Sunday, January 30, 2022

The Great Pause Week 98: Thich Nhất Hạnh (1926–2022)

"Voluntary simplicity is a superpower anyone can access"

T
his week we lost a great mind
that had dwelt among us these past 95 years. His health had been declining for some time and his passing came as no surprise, but for us it is nonetheless a loss. We are all diminished a little by his absence.

Of course, that is not something he would ever say. “Since I was never born, how then can I die?” he might ask. “Many of us believe that our entire existence is only a lifespan beginning the moment we are born or conceived and ending the moment we die,” he told friends. But that is not a correct understanding.

“The Buddha has a very different understanding of our existence. It is the understanding that birth and death are notions. They are not real. The fact that we think they are true makes a powerful illusion that causes our suffering. The Buddha taught that there is no birth; there is no death; there is no coming; there is no going; there is no same; there is no different; there is no permanent self; there is no annihilation. We only think there is. When we understand that we cannot be destroyed, we are liberated from fear. It is a great relief. We can enjoy life and appreciate it in a new way.”

I was compelled to re-read the writings and lectures of Thich Nhất Hạnh when I was diving into the world of quantum entanglement and the role that epigenetics plays in shaping our destinies. In his seminal 2016 book, Designing Regenerative Cultures, my friend Daniel Christian Wahl reminded me that Thich had a term for quantum entanglement — “interbeing.” 

Whenever I attempt to express a viable path for human survival or articulate some useful engagement, given our very uncertain and dangerous future, I tend to fall back upon the indigenous wisdom and pantheism that has guided my footsteps since youth, its terroir picking up notes of Zen, Tao, and beat dharma along the way. It is difficult to find words to explain what I mean when I say quantum entanglement, but interbeing probably expresses it better than most words. 

Erwin Schrödinger in a letter to Albert Einstein used the word verschränkung which is close. The two physicists were discussing correlations between two particles that interact and then separate, in which it appears that one particle of the entangled pair “knows” what action has been performed on or by the other, and with what outcome, even though there is no known means, or time, for such information to have been communicated.

“Cherish no notion of separated individuality,” I read in Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup’s translation of Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines by kerosine light in a canvas tent on Sumac Road in 1972. I was four months out of law school and a month into my vow of poverty but this idea of no ego was hard to get my head around despite all the riffs I had heard by then from Alan Watts, Swami Satchitananda and Baba Ram Das. Conceptually the notion is not hard — no more so than, say, understanding the amount of empty space in and between atoms of one body and the atoms of another, or, for that matter, the amount of emptiness within the double helix arrangement of DNA, which may have as great role to play in our daily lives as do the nucleoprotein structures we ken to map. 

When Thich Nhất Hạnh paid a call on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to urge him to come out publicly against the Vietnam War, King made a decision some historians, and the King family, believe augured his assassination in Memphis a year later. After that meeting, Dr. King nominated Thich for the Nobel Peace Prize. 

“I do not personally know of anyone more worthy than this gentle monk from Vietnam,” MLK wrote to the Nobel Committee in Norway. Given the controversial nature of the duplicitous, neocolonial war at that time and the fact that Thich had been exiled from his own country in 1966 for his outspoken views (unbecoming a monk in the eyes of many) the Committee chose not to award the Peace Prize to anyone that year, itself an elegant signal of protest.

Author of more than 100 books and a world traveler, Thich Nhất Hạnh was perhaps second only to the Dalai Lama and Pope Francis among best known religious influencers in our time, but his message has always been of a distinctly different quality. In part that was because he did not carry the burden of institution or legacy, which is liberating. In the main, tho, it was because he was a rebel. At the Plum Village monastery, Brother Phap Dung explained

One of the most powerful teachings that he shared with us before he got sick was about not building a stupa [shrine for his remains] for him and putting his ashes in an urn for us to pray to. He strongly commanded us not to do this. I will paraphrase his message:
“Please do not build a stupa for me. Please do not put my ashes in a vase, lock me inside, and limit who I am. I know this will be difficult for some of you. If you must build a stupa though, please make sure that you put a sign on it that says, ‘I am not in here.’ In addition, you can also put another sign that says, ‘I am not out there either,’ and a third sign that says, ‘If I am anywhere, it is in your mindful breathing and in your peaceful steps.’”

