Unleashing the Abundance of Hoarded Wealth

Do you know what made me cry this week? No, not that President T**** has pulled out of the Paris Agreement. (That man, all he seems to care about is money and attention.)

No, what made me cry was reading that former New York City mayor (and eighth richest person in the world), Michael Bloomberg, has pledged $15 million to pay the US share of supporting the UN Convention on Climate Change secretariat, "including its work to help countries implement their commitments under the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change."

There was something about a person with billions of dollars more than he needs actually doing something good and right and important with that money ... after all the bad news of late ... and I just burst into tears!

According to an article in The Telegraph, Bloomberg — also a UN Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change — said:

"Americans are not walking away from the Paris Climate Agreement. Just the opposite — we are forging ahead. Americans will honor and fulfill the Paris Agreement by leading from the bottom up — and there isn't anything Washington can do to stop us."

*****

I've often thought, Imagine this world if all the rich people stopped hoarding their money ... if they remembered that they can't take it with them ... if they kept enough for their comfort (and sure, a bit of dazzle if they're into that) but shared the rest, realizing that their wealth actually belongs to the whole world ... if they finally learned that you can't eat money, and that a healthy Earth is our greatest wealth and security.  

This week, I caught a tiny glimpse of what the realization of that daydream — all that unleashed abundance — could accomplish.

p.s. There's MORE good news! Massachusetts Republican governor, Charlie Baker, has just signed his state onto the U.S. Climate Alliance, a growing coalition of states (started by Washington state's governor Jay Inslee, New York's Andrew Cuomo, and California's Jerry Brown) determined to meet and even surpass their greenhouse gas reduction targets. But hey, I guess it's not too surprising ... Boston has always been a seedbed of progress and innovation.

 

I Have a Question for Climate Change Deniers: What Is It Going to Take?

It was a bad week for those who believe that the children (of all species) deserve a future — one with a viable biosphere and a survivable climate.

First, "President" T**** (I refuse to give his name airtime) decided to halt American momentum on the climate crisis. Is that ignorance? Stupidity? Negligence? Or just plain cronyism? (With his biggest crony being Putin, who cares not for the Russian people but for the Russian gas and oil industries and their continuing profits.)

Then we got word that the climate change denial group, the Heartland Institute, is sending their denialist drivel of a book (authored by three fossil fuel industry shills with PhDs), intended to seed even more doubt about anthropogenic global warming in the minds of the scientifically illiterate American public, to 200,000 science teachers throughout the United States. Good grief — no, bad grief. 

As I commented online about a Washington Post piece about this travesty of propaganda, there is a bright side. The Heartland Institute has just set the precedent that will allow us to send a copy of Al Gore's new movie, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, to 200,000 science teachers, too! After all, fair's fair. Thanks, Heartland.

An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power trailer

I got up the nerve to ask Heartland Institute to explain their mindset given the climate change emergency we're facing down. Another commenter wrote: "You do know of course that in a matter of time, very distant time, the sun is going to burn up and that will bring about the end of life on earth as we know it. Our piddling carbon footprint in the grand scheme of things means very little."

My response? "So in the near future, you don't care what kind of world we're leaving the children? Because the sun's going to burn out in a few billion years?" (I was glad to see that others suggested her comment was inane if not a little hard-hearted.)

I am really trying to understand a mindset that seems to put profit and greed ahead of life. I feel like I'm missing something. We can't drink oil, breathe "natural" (methane) gas, or eat coal. So why do so many North Americans continue to defend those industries ... at our peril?

To another Heartland supporter and climate change denier who likes the idea of spewing pseudo-science to teachers across the United States, I suggested that they follow the money. "If you do your due diligence, you'll soon discover innumerable links between the authors, fossil fuel and (for at least two of the three) tobacco companies, and 'think tanks' or other organizations (such as Heartland) funded in part by Big Oil or Big Coal (Exxon, Koch Brothers, Peabody, etc.). Even the person who wrote the forward for this second edition works for a lobby group 'funded by New Mexico oil and gas industry interests' (Sourcewatch). What the authors Bob Carter, Fred Singer and Craig Idso do (and continue to do with this publication) is called shilling."

The Heartland Institute Facebook page has a Ronald Reagan meme up top: "Government's first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives." Then why, I asked, isn't the American government protecting its most vulnerable citizens (its children) from the hellish future that is already being unleashed by climate chaos? I just don't get it.

On a friend's FB page, in a discussion of T****'s climate change policy devastation (and the suggestion that he's doing this for the profit), someone wrote: "Exactly gore has made what a billion off of climate change." [sic]

I flipped on the guy. I'm so sick and tired of people ranging on Al Gore. I wrote: "The man has probably done more to make us aware of the climate change emergency than any other living human being. Gore understands that the fastest way to curb greenhouse gas emissions is through market mechanisms, which can turn on a dime (which T****'s stupid tweets have proven). I don't agree with him on everything (I don't agree with anyone on everything!), but revolution takes a lot longer than people think -- and we don't have that time." I invited him to read The Planet-Saving, Capitalism-Subverting, Surprisingly Lucrative Investment Secrets of Al Gore.

