Dooming COP 27, Part III: Lines in the Sand

"Asking England and the US to pay for the environmental damage of the Industrial Revolution is like Latin America asking Spain for reparations for 1492."

At the climate week coinciding with the reopening of the UN General Assembly, Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry of Egypt used his 3 minutes at the podium to urge wealthy countries to make good on old commitments. He had a valid point when it came to the bribe Hillary Clinton had offered underdeveloping countries in Cancun in 2010 and later penciled into closing negotiations for the Paris Agreement in 2015. She told Egypt, among others, that if they could go along with Obama’s slow walk on any binding climate treaty the overdeveloped countries would pledge $100 billion annually (from private, not governmental, sources, she said) towards a “Green Climate Fund” under the unbiased auspices of the Global Environmental Facility, founded in 1991 by Egyptian-American Mohamed El-Ashry.

Shoukry said, with justification, that $100 billion would have been a good start in 2010 but that it should be clear to everyone by now that trillions annually are needed. It was when he let the caboose loose and called for wealthy countries to pay “loss and damage” reparations to developing nations that his train went off the rails. Granted the underdeveloping are suffering the worst impacts of the climate crisis and contributed proportionately little to its causes. “So world, show me the beef!” he said.

First, let’s recall that Wendy’s Where’s the Beef” could have been the best ad campaign of 1984 had not Apple’s 1984 video commercial been the best ad of all time. 

Clara Peller died in 1987 but will be forever celebrated by meme-archivists as the diminutive octogenarian who uttered the famous hamburger challenge, assuming Sameh Shoukry doesn’t try to steal her trademark. He is slated to lead the COP when it convenes in Sharm El Sheikh next week.

The UNFCCC COP27 decodes as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s 27th Conference of Parties to the Paris Agreement. Having gotten back into the Agreement just in time, the United States will send a full delegation of diplomats and celebrities to proclaim what a good job Joe Biden is doing towards meeting the UN’s somewhat bland and uninspiring Paris goals. In trademark aviator shades, he and Jill will pose with camels and pyramids. The US delegation will attempt to play down the backroom deals it cuts to squash insurgent drives towards greater ambition and stronger Paris targets led by small island nations. Shoukry has now telegraphed he will single out the Clinton bribe and demand a payment schedule. That is a clever start.

However, his second shoe that fell at climate week was a reference to the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage. He might have had a chance getting the West to ante up some cash for development projects targeting climate Mitigation and Adaptation, but Loss and Damage has been and will remain, a non-starter. Asking England and the US to pay for the environmental damage of the Industrial Revolution is like Latin America asking Spain for reparations for the genocide and slavery of the Colombian Encounter, or First Nations asking for the U.S. to now kindly get out of North America, thank you very much for the iPhones. Those retreats and reparations might even be beneficial for the planet, but they aren’t likely to happen. South Africa asking the Dutch to pay for the slaves they sold and Palestine asking Lord Balfour’s heirs to unpartition the Transjordan are like Russia demanding the return of Ukraine. It's history now. Get over it.

I actually agree with emeritus diplomats like Todd Stern who have resisted retroactive Loss and Damage provisions for 30 years. They’re not going to happen. Shoukry should not hinge the success of his Egypt COP on getting that done any more than Putin should expect his Checzen conscripts to return unscathed and unhumiliated from the Donbass meat grinder.

Watching these childish melodramas played out at an hour so late in the day for reversing climate change is profoundly disturbing. Were it not for the natural climate solutions that beckon and will transform everything in just a few years, I might even get depressed.

 

The Achilles Heel of COP 27, Part II: Loss and Damage

"The top five historical emitters—the US, China, Russia, Brazil, and India—together have caused $6 trillion in damage since 1990. So who pays?"

In 2022, six insurance companies that had written policies on Florida beachfront property declared bankruptcy. Those that got out early were lucky. Losses from Hurricane Ian could exceed $60 billion. “And the biggest driver of that loss is not climate change;” wrote New York Times columnist Andrew Revkin, “it’s human change. It’s where we build.”

If you can’t imagine any insurance company moving to Florida and writing policies now, try to imagine anyone agreeing to indemnify residential and business property along the Indus River in Pakistan.