The Good News

They don’t publish
the good news.
The good news is published
by us.
We have a special edition every moment,
and we need you to read it.
The good news is that you are alive,
and the linden tree is still there,
standing firm in the harsh Winter.
The good news is that you have wonderful eyes
to touch the blue sky.
The good news is that your child is there before you,
and your arms are available:
hugging is possible.
They only print what is wrong.
Look at each of our special editions.
We always offer the things that are not wrong.
We want you to benefit from them
and help protect them.
The dandelion is there by the sidewalk,
smiling its wondrous smile,
singing the song of eternity.
Listen! You have ears that can hear it.
Bow your head.
Listen to it.
Leave behind the world of sorrow
and preoccupation
and get free.
The latest good news
is that you can do it.

Thich Nhat Hanh 1926–2022

 


The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #Regenerosity


Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works: 

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

Sunday, January 23, 2022

The Great Pause Week 97: BitCoinomics in Kazakhstan

"A golden shanyrak set against a sky blue background with rays of the sun bouncing off two gold-winged unicorns."

Is it a coincidence that cryptocurrencies around the world have added a largely unseen, largely under-reported 7 percent to global money supply while the inflation rate in the United States—highest since the Reagan Recession in 1982—is 7 percent?


A few years ago the Ecovillage Training Center in Tennessee received an application for our apprenticeship program from a young man from Kazakhstan. I had not much prior knowledge of the region and had not recruited him, but somehow he’d got wind of our programs in permaculture and natural building and applied, so we worked out the visa and got him to Tennessee. When he showed us his photos and videos of his home town of Almaty we could see Kazakhstan was already a pretty good ecovillage incubator, with dozens of experimental neighborhoods, some entering their second decade. While their building vernacular was nothing special—cement cube apartments—the interiors revealed artistic skill and craft. 

Kazakhstan is not a country most USAnians think about—just some desert country between China and Russia inhabited by nomadic descendants of the Mongols. The national emblem, adopted in 1992 to replace a Soviet badge from 1920, is a golden shanyrak (the center of the ceiling of a yurt we call the “Eye of Heaven”), set against a sky blue background with rays of the sun bouncing off two gold-winged unicorns. So, yeah, yurts and horses.

With an area equivalent in size to Western Europe (1,000,000 sq mi), Kazakhstan is the largest landlocked country in the world. With only 18 million people, it is also the least densely settled in the world. It has the second largest uranium, chromium, lead, and zinc reserves, the third largest manganese reserves, the fifth largest copper reserves, and ranks in the top ten for coal, iron and gold. It is also an exporter of diamonds. Under its southwestern Caspian lowlands is the world’s 11th largest proven reserve of petroleum and natural gas. Production had been hitting 1.6 million barrels per day (b/d) in recent months. Chevron has a 50% stake in the Tengizchevroil (TCO) field that gets oil to sea by train, about 700,000 b/d. Picture hundreds of tank cars pulled by a string of Temir Zholy 2TE10U diesel locomotives. This oil and mineral wealth have made Kazakhs some of the wealthiest people in Eurasia, which explains why its youth are constructing ecovillages in Almaty and launching start-ups on the Internet to sell stuff to China, Russia and the West. Baikonur Cosmodrome is the world's oldest and largest operational spaceport.


Earlier this month all that came to a screeching halt.

To be fair, internal conflict has been simmering in Kazakhstan for decades. There is an old Soviet era conservative element and a younger entrepreneurial, even libertarian, underclass. Kazakhstan reluctantly became the last Soviet republic to declare independence, and then only after the August 1991 aborted coup attempt in Moscow. Ten days after Kazakhstan withdrew its membership from the USSR, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

Nursultan Nazarbayev had been a happy Soviet puppet. In 1991 he became the new country's first President. He converted the economy to capitalism by cutting deals with Chevron and other majors, dealing himself in on every contract while political and social liberalization lagged. Strikes and protests plagued his rule—oil workers in Zhanaozen, Aktau, Aktobe and Atyrau, coal miners in Karaganda, copper workers in Zhezkazgan, as well as young, liberal activists in modernistic Almaty. Their one unifying message, coined by the feminists, was “Shal, ket!” – “Old man, get out!” 

Nur Sultan
 By 2006, Kazakhstan was generating 60% of the GDP of Central Asia. In 1997, Nazarbayev moved his throne to a splendiferous new seat in Astana. Finally, in 2019, he stepped aside after 35 years of unelected rule. He remained as head of the national security forces and the national oil and mining companies, created a national holiday on his birthday, and renamed Astana, Nur-Sultan, after himself. He owns an estimated 330 million pounds sterling in London real estate.

