Time for Change.
Hey thanks for coming, if I have contacted you directly it's because I think you might be able to help. This site is not being created by a particular person, but by BurnZero, the name of the anonymous collective editing it. We act as nature protecting herself, a collaborative effort to help sort out our collective mess.
This site is presented as a Wiki (much the same format as Wikipedia). It intends to curate a plan of how we might collectively take a different tact to organising society to work within the confines of a closed system and move from egocentric to an ecocentric. It may be that a collapse of our current system is inevitable, but perhaps here we can nurture the seed of something parallel.
This site has been created in the format of an ongoing, editable log to clarify some ideas about how this might be done. As such, BurnZero commits to reference any facts stated to robust scientific papers. If you find a meaningful factual error, please register on this site and correct it.
Introduction
Short: We have had a long collective history, but now it is in jeopardy. Asking politely for the ruling class to act is not going to cut it we need to look at other solutions.
Summary
We need to move from egocentrism to ecocentrism. Some believe we as individuals can slow its progression by adopting better consumption patterns. It can be summarized in this equation:
P x S x E x C = CO2 (carbon dioxide output)
It’s a neat little formula because it drives home the point: that for all the Paris climate talks and more affordable Teslas, environmental incrementalism is somewhat pointless. In the equation, P = population; S = services used by people; E= the energy needed to power those services; and C equals the carbon dioxide created by that energy. Population is of course trending ever-higher, as are the services people demand, especially in the developing world which has barely scratched the surface in terms of cars and air conditioning and other modern basics. Those two factors swamp progress in energy efficiency. Gates points out that scientists are calling for an 80 percent drop in carbon emissions by 2050 (and a total end by 2100) to stave off the most dramatic effects of climate change, yet even with more efficiency, the growth in population and services means that emissions will instead jump by 50%.
Some believe we can look to our entrenched politicians for answers.This might take the form of recycling plastics or paying charities to reduce people's use of firewood is doing a disservice to the cause. However whether it is recycling plastics or lip service from lobbied politicians it seems neither is effective. By greenwashing ourselves it temporarily relieves the anxiety intended for a much bigger problem. This website serves as log of an expedition to find something better.
In healthcare, when someone has a stomach ache, you can quickly treat it by going to a pharmacy. The pharmacist can address the immediate problem, indigestion = antacids, diarrhoea = loperamide, pain = analgesics. However whilst the acute symptoms may subside, you have just removed a key bodily warning system which might remind you that something more serious is wrong. The same is to say with our actions to save the environment, whilst well-meaning, not using plastic straws only helps relieve a symptom of a much larger problem. The science of third parties trying to convince you of these facts is not nefarious, there's no James Bond villain stroking his white cat. Its simply that we are living in a society which bases its success on profit. A classic example of greenwashing is when Volkswagen admitted to cheating emissions tests by fitting various vehicles with a “defect” device, with software which could detect when it was undergoing an emissions test and altering the performance to reduce the emissions level.
The Issue.
Unfortunately, there is no Darth Vader like villian for us to blame. No one is in control of large complex global systems. It is not the evil rich or evil corporations driving us to collapse. It is the ever-evolving systems in which we all participate and which no one influences enough to change direction in any coherent and sustained way that determine our trajectory to collapse. We want someone to blame, and even argue that “we are the system”, and we are all to blame, but we are not. The system will take its own course, as it always has. And all signs are that the courses our energy/resource, economic and ecological/climate systems are on, lead in each case to an End Game.These are the main issues we face:
- Deniers - cherry picking small pieces of information and relying on people’s lack of comprehension and capacity for research to sow doubt and uncertainty.
- Undermining expertise and intellect - (Goebbals, Gove, Bannon, Farage, Savarola, Trump, Putin) creating division between those who care, and those they care about
- Religion - prizing faith over research and evidence based approaches & telling people that their own higher power won’t allow destruction, floods and desertification
- Mercantilist capitalism - capitalism, a great system that has done more to reduce poverty than nearly any other institution, but corrupted and protected by governments in order to allow them to exhaust resources rather than respond to the consequent changes in supply and demand
- First past the post electoral systems - promoting single issue politics (Brexit), and weakening the capacity of smaller parties to campaign for complex longer term issues (understandably seen as secondary)
- Consolidation of the media - I don’t subscribe the conspiracy theories, but 80% of all UK media is controlled by just 4 men - and any economist can tell you the damage done by oligopoly - and any political scientist can appall you with horror stories of what oligarchies do
- Apathy/(bread and circuses) - compare subscriptions to sky sports against subscriptions to Greenpeace - once the bread gets a bit short, it’ll be too late
- Technoutopianism - I’m a fan of a technological solution - but it is a bet and a risky one too - the interrelationships of climate and environment are complex, and the rise of the scientific method over superstition has been incredibly successful in speeding up progress, but it can take a long time, and as you can see from the thermometer below we are already crazily close to the +1.5C increase
- Poor education standards - making it easier for people to be misled through ignorance of the availability of data for research and forecasting (negating their talents and intellect)
- Undiagnosed and untreated mental illnesses - narcissism, psychopathy of the wealthy and those in power.