And yet, that is exactly what the parties to the Paris Agreement demand. To get the Agreement, the US and other overdeveloped countries had to make an offer the underdeveloping world could not refuse. Hillary Clinton penciled a number onto the back of an envelope Barack Obama carried into the tiny back room where China was meeting with South Africa, Brazil and India. That number? $100 billion per year. There’s a sucker born every minute, as P.T. Barnum is said to have said. The BRICs bought it. Financiers (Clinton thought the bribe money would come from the private sector) demurred. Some token millions changed hands, mostly from Nordic soft-hearts. Years passed. COPs came and went. The can got kicked. Damage piled up. Tensions rose.

In every COP (Conference of Parties), the “Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage” (WIM) gets revisited. Protestors from civil society raise banners, march en masse, and block traffic. The aggrieved nations walk out of Blue Zone meetings. In 2013, the “Fiji Clearinghouse for Risk Transfer” was established. Two years later, the US eluded the clutches of the angry mob at COP25 by offering the “Santiago Network” of insurance pools directed solely towards payments for loss and damage. COP26-Glasgow pumped more helium into that idea and pledged COP27-Egypt would finalize the “institutional arrangements.” The WIM is supposed to be retooled at COP30 in 2024 to reflect this new framework about to be negotiated.

 

There’s always been enough blame to go around, and researchers are getting better at pinpointing who deserves it. The top five historical emitters — the US, China, Russia, Brazil, and India — together have caused $6 trillion in damage since 1990, or about 11% of average annual global gross domestic product. US emissions, according to the research, are responsible for at least a 1% decline in Pakistan’s potential GDP — equivalent to about $33 billion.

— Bloomberg Green

“Loss and Damage” has everything the South loves and the North hates. It is a finger-pointing game with deep historic roots. “Why is there such disparity of wealth between hemispheres?” a precocious child might reasonably ask. One tries to trace the transfers of advantages. Technology prowess? Military prowess? But where does those come from? Maybe they come from energy inputs — slaves from Africa, peat from Ireland; coal from Wales; oil and gas from the Transjordan and Azerbaijan, then Nigeria. The genocide of indigenous populations in Africa and the Americas transferred resource wealth from the peripheries of empire to the capital cities and family aristocracies in both the “Old” world and “New.”

Ninety percent of historic emissions now wrecking the climate were spewed by the lavishly spendthrift countries that gained their resources by mass murder and theft. They stole from the countries they conquered and beggared and built their monumental city-states. That is how the US and EU became so overdeveloped, the South says. It wasn’t intelligence or hard work. It was organized crime. Thus, the underdeveloping world says, “Hey, we are not giving up fossil energy until we get our share of the wealth!” and moreover, “You owe us.”

Neither of those propositions has a ghost of a chance of accomplishing anything other than near-term human extinction. In game theory, they end in a null sum. Everyone loses.

Negotiators like the US’s John Kerry are determined not to cave in to any of those narratives. There is enough historic guilt to go around. Should the Hebrews be compensated for being tossed out of Egypt by the Pharaohs? Should Africa be reimbursed by the descendants of Arab slavers? Should Israel get out of Palestine? Should Canada, Mexico, and the US give back North America? What does United Fruit owe the royal family of Hawaii?

As silly as these ideas may seem, they are deadly serious roadblocks at UN climate conferences. Deadly is exactly the word I intend. Pakistan is going to Sharm El Sheikh loaded for bear. They will passionately demand reparations for their historic heatwaves and floods. Same for the island nations sinking into the Pacific and Indian oceans. Ditto the displaced indigenous people of the Amazon.

The issue rose to the top of the political agenda at the Cop26 climate talks. Developing countries put forward a proposal for a funding facility dedicated to loss and damage, which was blocked by the US and the EU.

— Climate Home News 2/24/22

Last December in Glasgow the aggrieved let their oppressors kick L&D down the road to Egypt where “relevant organizations and stakeholders [will] discuss the arrangements for the funding of activities to avert, minimize and address loss and damage associated with the adverse impacts of climate change…” the UNFCCC website says. During 2022 Climate Week, the G-7 countries signaled they have no intention to pay. They have plenty of losses themselves, and more in the pipeline. Reference: Ian, Florida.