President Qaysm Joomart Tokaev has been trying to demonstrate a new Kazakh model of progressive independence, but it is kind of like the Republican leadership in Washington trying to distance itself from Mar-A-Lago. Everyone knows who really runs things.

When the January protests erupted—ostensibly over food price inflation and high fuel costs— Tokaev reacted by declaring a state of emergency, issuing “shoot to kill without warning” orders to police, arresting reporters, instituting a complete internet blackout, and asking for intervention by the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Russia’s NATO, which sent 4000 troops from Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Russia to assist in restoring order. By January 13th, Tokaev had arrested some 12,000 union organizers and other civic activists, snuffing out the conflict.

Going back to trying to show a new face for Kazakhstan, Tokaev stripped Nazarbayev of his official rank (although not control of his companies), arrested or executed some of his cronies in the state security apparatus, rolled back gas prices, and restarted the internet. But there is another story here, one which is not being reported.

When neighboring China outlawed cryptocurrency mining overnight last June, many miners —between 60 and 70 percent of Bitcoin’s global mining network—hastily relocated to Kazakhstan, hauling an estimated 87,849 mining machines across the border. By the end of the year. Kazakhstan had become one of the top Bitcoin mining countries, second or third by some accounts. When the internet shut down on January 8, the Bitcoin network lost 12 percent of its hashrate globally. That might have cost Kazakh miners around $20 million, or $4.8 million for every 24 hours with no internet, but the bigger question is, what effect did Bitcoin miners have on causing the protests—and the consequent shutdown—by virtue of the inflationary pressure mining places on energy supply?

Is it a coincidence that cryptocurrencies around the world have added a largely unseen, largely under-reported 7 percent to global money supply and the inflation rate in the United States—highest since the Reagan Recession in 1982—is 7 percent?

When Chinese coinminers plugged their machines into Kazakhstan’s aging power grid it caused a sudden spike in demand for energy. Grappling with blackouts and power cuts, the utilities (owned by Nazarbayev) raised prices. Nazarbayev also jacked up the price of fuel. People shouted “Shal, ket!” and took to the streets.

Meanwhile, for security reasons the miners located their server farms in the remote north, where winter weather brought an unforeseen risk during shutdowns because condensation instantly froze some of the machines, damaging the very expensive hardware. Many Chinese miners had relocated to Southwest Texas this past fall, hoping to cash in on off-peak wind power. Grid reliability in winter there should be equally concerning, but there is a backlog of miners still waiting to plug in as new wind farms go up. Orders for the energy transformers needed to allow Chinese or Russian mining machines to operate in Texas currently have waiting times of six to 12 months.

If the inflation bugaboo being hurled at Joe Biden, weaponized by Fox News with the approval of Mar-A-Lago, brings down the Biden agenda, much as it now threatens to bring down the government of Kazakhstan, what does this say for the stability of countries that are welcoming in BitCoin, such as El Salvador?

Crypto enthusiasts have long forecast the day when fiat currencies are gently put out to pasture, replaced by democratized tokens accepted in free trade, secured by blockchain validation, and incapable of being manipulated by elites to their own ends. Gentle may not accurately describe that change, or “inevitable” describe its viability.

Of course, unless and until it stops drilling oil and gas and mining uranium, Kazakhstan will have a bigger problem than crypto-inflation. The amber plains of grain that underpin its food supply will turn to blowing dust and the hordes that arrive by the millions looking to survive inland after fleeing from rising seas and wildfires will not be golden.


 

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #Regenerosity

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.


Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works: 

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 

2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 

3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 

4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

 

Sunday, January 16, 2022

The Great Pause Week 96: Eight Climate Goals for the Next 8 Years

"And the last thing you want to do when you are dieting is to binge."


Responding to this blog
just hours after the previous post was published, a government spokesperson said it was true that the United States had missed its goals in 2021 for reducing carbon dioxide emissions but hoped to be back onto its Paris Agreement track in 2022. 

“We need to see annual emission reductions of around 5% each year, and this year we saw emissions grow over 6%,” said Kate Larsen of the Rhodium Group, which released the latest data. The Dow index fell 400 points on this news, as traders took profits to buy doomsteads.

Weasel words. A 5% decline slope would be in agreement with the Biden Administration’s announced target for meeting its national commitments to the Paris process. It gets that number by shifting around the starting year. To actually be on track to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement would require slimming the world greenhouse footprint by 184 billion tons over the next 8 years (36.7 GtCO2e in 2019 times 10 years, divided in half). 