- Copyright and patent system - if we could copy the code of FB, Gmail, Youtube and distribute it, we would not have to sit through endless advertising promoting excessive consumption just to connect with one another.
- Undisclosed corporate lobbying - many politicians migrate between private and governmental positions.
- Pro natalism - it's inherent in our culture to have more kids. The best thing you can do for the planet is have 1 or less children.
The argument that is presented on this site is that these issues are a symptom, a consequence of a root cause.
The Timeline.
Reverse Maslow of revolution when you get down to the bottom rung, water and food that’s the tipping point. “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”
The projects
- The Last Garden - making corporates more aware of over expansion - inspired by the Joni Mitchel Song "Bog Yellow Taxi"
- Solar music beacons - using solar panels that charge a battery hooked into a bluethooth hifi all set in concrete.
The Goal.
The goal is to figure out what are the best ideas lying around and contrast them. There are two players. One a nihilistic machine whose sole goal is the accumulation of profit, the other is us. However both are on the same ship. The machine is killing the life support that we are both on, they dont fully realise it yet but they are starting to. There will come a point where some of the cogs working within the machine will start realising we are both on the same ship and realise it needs to stop. The realisation will most probably come from environmental black swans. Hurricanes, floods, famine. There are accelerationist amongst us. Who believe this point is inevitable and hedonistically consume quickening all of our demise. You have to believe we can save the ship, look at your children, look at the ground, underneath the bones of thousands of generations of your ancestors. Then look to the sky, a lifeless, dark universe. Lets not be proof of Fermi's paradox. Lets sort this shit out.
Proposed Solutions.
We cannot consume our way out of this crisis.
- Electric Vehicles - a great concept but avoids the root problem.
- Green Energy - one of the best solutions, however it is arguable that we cannot improve our existing infrastructure to get us out of this (Jevons Paradox).
The solution
Stage 1
Ban lobbying.
Increase transparency
Ban loopholes.
Meet Basic Needs - by transitioning away form carbon based fuels in the future this will create a basic need gap for the most vulernable. As such we need to protect people by establishing a firm social foundation—a social guarantee. We need to guarantee universal public healthcare, housing, education, transport, water, and energy and internet, so that everyone has access to the resources they need to live well. And as unnecessary industrial production slows down, we need to shorten the working week to share necessary labor more evenly, and introduce a climate job guarantee to ensure that everyone has access to a decent livelihood—with a basic income for those who cannot work or who choose not to. This is the bread and butter of a just transition.
Tax the rich. We need to tax the rich out of existence. As Thomas Piketty has pointed out (https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/piketty/2019/06/11/the-illusion-of-centrist-ecology/), cutting the purchasing power of the rich is the single most powerful way to reduce excess energy use and emissions. This may sound radical, but think about it: it is irrational—and dangerous—to continue supporting an over-consuming class in the middle of a climate emergency. We cannot allow them to appropriate energy so vastly beyond what anyone could reasonably need.
How can we do this? One approach would be to introduce a wealth tax. Make it tough enough that rich people will be incentivized to sell off assets that are surplus to actual requirements. We can also introduce a maximum income policy, such that anything over a certain threshold faces a 100% rate of tax. In addition to cutting excess consumption at the top, this approach will reduce inequality and eliminate the oligarchic power that pollutes our politics.
Stage 2
Burn Zero Carbon - follow the advice of 100 Nobel laureates and several thousand scientists calls for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to do just that: an international agreement to end fossil fuels on a fair and binding schedule. We don't need net zero (reliance on future technology to suck carbon out of the air) we need aim at burn zero. Nationalize the fossil fuel industry and the energy companies, bringing them under public control, just like any other essential service or utility. This will allow us to wind down fossil fuel production and use in line with science-based schedules, without having to constantly fight fossil capital and their propaganda. It also allows us to protect against price chaos, and ration energy to where it’s needed most, to keep essential services going. At the same time, we need to scale down less-necessary parts of the economy in order to reduce excess energy demand: SUVs, private jets, commercial air travel, industrial beef, fast fashion, advertising, planned obsolescence, the military industrial complex and so on. We need to focus the economy on what is required for human well-being and ecological stability, rather than on corporate profits and elite consumption.
How do you pay for a social guarantee? Any government that has monetary sovereignty can fund it by issuing the national currency; think of quantitative easing, but this time for people and the planet. This is true for all high-income countries, although for EU countries it would have to be done in a coordinated fashion. The crucial thing is that to prevent any risk of inflation, we also have to reduce the purchasing power of the rich. And that brings us to the next key point.
Ban the corporate structure - so other organisation types can flourish. There are already many alternatives in existence, co-operatives etc however they have not become the dominant institutions on earth as corporations have an unfair advantage, much the same as China having a police-state advantage over the west. Coporates are computers, machines unfeeling in pursuit of profit, as they are not governed by humans but solely by profit they have an unfair advange as they do not take into account externalities which effect us allhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEEzripANUQ&t=232s
Eating meat license - eating meat is the third worse thing one can do as a consumer.