But I couldn't stop there: "If you want to rang on someone/something, why not rang on the governments (i.e., taxpayers) the world over who are still giving trillions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies to fossil fuel corporations every year! (And that's while they say that renewable energy companies should be able to stand on their own two feet. Gimme a break. Fossil fuel corporations have never stood on their own two feet. Society has always had to pay the social/health and environmental costs of fossil fuel pollution.)"

Another one that made my blood boil said that abnormally high snowpack in the Sierras proved that climate change is a scam and the California drought is over. Look, we all hope and pray for California that their drought will end (heck, Canada gets nearly 50% of its food from that American state, so you know we've got our fingers crossed for good luck), but it's not as simple as one horrendously rainy season (five deaths!) and a high snowpack. All those aquifers and reservoirs and wells are going to take years to refill.

What is it going to take for climate change deniers to see that their delay tactics are endangering us all? Oh well, let's face it. It's just been a bad and sad week for the climate.

Experiencing Censorship in All the Wrong Places

Censorship. A simple definition might be "the examination of material (such as books, movies, news, and art) and official suppression of any parts that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security (adapted from my computer's dictionary). It is closely related to censure, which means harsh criticism or to criticize harshly.

We used to think of censorship merely in terms of what happened to books and movies that hadn't yet been released. Next came book banning and even book burning. Then some (of the very people who liked to ban and burn books) started equating political correctness with censorship. (I've always considered political correctness to be society's fancy way of labeling what mothers everywhere used to urge: "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.") And with the election of T**** in the United States, saying nasty things about "others" is now considered freedom of speech, so any talk of censorship is seen as unconstitutional — almost tantamount to treason. (Sheesh.)

But lately, censorship seems to have gone wonky in other ways, too ... some consternating and some downright dangerous. Within the last three days, I have experienced censorship in conversation with three different friends.

First, I was telling a friend about a disturbing incident that I'd read about in the paper. "Does this have a sad ending? If so, I don't need to hear it." The story was a cautionary tale about her field of work, but it did, indeed, have a sad ending. So with that, I was shut down. 

And I felt shut down — censored. But mostly I felt sad that there are people who won't (can't?) allow themselves to feel the sadness of others. Have some of us become so fragile that there's no strength and no room left for empathy? How are we going to face the extreme sorrow of the climate change emergency if we can't even share a story about a sad incident in a next-door city?

I don't just tell stories willy-nilly. There's a point to a story that I choose to share — sometimes it has a connection to the other person, but sometimes it's simply something that I found interesting or edifying. In the second incident, I recounted a short TV show that I'd watched on Netflix and found instructive for my own career. I'll admit that my menopausal brain might have made the story more meandering than it needed to be. But my friend, instead of engaging with the story, said (I'm paraphrasing), "You know how people who watch TV will talk about shows they've watched and bore you to tears? You just did that."

Ouch. Obviously her mother never instructed her to say nothing if she didn't have anything nice to say — that was my first thought. But then I began to mourn the lack of patience our society has developed. Can't we just talk about "stuff" with friends anymore? If we don't have the time and patience for everyday — uncensored — conversations, how will we ever have the time and patience to listen to how serious the climate crisis is, the science behind it, and the solutions we needed to implement yesterday?

On my way to tea with a third friend, I kept chanting, "Don't talk about T****, don't say anything negative. Don't talk about T****, don't say anything negative." This friend is (what I think is being called) a progressive. I'm simply someone who likes to get to the bottom of things, so months before the American election, I'd been reading up on T****'s growing popularity. My friend and I had a falling out because I wanted to talk about it (the rise of T****) and she didn't. I've been self-censoring around her ever since. (In fact, it didn't even cross my mind until just now that I could have said, "I warned you.") 

Positive thinking does not stop evil and greed. It just doesn't. It doesn't get the good people elected. It certainly hasn't mitigated climate disruption. Talking about how Big Money and Big Oil are killing the future, what their strategies are, and how we can beat them — that's how we will, well, beat them. Not by pretending that everything is goodness and light. 

If we're going to fill our lives with censorship, I'd like to suggest some Censorship for the Planet. Let's stop giving column inches in our newspapers and blogs to climate change deniers. Let's stop watching news and other shows that give air time to climate change deniers. Let's stop "sharing" the dangerously misleading drivel and "alternative facts" of climate change deniers on our social media channels. 

Folks, let's stop censoring ourselves, our friends and our loved ones (and our climate scientists) and start really listening to them. If we're going to censor at all, let's censor (and censure) those who are committing the greatest evil and the greatest ever crime against humanity: climate change deniers who have delayed urgent action on this emergency for decades, causing millions to lose their lives or their livelihoods, their food security and water sources, their homes or entire homelands. 

Let's be very clear that freedom of speech and expression should not, does not, cannot include the freedom to commit progenycide.