With just 8 years to make up for ground lost, I have 8 suggestions of simple, relatively painless, ways to drop global emissions by 11 percent per year and hit the 2030 target of halving global emissions. Here, then, is my top eight countdown:

8. More vasectomies 

It is not difficult to convert vasectomies into billions of tons of carbon dioxide. For each child avoided in Luxembourg 41.82 metric tons of CO2/y do not get released each year. That is based on buying habits, not land use, insurance, or cement being poured, so the number is likely a little low. In United States the average child costs 17.75 tons per year, Russia 9.59, Italy 7.68, China 6.27. In 14 African countries combined it is 2.61. An Indian child adds 1.67. World average is 4.78, so if one billion vasectomies could cut the global birth rate by 50 million per year it would save 0.25 GtCO2e/y, or 2 billion tons by 2030.

7. Avoid stuff from faraway places, and going there

Flying is often thought of as a major impact, but eliminating all passenger air travel would only give us 0.8 GtCO2e/y. Still, we need to lose pounds by losing ounces. Shipping, like flying, accounts for 10.6% of global emissions. Staying close to home and buying local would give us back 1.6 GtCO2e/y or 12.8 billion tons by 2030.

6. Grow more bamboo

The carbon sequestration properties of bamboo have been studied in countries where it naturally forms wild forests, such as México and China, but also in unusual places like Ireland, where they are considering it for a biofuel crop. Bamboo is the second fastest growing plant in the world, after algae, and already employs more than one in six humans in its commerce. With more than 70,000 varieties to choose from, it can grow nearly everywhere and does not need good soil and water. Presently, bamboo occupies an area of 36 million hectares worldwide, which is equivalent to 3.2% of the total forest area in the world. About a third of that bamboo is in India and 12% in China. On average, one hectare of bamboo absorbs 62.3 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere per year, so adding just 10% per year to the world’s bamboo forests would absorb 0.2 billion tons per year. But why stop there? Don’t you remember the lush bamboo scenery from The Time Machine? It grows everywhere. Why don’t we loose it to double the bamboo forested area annually? Result: 4.29 GtCO2e/y or 34.32 billion tons by 2030. Just make sure you harvest a third every year and don’t let it rot and go back to the atmosphere. 

5. Grow more algae

You remember we said bamboo is the second fastest growing plant in the world, after algae? No? Put down that reefer and re-read the last paragraph. Two thirds of the planet is covered with water. 5 GtCO2e/y or 40 billion tons by 2030.

4. Skip electric cars. Bike 

Road transport accounts for 17% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Eliminating just personal automobiles (including electric) would give us back 3.8 GtCO2e/y or 30.4 billion tons by 2030. Sorry this is out of sequence but I couldn’t resist the reefer joke, and incidentally we could also be growing more cannabis.

3. The night of the short knives

Pets are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions each year than energy-related emissions from oil and gas extraction or manufacturing of fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, and refrigerants, combined. Twice as much as commercial air travel. Twice as much as cement. More than all freight trucking. Twice as much as freight maritime transport and cruise ships. Each pet owner can hold whatever farewell ceremony seems appropriate and then quietly euthanize their dogs, cats, parakeets and goldfish and substitute lifelike animatrons. Drop in Greenhouse Gas Emissions: 5.8 GtCO2e/y or 46.4 billion tons by 2030.

2. Tofu

Switch to vegetarian diets. Drop in Greenhouse Gas Emissions: 7.1 GtCO2e/y or 56.8 billion tons by 2030.

And finally, the number one thing we could do right now to hit the 2030 goal:

1. Green cities

After accounting for the carbon footprint of materials and installation, which take from 6 to 15 years to offset in the 50 year life of a roof, the positive effects of vegetating rooftops or siting new buildings underground and planting grasses come mostly from energy performance and urban cooling. Still, vegetation like mosses and sedums, which are weather and drought resistant, remove 2.5 kg CO2 per square meter. Covering a city like Paris (100 million square meters of roofing) with mosses on pitched roofs and sedums on flat roofs would draw down 0.25 billion tons per year. There are 123 cities in the world the size of Paris or larger, so just repeating the Paris example in half of those would cancel out emissions by 15 GtCO2e/y, or or 120 billion tons by 2030.

If all of these ideas are not enough for you, Paul Hawken describes 100 more in his books, Drawdown and Regeneration.

Summing the top 8 tips, we’ve achieved 42.84 billion tons of CO2 emissions reductions and/or carbon removal per year. Keeping that pace for eight years would pull 342.72 billion tons and our target was 184 billion tons. We didn’t just hit our target, we smashed it! Maybe we could ease off the pace, only go vegan 3 days per week, let our pet die of old age, and keep the electric car for rainy days.

