While all of us who live in "developed" countries drive climate change and overshoot, it's the billionaire class that is primarily responsible. The private jets of just 23 billionaires emit an average of 2,074 tons of carbon a year — equivalent to 300 years’ worth of emissions for the average person — or 2,000 years’ worth for someone in the global poorest 50 percent. Even more destructive, 40 percent of the billionaire investments are in the industries of oil, mining, shipping, and cement. Humanity has a deep-seated behavioral problem. Unfortunately, I don't see either granting nature rights or a change of heart on the horizon. Multiple tipping points are surpassed, and the plan being executed in the US is the round up of brown people and the build out of forced labor in prison camps.
What seems obvious to you and me is rare knowledge and perspective.
I hope that by learning and writing about this I can contribute with something. The worst thing is to feel powerless and like we have no agency. From my talks with people from all walks of life, there's more and more awareness that we're destroying this planet and no one is happy. We lived on this planet with a different mentality for millennia, this way of life is not set in stone.
I agree. And taking agency is a choice. To me, it's a responsibility as well. If we know things of importance we must share them. Yes, many are unhappy. Our blithe world came apart during Covid. The pre Covid world was unsustainable, and our false shallow puddle of happiness was the narcotic called consumerism. This is gut check time. Can we show people there are more meaningful ways of living? Can we show people that deeper thinking and effort are where meaning lies? Can we give them the tools to get there?
I would like to see more people looking for answers together and not expecting the 'ruling class' to solve all the issues because they won't. Those rural women from India are an example for me: you see a problem, you try to solve it. We all have agency one way or another.
In my view, the ruling class wishes to accelerate our problems. The motivations vary, but in the reality of a world of shrinking resources a disturbing argument for deliberate depopulation (from their ugly point of view) can be made. I like what the women of India are trying to do. Conditions for equatorial countries are already desperate. 1000 pilgrims died on their journey to Mecca last year. Dozens of Indian voters died standing in line. A third of Pakistan was flooded a few summers ago. People are dying from wet-bulb temperatures. We all have agency in principle, if we're informed. Evilly, the mass media machine does its best to tamp hard truths down.
It’s probably time to ask ourselves why we allow people to get so rich by using our common resources. But I think lots of people are uncomfortable with this line of thought.
How would “the ruling class” have an opinion? We have a systemic problem where capitalism, that the rich are the winners at, is running their show. Rather than evil villains, we have worked our way, along capitalism’s natural lines, into the mess we are in — that those winners, strange but true since they will go down with everyone else, don’t have an ethos to break out of.
This struck me as a very right-on piece about what’s going on, that describes where we are in an evolutionary process of breakdown preceding breakthrough…unless we destroy ourselves before we get to operating as the caring family of humanity we have the potential to become. And isn’t this an interesting week, where perhaps the tide has started to turn against Trump’s stranglehold — my Substack tomorrow is about that — where how much that has broken down, thanks to him, gives us a new playing field to grapple with what can send humanity back to the Stone Age unless we change our fundamental ways?
While all of us who live in "developed" countries drive climate change and overshoot, it's the billionaire class that is primarily responsible. The private jets of just 23 billionaires emit an average of 2,074 tons of carbon a year — equivalent to 300 years’ worth of emissions for the average person — or 2,000 years’ worth for someone in the global poorest 50 percent. Even more destructive, 40 percent of the billionaire investments are in the industries of oil, mining, shipping, and cement. Humanity has a deep-seated behavioral problem. Unfortunately, I don't see either granting nature rights or a change of heart on the horizon. Multiple tipping points are surpassed, and the plan being executed in the US is the round up of brown people and the build out of forced labor in prison camps.
What seems obvious to you and me is rare knowledge and perspective.
I hope that by learning and writing about this I can contribute with something. The worst thing is to feel powerless and like we have no agency. From my talks with people from all walks of life, there's more and more awareness that we're destroying this planet and no one is happy. We lived on this planet with a different mentality for millennia, this way of life is not set in stone.
I agree. And taking agency is a choice. To me, it's a responsibility as well. If we know things of importance we must share them. Yes, many are unhappy. Our blithe world came apart during Covid. The pre Covid world was unsustainable, and our false shallow puddle of happiness was the narcotic called consumerism. This is gut check time. Can we show people there are more meaningful ways of living? Can we show people that deeper thinking and effort are where meaning lies? Can we give them the tools to get there?
I would like to see more people looking for answers together and not expecting the 'ruling class' to solve all the issues because they won't. Those rural women from India are an example for me: you see a problem, you try to solve it. We all have agency one way or another.
In my view, the ruling class wishes to accelerate our problems. The motivations vary, but in the reality of a world of shrinking resources a disturbing argument for deliberate depopulation (from their ugly point of view) can be made. I like what the women of India are trying to do. Conditions for equatorial countries are already desperate. 1000 pilgrims died on their journey to Mecca last year. Dozens of Indian voters died standing in line. A third of Pakistan was flooded a few summers ago. People are dying from wet-bulb temperatures. We all have agency in principle, if we're informed. Evilly, the mass media machine does its best to tamp hard truths down.
It’s probably time to ask ourselves why we allow people to get so rich by using our common resources. But I think lots of people are uncomfortable with this line of thought.
How would “the ruling class” have an opinion? We have a systemic problem where capitalism, that the rich are the winners at, is running their show. Rather than evil villains, we have worked our way, along capitalism’s natural lines, into the mess we are in — that those winners, strange but true since they will go down with everyone else, don’t have an ethos to break out of.
This struck me as a very right-on piece about what’s going on, that describes where we are in an evolutionary process of breakdown preceding breakthrough…unless we destroy ourselves before we get to operating as the caring family of humanity we have the potential to become. And isn’t this an interesting week, where perhaps the tide has started to turn against Trump’s stranglehold — my Substack tomorrow is about that — where how much that has broken down, thanks to him, gives us a new playing field to grapple with what can send humanity back to the Stone Age unless we change our fundamental ways?