I watched a 60 Minutes story about a family returning to their home on Sanibel Island after Ian. Sanibel is a barrier island, a spit of sand thrown up by wave action just a few hundred yards from the coastline. Building McMansions there was insane, but rolling the dice for a century or more, the odds of that sand spit being submerged by a storm might be only once in a hundred years. And yet, this family was utterly shocked and weeping. They had been there ten years and it had been paradisaical. Now their house, and their life’s savings, were in ruins. The sea had washed away all the McMansions. How could such a thing ever happen? they asked.

The biggest driver of that loss is not climate change; it’s human change. It’s where we build.

— Andrew Revkin

Last year the average amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased at its fifth-fastest rate since record-keeping began in 1958. The global annual average reached 414.7 parts of CO2 for every million parts of atmosphere, the highest level in at least 2 million years. Glaciers shrank for the 34th year in a row, ocean temperature set a record, sea levels rose faster than the long-term trend, and a record 32% of land around the world experienced drought. The hotter atmosphere has already locked in almost a foot of global sea-level rise from Greenland alone. And two scientists suggested that the most important metric of all — the imbalance between the Earth’s incoming and outgoing energy — wasn’t even being measured directly.

***

Researchers now predict that five of the 16 tipping points they’ve identified may be crossed even at today’s temperatures. They include the death of coral reefs, the melting of ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica, the thawing of permafrost, and shifts in North Atlantic ocean patterns. Two authors of that paper also contributed weeks earlier to an analysis of unlikely but not impossible “catastrophic climate change scenarios” that could trigger societal collapse. They called these worst-case scenarios “a dangerously underexplored topic.”

— Bloomberg Green

 

In early 2022, the UN’s climate science authority, the IPCC, dodged politics as best it could in its 18-chapter report on climate prospects at 1.5-degrees but minced no words in saying that projected “losses and damages” will escalate with every increment of warming and “become increasingly difficult to avoid.” The US delegation had wanted “losses and damages” replaced with “impacts” in the draft but IPCC hung tough.

It is a silly children’s game being played. The fate of humanity has been reduced to finger-pointing, preventing support from reaching the most vulnerable, closing borders to climate migrants, and everyone playing victim. Whether we have enough time left to grow up is the larger, existential question.

 ________________________________

Towns, villages and cities in Ukraine are being bombed every day. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. So far there are 62 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region. They are calling their project “The Green Road.”

The Green Road is helping these places grow their own food, and raising money to acquire farm machinery and seed, and to erect greenhouses. The opportunity, however, is larger than that. The majority of the migrants are children. This will be the first experience in ecovillage living for most. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad

---

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 backward — 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.

The Great Change is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Forecast: Perfect Storm in Egypt, Part I

"The Climate Summit sails towards dangerous shoals at Sharm El Sheikh"

“They need to loosen regulations, they need to release all those permits sitting on someone’s desk for drilling on federal lands, and they need to allow the Keystone XL pipeline to come down to deliver the Canadian oil sands to American consumers,” said Darlene Wallace, a board member of the Oklahoma Energy Producers Alliance. “And the president needs to encourage investors to invest in the oil business.”

— The New York Times

The announcement by the Saudi-led Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development-Plus energy cartel that it would pump two million fewer barrels shocked Washington but came as no surprise to those of us who have been watching the oil patch since the Arab Oil Embargo following the Yom Kippur War.

OPEC+ knows it needs a minimum price per barrel to drill and pump. Letting NATO undercut the costs of keeping princely pleasure palaces running to subsidize the Ukraine adventure won’t do. That is a favor Prince Bandar might have been willing to extend to Pappy Bush et sequelae but at below $80/barrel, too costly for Mohammed bin Salman to push beyond a perfunctory couple of months, and then only in exchange for the latest fighter jet upgrades with which to torment Yemen.

So long as the FBI continues to assist Turkey in investigating the charcuterie going on in the back rooms of the Saudi Embassy of Istanbul, Prince MBS is not the friend of the United States that Bandar Bush was. It matters little that Mr. Biden jettisoned his vow to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” and three months ago bent to kiss the prince’s ring. This is real money we are talking about here; more on a daily cash flow basis than the annual budgets of two-thirds of the world’s nations.