That said, from 2030 to 2040 we will need to do it all over again, make up any shortfalls from this decade, and adjust the goal if natural emissions have increased in response to warming already in the pipeline, such as methane from melting permafrost or CO2 from wildfires and burning peat, or if there are — dare we imagine? — renegade countries that choose to ignore the UN targets.

Of course, the last thing you want to do when you are dieting is to binge. There should be no new gas stations or car dealerships opening up. There should be no new leases for oil exploration. There should be no more pipelines and offshore rigs being built. And no more pet stores in the mall! One definition of insanity is to keep repeating what you already know is killing you.


References:

Jackson, R.B., Friedlingstein, P., Le Quere, C., Abernethy, S., Andrew, R.M., Canadell, J.G., Ciais, P., Davis, S.J., Deng, Z., Liu, Z. and Peters, G.P., 2021. Global fossil carbon emissions rebound near pre-COVID-19 levels. arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.02222.

Kuronuma T, Watanabe H, Ishihara T, et al. CO2 Payoff of extensive green roofs with different vegetation species. Sustain. 2018;10(7):1–12. doi:10.3390/su10072256 

Getter K, Rowe D, Robertson G, Cregg B, Andresen J. Carbon sequestration potential of extensive green roofs. Environ Sci Technol. 2009; 43(19):7564–7570. 


The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #Regenerosity

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”
 — Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.


Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:
1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

 

Sunday, January 9, 2022

The Great Pause Week 95: Our 2021 Report Card

"The report card arriving at the start of 2022 is … well … disappointing. We could be doing much better."

These are tough times for a lot of people. This past year touched many of us in painful ways because of the pandemic, the economic fallout from that, and a string of horrible climate events took lives, livelihoods, homes, and lifetime memories. This coming year promises only more of the same.

None of those are the toughest challenge we face.

That challenge is the 2-degree test. Pass it and our grandchildren survive to make more of our line. Fail, and they don’t. Simple as that.

Oh, human extinction may not suddenly happen at 2 degrees, although that would be hotter than mammals of our kind have experienced in our evolutionary history. But what scientists have been saying for more than 30 years is that 2 degrees is a threshold and a trigger. It marks the start of a cascade of reinforcing feedbacks that get us to 3, which gets us to 4, etc. There is some speculation that 5 would find a new stable state of Hothouse Earth but it is just that — speculation. By then it would not matter for our kind. If we don’t disappear at 2, we’ll be gone by 3. Four at the latest. Our current trajectory will take us 4.6 to 4.9 degrees warmer by 2100.

In August 1981, James Hansen and co-authors published a paper in Science entitled “Climate impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide,” that predicted, among other things, accelerated surface warming in the Arctic, leading to global shifts in climate patterns with pronounced droughts and wildfires in some areas and ice storms and floods in others. Hansen said that the signal would become strong enough by 2000 that most people would be able to directly observe the change. We might have listened, 8 years later, when Hansen testified to Congress, saying it was then 99% certain that anthropogenic climate change was already happening, or a few years later, when he began a TED talk, “It’s as if an asteroid were heading towards Earth…,” but we didn’t.

That hesitancy had a cost. The most recent IPCC report and a host of similar studies say we have to halve emissions by 2030 to have a 50 or 60 percent chance of not going over the no-going-back threshold. We are left, in 2022, with an 11 percent glide slope to get out of fossil fuels or lose the 2-degree race. Who can deny, just looking out the window of the Chuck E Cheese, that our 1-degree passage has been truly catastrophic?

The last time there was this much carbon in the atmosphere, Earth was in the P.E.T.M. — the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. After all the land animals who couldn’t burrow went extinct, the oceans acidified and even organisms below the thermocline in the deep sea went extinct too. That pretty much ended the global food supply for a hundred million years, but then worms led to reptiles and reptiles led to mammals and avian and fish species and before you knew it you had smart monkeys blogging and making podcasts.

Although there is a large gap between how long it takes to change radiative forcing by chemically changing the atmosphere and the actual change of Earth’s surface temperature, the speed of warming now is more than ten times faster than the transition into the P.E.T.M. It is more than ten times faster than any climate transition.

At the beginning of 2021 we got some great news. It was like bringing home a report card with straight A’s. After rising steadily for decades, global carbon dioxide emissions fell by 6.4%, or 2.3 billion tonnes, in 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic squelched economic and social activities worldwide. While that is not 11 percent, and we would need to make up for the shortfall in 2021, we were at least headed in the right direction. You can’t expect to hit 11 percent per year straight out of the starting blocks, after all.

