems than we do, and deliver health care that is as good as ours, if not better. I believe those things. Why hasn't the U.S. done wh**ever it is that makes those other countries' health care systems more economical? The U.S. hasn't, because the U.S. thinks those other systems are not "capitalist" enough. Many in the U.S. label those other systems "socialist" which is a word they use for shunning.

I'd rather have the health care system which is (a) more economical, (b) delivers just as good health care, and (c) has less insurance paper complications. It doesn't bother me if it is less "capitalist". It doesn't bother me if it is more "socialist".

Voice of Reason Loc: Earth

Ah yes, the old l*****t shibboleth, corporations are evil and government is angelic. It must be nice to have such a simplistic worldview.

Thanks for the links. The first one describes positive feedback. If A increases that causes B to increase, which causes A to increase...and so on. The problem with that theory is it should cause runaway unstoppable heating. However, the evidence clearly shows that when temperatures in the past have hit peaks, they then start dropping despite CO2 levels being at record highs. Worse, as the temperatures continue to drop over the next 400 years, CO2 levels continue to rise. According to your positive feedback theory, that should be impossible. A much more probable and simple (KISS) explanation is that temperature drives atmospheric CO2 levels, mostly through oceanic temperature changes.

The link to Snopes is typical leftism. They insinuate that those ignorant knuckle-d**gging deniers just don't understand the need to adjust raw temperature data. In reality, most everybody who has looked into it at all knows about these adjustments. They're called homogenization. Virtually everyone who is even faintly knowledgeable on either side of the argument understands the need and importance of homogenizing raw temperature data. However, doing so creates huge opportunities for fraud by those whose livelihoods depend on promoting belief in AGW. That is why it's good to be able to compare raw data to homogenized data. When doing so, many of the homogenized datasets appear to be fraudulent.

Here's an interesting little fact concerning solar power. A general rule-of-thumb for PV solar power is that, on average, within the continental US over the course of a year, one square meter of solar cells will produce 1KWh (1 kilowatt-hour) of electricity per day. A gallon of gas contains roughly the same energy as 37KWh of electricity. That means that it will take a square meter of solar cells a FULL YEAR to produce the energy contained in 10 gallons of gasoline. See what I mean about the lack of energy density?

Thanks to the first amendment, you have the right to believe in and practice any religion you wish. However, also thanks to the same amendment, you do not have the right to force your religious views or practices on anybody else.

Voice of Reason Loc: Earth

Do private for-profit healthcare insurance companies add to the cost of healthcare? Yes.

Do non-profit healthcare insurance companies add to the cost of healthcare? Yes.

Do either of them add over $2 billion in healthcare costs just for their website? I don't think so.

Do government bureaucrats add to the cost of socialized healthcare? Yes. What happens when socialized healthcare underperforms? Those same bureaucrats claim it's due to lack of funding and taxes must be raised again (and again...).