Some sources suggest the Prince has a more urgent reason for the cutbacks. “Industry oil stockpiles in countries that make up OPEC+ are 9.2% lower than the five-year average… While the oil cartel has often cut production in the face of weakening demand, it never implemented a cut in such a tight market, according to a Goldman Sachs research note from Monday,” reported Jinjoo Lee in the Wall Street Journal. Analysts have for many years suggested that Saudi estimates of ultimate reserves have been greatly overstated. If the Middle East is scraping the bottom of its oil province the same way Texas drillers have reached the dregs of the Permian Basin, a ten percent cutback may not be entirely optional.

Casting around for rescue remedies, the Biden Administration sees that easing sanctions on Iran and Venezuela could free up more than a million barrels of oil per day, which would help lower prices at home and in Europe and potentially replace some of the Russian barrels now sold to Chinese and Indian refineries. Unfortunately, nuclear weapons talks with Iran have stalled with scant hope of a breakthrough, the deal would send an awful message to Muslim women protesters being courted and supported, and the prospects of a deal with Venezuela are a political and economic fly-trap. In Europe, the real crisis will come in December when the Russian oil boycott goes into full effect. Shivering Europeans who can no longer afford vacations in Ibiza and Cancun may by then be feeling the combined effects of slower Atlantic circulation and Rossby waves generated by this year’s dramatic loss of polar ice. That will have a chilling effect on NATO bonhomie.

“We will struggle to avoid a gas emergency this winter without at least 20% savings in private households, businesses and industry. The situation may become very serious if we do not significantly reduce our gas consumption.”

— Klaus Mueller of Germany’s Bundesnetzagentur

Vladimir Putin is in no hurry to negotiate a withdrawal from Ukraine knowing that time is on his side regardless of losses at the front. He can make up for the fallen with conscripts. He need only recall Napolean’s ill-fated march to Moscow or the Siege of Leningrad, when it was General Winter that reversed the fortunes of war for Mother Russia.

As mentioned here two weeks ago, Mr. Biden has already released the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. SPR is now at its lowest level in four decades. Heaven forfend an unseen disaster strikes Gulf Coast refineries, such as a late-season hurricane or some mysterious actor responding to the destruction of Nord Stream II.

So it is, that only weeks before the opening of the COP 27 Climate Summit in Sharm El Sheikh, the US finds itself compelled to knuckle under to climate foes and open more federal lands and waters, resume pipeline laying, and drill baby drill.

Still, Prince MBS may be missing the bigger picture here.

“Shale will likely tip over in five years, and US production will be down 20 to 30% quickly. When it does — this feels like watching the steamroller scene in Austin Powers. Oil prices in the late 2020s will be something to behold.”

— An industry executive responding to a poll by the Dallas Fed, reported by Energy Bulletin

 [In the Permian Basin] “The number of new horizontal wells increased to 4,524 in 2021, compared with 350 in 2010. In June 2022, the Permian Basin accounted for about 43% of U.S. crude oil production and 17% of U.S. natural gas production (measured as gross withdrawals). The length of a well’s horizontal section, or lateral, is a key factor in well productivity. In the Permian Basin, average well horizontal length has increased to more than 10,000 feet in the first nine months of 2022, compared with less than 4,000 feet in 2010.”

— US Energy Information Administration

Fossil prices are going to skyrocket if left alone. Scarcity will force that. Shutting the spigot prematurely only brings on solar power sooner and gets people to conserve. That should be the last thing OPEC+ wants.

Next Week: The Achilles Heel of COP 27, Part II: Loss and Damage.

---

Towns, villages and cities in Ukraine are being bombed every day. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. So far there are 62 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region. They are calling their project “The Green Road.”

The Green Road is helping these places grow their own food, and raising money to acquire farm machinery and seed, and to erect greenhouses. The opportunity, however, is larger than that. The majority of the migrants are children. This will be the first experience in ecovillage living for most. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad

---

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 backward — 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.

The Great Change is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Is the USA Kneecapping China?

"The factory of the world has suddenly found itself without customers."

“No surprises” is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin. The people of America, who live in the world’s most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto. Follow the lo-glo outward, to where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find the land of the refugees. They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles, Sherman's March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bungee jumping. They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the lo-glo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture. The only ones left in the city are street people, feeding off debris, immigrants thrown out like shrapnel from the Asian powers….

― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

There is a puzzle I played when I was a kid—a finger trap made of bamboo paper. If you've never seen one, you place your index fingers in either end, and when you try to pull them out, the tube constricts, trapping your fingers. When you push your fingers inward, it causes the trap to loosen. If you are a child, it is very easy to get stuck. You think it is just a toy when you stick your fingers in but when you get stuck, you panic and pull rather than slowing down and thinking your way out.

I suspect it may be like that the way the Joint Chiefs are drawing President Biden into conflict with China. We aren’t at the panic stage; we are at the enticing toy part. Stick your fingers in, Joe. It's only paper.

Encouraged by the success of a proxy war in Ukraine that boldly began with Obama poking the bear, endured a hiatus during the Putin-Trump bromance, and then re-launched with a NATO full-court press in Biden’s first 100 days, the Chiefs have lately been raising toasts and quoting Hannibal Smith, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

Russia has tipped into dark recession. They need to send untrained conscripts from Chechnya to shore up a routed, crumbling line that is chaotically exiting newly annexed Donbas. The scenes are reminiscent of World War I, when Tsarist troops were sent to the front in 1915 without arms — only one rifle to every ten soldiers — and instructed to pick up the rifles or pistols of the fallen.

The Chiefs may imagine it will go that way with China, too. The US has been poking the dragon in the Strait of Taiwan. I can imagine a new Taiwanese government declaring the island independent, daring Xi to act. In mid-September, President Biden said for the fourth time that should China invade Taiwan, the United States would send troops there, as though it were the Chosin Reservoir in Korea and this is November, 1950.

But as former President Jimmy Carter has told us many times, military confrontations are not the Chinese way, even when they have clear superiority. To defend Taiwan the US would need to project its Naval power thousands of miles from its principal bases. China has vastly more ships, troop numbers, planes and missile defenses in the Pacific. Even if Congress were to approve funding today, it would be sometime in the mid-2030s before the US could even imagine defending Taiwan. The New York Times has called Biden’s taunts “foreign policy for the middle class,” designed for the campaign trail but indistinguishable from standard Trump stump.

 

Relations between the US and China have been tense since China joined with Russia and Iran in challenging the hegemony of petrodollars, a serious threat to the concentration of wealth and power from periphery of empire to center. This week the CEO of Konnech, which is based in Michigan and develops software to manage election logistics, was arrested for sharing Los Angeles County poll personnel data with China.

Before Covid I made a number of trips into various regions of China to teach courses in permaculture and ecovillage design and to train trainers in those disciplines. I stayed in several very different Chinese ecovillages and met with ecovillagers from distant provinces that had their own distinct styles and philosophies. In one of my blogs I told the story of Xi Jinping’s rise from regional government to national prominence and why I thought he brought a fresh look that would be good. His consolidation of power, treatment of the Uyghurs, and responses to internal conflict have now colored my early optimism, serving only to remind me that “absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Tech giants like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google that had been partnering with Chinese firms to produce hardware and software are now madly relocating facilities to India, Vietnam, Malaysia, or wherever they think they can stand up an inexpensive but skilled workforce and their robot minions. They are asking their myriad suppliers to do the same. Apple is producing the new iPhone 14 in India and iPads and AirPods in northern Vietnam. Microsoft has shipped Xbox game consoles this year from Ho Chi Minh City. Amazon has been making Fire TV devices in Chennai. During Nancy. Pelosi’s provocative visit to Taiwan, Apple reminded its Taiwanese suppliers to label components destined for China as made in “Chinese Taipei” or “Taiwan, China” so as not to anger its Shenzhen partners.

During the Obama years, China and the US grew gradually closer, to great mutual benefit. Manufacturing workers in China tripled their annual income to more than $9,300, according to the country’s Bureau of Statistics. When Trump levied a 15 percent tariff on tech products made in China, the tech world flinched. The Chiefs have more to think about than smartwatches and Alexis, however. China’s tech labs are starting to leapfrog the West in AI, robotics, neurobiology, transhumanism, nuclear fusion, and genetic engineering. All of that, once merely grist for science fiction dystopias, is coming to fruition more quickly than anyone had foreseen.

Japan’s Softbank pulled out a huge amount of cash from Alibaba, while Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway is selling its stake in electric vehicle maker BYD. Tencent has had more than $7 billion worth of investments withdrawn in the second half of this year alone.