Moreover, 2020 showed that the pundits who said suddenly removing global dimming would spike the heat and kill us all were wrong and the scientists who said the brightening shock would be brief and recoverable were right. Suddenly, all over the major shipping routes of the world, whales recovered their hearing and began to sing again. Without all the gawking tourists, Giant Pandas in Chinese zoos began mating again.

The report card arriving at the start of 2022 is … well … disappointing. Straight F’s. I don’t know if disappointing is really the right word. Global fossil carbon emissions in 2021 were 36.4 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent, a rise of approximately 4.9 percent compared to 2020. China emitted 11.2 billion tCO2 in 2021, up 4% from 2020 and 6% higher than in 2019. In the US and Europe the rebound was 8 percent. India’s fossil emissions jumped almost 13 percent. This rebound almost returns us to 2019 levels, when the world emitted 36.7 billion tons.

Coal use in 2021 rose above 2019 levels, and is only slightly (<1%) below the 2013 peak. At Glasgow, more than 40 countries pledged to phase out coal use. Missing from that list were China, India, Australia and the United States. CO2 emissions from natural gas rebounded above 2019 levels. More disturbing are the unchecked methane emissions from wells, pipelines and refineries as the new natural gas industry becomes the designated coal substitute. All that methane goes on top of the spike in emissions from natural sources as Earth warms, forests burn and permafrost melts.

Fully one third of the $15–20 trillion in global economic stimulus packages already passed globally is going to fossil fuels and carbon-intensive heavy industries. Here in the U.S., unless the Build Back Better bill passes, very little of our stimulus spending will go to green energy and clean tech.

— Scientific American

This is where we find ourselves at the start of 2022. Back where we were at the start of 2020. We needed more than one Covid to get to 11 percent but we only got one. And when that was past (or so we imagined) we went back to “normal.” Normal is the asteroid still approaching.

Next week I will propose eight relatively simple and straightforward solutions for the next 8 years that will achieve the 2030 target and keep us within the 2-degree boundary.

 


 

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #Regenerosity #DontLookUp

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.


Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:
1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

Sunday, January 2, 2022

The Great Pause Week 94: Restoring the Vote in Tennessee in 1981

"I then sued the Tennessee Secretary of State to nullify the felon disenfranchisement law."

Last week I described my foibles and failures attempting to employ federal law in federal courts to throw out bad voting laws installed by Republican cabals in the 70’s and 80’s. As Clements said, history may not repeat, but it rhymes.

Because the feds dismissed the plaintiff’s complaint for failure to state a claim, the many issues raised by Wesley vs. Collins went largely unresolved and it has festered as untidy precedent and the subject of many law review articles but affords scant satisfaction.

It did not fester long with me. While it was still on appeal, I paid a call on a close friend, the great law professor and appellate litigator, Lewis Laska, and asked his advice. He and I discussed the possibility of a state case under Tennessee’s constitution. Tennessee had a very unique Constitutional history and Laska and I had both previously researched that to fine nuance.

In Tennessee’s original 1796 Constitution all free men over twenty-one years of age, including free black men, were given the franchise, without requirements for property ownership, wealth or literacy. By 1834 Antebellum sentiments had shifted and the right was amended to “Every free white man of the age of twenty-one years.”

Women, slaves, and Indians were still strictly out of luck. Now they were joined by black men. Enfranchisement had lasted just 38 years. Roe v. Wade has been on the books for 48 years. Power shifts.

There is something to be said for the survival strategy of picking as your Vice President someone who is hated by those who might wish you harm. Kennedy’s choice of LBJ is a poignant example of the wrong choice. Likewise Reagan and G.H.W. Bush. Actual bullets establish my point. Agnew, Gore, Pence, and Kamala Harris were all safe choices. Lincoln’s “Group of Rivals,” “charity for all, malice towards none,” and “bind the wounds” sentiments may have been noble, but they made him a no-brainer (no pun intended) target when he chose Andrew Johnson for his Veep.

After the fall of Fort Donelson on February 15, 1862, the greater part of Tennessee came into the possession of the Union army. President Abraham Lincoln appointed Andrew Johnson to be military governor. For more than two years, Johnson exercised complete and dictatorial control over state government. In 1864, Johnson was nominated to run as Lincoln's Vice-President, and because he desired to obtain the free electoral vote of his own State, he permitted the Union party to call a political convention. At the 1865 convention, the party passed a resolution, purporting to be a constitutional amendment, which was to have the effect of disenfranchising anyone who had voted for or served in the secessionist government or in the Confederate army. In the presidential election of 1860, before the war, 145,000 votes had been cast in Tennessee. In the first general election in 1865, after the convention, the State's voters cast only 25,000 votes, about the number of Union army troops occupying Tennessee at the time.

Gaskin vs. Collins, December 12, 1983.

A pardoned former Confederate soldier sued (Ridley, 43 Tenn. 569.). Justice Shackelford, writing for the Tennessee Supreme court, lamented:

The elective franchise is not an inalienable right or privilege, but a political right, conferred, limited, or withheld, at the pleasure of the people, acting in their sovereign capacity. Each State may define it in its own Constitution, or empower its Legislature to do so.

This situation was intolerable to a majority of citizens so the Assembly put out the call for a new Constitutional convention and in 1870 that body returned voting rights to most. While instituting a few more pernicious clauses, like residency and poll taxes, it allowed all men to vote regardless of their race or Civil War affiliations. Most importantly, it wrote in this:

Article 1, Section 5:

The election shall be free and equal, and the right of suffrage, as hereinafter declared, shall never be denied to any person entitled thereto, except upon conviction by a jury of some infamous crime, previously ascertained and declared by law, and judgment thereon by court of competent jurisdiction. (Emphasis added)

Stephen Gaskin was convicted on November 11, 1971 of the felony of “manufacturing marijuana.” At that time, it was not an infamous crime. In 1975, he completed his term of incarceration and returned to society with all of his former rights, privileges and immunities restored. In 1981 the local registrar of voters sent him a notice that he was henceforth off the rolls. Tennessee had just passed a law which had the effect of expanding the definition of infamous crimes to include all felonies, and disenfranchising all felons regardless of when they were convicted.

With the Wesley case I described here last week already moving through federal filings, I paid a call on another friend, Richard H. Dinkins, whose prominent Nashville firm, Williams & Dinkins, specializes in civil rights cases and who had personally won the historic settlement of a 43-year old school desegregation case against the Nashville School System. After listening to my case theory in Wesley and now Gaskin, he walked me over to see another civil rights legend, the Reverend C.T. Vivian, organizer of the first sit-ins in Nashville in 1960, the first civil rights march in 1961, and the Freedom Rides. I had not expected that. I was a bit too was awestruck and choked to even speak.

Meekly, I explained what I was doing and asked him for any advice. He looked at me a long time and finally said, “Good luck to you.”

That was it. I don’t know if he thought I was just a white honky hippy dabbling in his life’s work or he admired my spunk, but I was on my own.

Gaskin vs. State

My first test of the law, going to Federal Court, sought to enjoin it as ex post facto—elevating the punishment for a crime retroactively. That failed because the court declared Tennessee’s purpose was not to punish anyone, just to reasonably regulate the ballot box, which it had every right to do. Ex post facto did not apply because this was not punishment.

I then sued the Tennessee Secretary of State to nullify the felon disenfranchisement law.

The State process was a different matter. We won in lower court. The State appealed. We briefed, they briefed. It went to the State Supreme Court. The slower Wesley case was still winding its way through to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals with the promise of national impact if it won. I was in full court mode, all the while limping along on The Farm’s subsistence budget of one dollar per day per resident. To support trips to the Vanderbilt law library I wrote letters to mailing lists of potential donors asking for gas money. Back then you could do non-profit bulk mailings for about 4 cents per piece, The Farm had a small Davidson press, and 5000 letters could push this work along for another month.

On the day of oral argument I got up early, rinsed the sprouts for my 20-member group home (a minor catastrophe explained in my retelling of this story in Voices from The Farm), fetched my hand-sewn three-piece denim “law suit” in its dry cleaning bag (nod to Suzanne Suarez Hurley), and walked to the motor pool dispatcher to pick up my arranged-for vehicle, which unfortunately was out of service or hijacked into service already and elsewhere. I then frantically looked for a ride and fortunately our Angel-One free neonatal ambulance service was going up to serve greater Metro Nashville that day and could give me a lift. Stork-like, they dropped me at the courthouse steps in my neatly pressed suit and shiny vegan shoes.

My case was second on the docket, to be argued in opposition by William P. Sizer, Asst. Atty. General of the State. I then watched a most amazing ritual as Court was called into session. An elderly black man in white porter car jacket came and straightened the chairs at the podium and placed a ledger at one end of the table. Docket sheets were placed at each Justice’s place along the bench. The Bailiff entered and called All Rise. Five white Justices filed in in order of reverse seniority and took their seats. The black porter moved down the bench, offering the ledger for each to sign, again in reverse seniority order.

When my case came up, the Attorney General had the first go. At one point I was so certain I was winning, just listening to him, I failed to suppress a chuckle and was immediately embarrassed for my lack of decorum. When my turn came I was in good form, having seen no surprises and liking the questions that had come from the bench. I wrapped myself in the Ol' Stars and Bars and whistled Dixie. “Mr. Gaskin is as much entitled to his right to vote after being disenfranchised for a crime he committed in 1971 as he would be had he been a Confederate bugle boy in 1864.” Or words to that effect. Stephen was not really that old, which I think they appreciated.

Writing the unanimous opinion, Justice Drowota said:

It is obvious that the 1870 constitutional convention was comprised of men who had known the injustice of retroactive disenfranchisement and were determined to safeguard themselves and future generations from similar acts of repression. That this right was preserved by constitutional amendment rather than legislative enactment accentuates its importance to the people of the State of Tennessee. We cannot ignore the reasons for which this amendment was adopted without usurping the will of the people who saw fit to include it in our constitution. Accordingly, the finding of the Chancellor, that Article I, Section 5 of the Tennessee Constitution prohibits the General Assembly from retroactively disenfranchising convicted felons who have never been adjudged infamous, is affirmed.

This was a case of first impression for this part of the Tennessee Constitution in the 183 years it had been on the books. When the court read its ruling on December 12, 1983, it gave a Christmas present to more than 200,000 convicted felons in Tennessee, disproportionately young people of color caught up by the fabricated War on Drugs. I was invited to the State Penitentiary and given a framed certificate of appreciation by the inmates. The State was tasked with setting up and administering polling stations inside the walls. Right wing media went ballistic. I was just happy to think an audacious, long-haired hippy might have earned C.T. Vivian’s quiet respect.

The case was only retroactive to convictions before 1981, so by now the vote-suppressing Republicans have the upper hand again and the black population is underrepresented not only in Tennessee but in all the other states where the Civil War had no effect on later voting. Wesley vs. Collins, wrongly decided, remains the law of the land. Other devices are being deployed to wreck the vote, State by State, and Congress is deadlocked by absolute refusal of the GOP-controlled Senate, with its plus-two Manchin/Sinema majority, to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. At least 262 bills were introduced in 41 states this year with the intent to subvert the election process. Of those, 32 have already become law in 17 states.

And so we drift….

As someone who until the present pandemic traveled the world, I have been fortunate to live in many cultures where the color of one’s skin is unremarked; below notice. Many places. I might even say most.

That is as it should be. Skin tone is an infinitesimally small fraction of the genome and meaningless as any indicator of character or social worth. Using it as a tribal symbol is inane. Cancel me for having said that if you will but I am sticking to it.

That it is such a strident holdover from American slavery and genocide today speaks poorly of the USAnian character and our willingness to reconcile our myths with our legacy of ethnic cleansing and other atrocities. With our drone wars—$6 trillion and a million civilian deaths since 2002—black detention sites, secret prisons, and torture—we are the terrorists. Until we can drop our resistance to that collective healing, we will only keep cutting new wounds and salting old ones.

When the pandemic arrived, the US treated WHO the same way it habitually treated staff of various international human rights agencies, the International Court of Justice, and the UN Rapporteur on Torture. One irony, of course, is that with the seamless transmission of callous, hegemonic, US-first, vaccine diplomacy between Trump and Biden (and steadfast defense of patent rights to prevent end-around runs), has resulted in the waves of new variants that are wrecking the American economy, democracy, and place in the world, and may continue doing so for another year or more. The newly-minted legacy of ill will spawned by thoughtless, jingoist, selfish vaccine hoarding and willingness to let millions to die will fester for an eternity.

But it never needs to be that way. It doesn’t have to be.

Peace on Earth. Good Will to All.


This is the second of two parts that I will use to close out this, the second year of The Great Pause gifted to us by the Covid pandemic. This memoir is part of a book I am developing with a Russian co-author, Тюрин Глеб, to recall for large literary audience of Russian-speaking youth the story of the hippies, and in particular the relevance of the The Farm to today’s ecovillage and ecosystem regeneration movement, now growing strong across the white frosts of that vast, beautiful, and ever-changing landscape.


The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #Regenerosity

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.


Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:
1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

 

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