The exodus is having an impact on China’s economy, but that pales beside the triple threat of Xi’s zero-Covid policy, the birthrate collapse, and global extractive resource limits. China’s real estate boom was in large measure levered up by higher fertility and foreign industrial investment and is crashing now. Meanwhile, Vietnam’s industrial real estate values are soaring. Now Xi has to deal with severe recession on top of everything else. Absolute power collides with absolute limits. Limits always win. 

President Carter's decision to normalize the relationship between the United States and the People's Republic of China in 1979 changed China. After Carter was ousted from the White House by Ronald Reagan, he continued to work with China, focusing on human rights, not only for Uyghurs but also Zhuang, Manchu, Hui, Miao, Tujia, Yi, Mongol, Tibetan, Buyi, Dong, Yao, and Korean minorities.

In a 2019 phone conversation, Jimmy Carter told Donald Trump, "I normalized diplomatic relations with China in 1979. Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody? None. And we have stayed at war.”

We have wasted, I think, $3 trillion. China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that's why they're ahead of us. In almost every way. And I think the difference is if you take $3 trillion and put it in American infrastructure, you'd probably have $2 trillion left over. We'd have high-speed railroad. We'd have bridges that aren't collapsing. We'd have roads that are maintained properly. Our education system would be as good as that of, say, South Korea or Hong Kong.

The US, after more years of planning than is readily apparent, has decided to call the bluff of the Former Soviet Union, correctly perceiving that the era of open advancement and democratization introduced by Gorbachev was being undone by Putin, who apparently desires a return to the mighty counter that USSR had posed to US global hegemony. The Chiefs are winning their bet. Red Army military might has been revealed as far from a daunting counterpoise and more of a paper tiger. While it might even be a good idea to have a check on US hegemony, it won’t likely come from Moscow or even a Moscow/Beijing/Tehran axis. Likely it will have to come from the EU getting gorm.

Buoyed by its seeming success in Ukraine, the eye in the palantír is now focused on Taipei. That is a serious mistake. Carter’s 1979 policy was the right one. I just pray it is not already too late to recall it. And yet, China is doing as much to harm itself as any outside forces.

• Zero Covid policies without effective vaccines are wreaking havoc on jobs and retail

• Monetary response to the weak economy has been tepid at best

• The real estate market is in crisis from mortgage defaults and business failures

• Climate change is battering the nation with typhoons, droughts and floods

• The iron and steel industries were down more than 80% in the first seven months of 2022

• One in five people aged 16 to 24 are unemployed

• The yuan is on course for its worst year in decades as it plummets against the US dollar.

Beijing's goal - an annual growth rate of 5.5% - is now out of reach although officials have downplayed the need to meet the target. China narrowly avoided contraction in the April to June quarter. This year, some economists do not expect any growth.

— The BBC

So what would I recommend? I am not naive enough to think China can be bought off or brought to heel, but you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar and anyway, does the US really want to fight a two-front war? If I were POTUS I would wheelchair over the 98-year-old Jimmy Carter as Special Emissary with the following deal:

Stop playing footsie with Putin and messing with US sociopolitics through the Metaverse and we will prop up the Yuan, bring back Apple, and provide universal Starlink coverage. Free the Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hong Kong and Taiwanese from bland Han homogenization and we will send Chinese cosmonauts to the Space Station, increase exchanges of permaculture and regenerative ecovillages, and work together to rapidly solve the climate crisis.

We might even give a little boost to the next primary opponent of Marsha Blackburn.

I know, I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one. I have met plenty of young idealistic Chinese who dream like I do.

 

Should Internet be a Human Right?

"And are our conceptions of rights doomed by their own success?"

Englishmen thought it an intolerable Hardship, when (tho’ by an Act of their own Parliament) Thoughts, which should be free, were fetter’d and confin’d, and an Officer was erected over the Nation, call’d a Licenser of the Press, without whose Consent no Writing could be publish’d. Care might indeed be taken in the Choice of this Officer, that he should be a Man of great Understanding, profound Learning, and extraordinary Piety. Yet, as the greatest and best of Men may have some Errors, and have been often found averse to some Truths, it was justly esteem’d a National Grievance that the People should have Nothing to read but the Opinions, or what was agreeable to the Opinions of ONE MAN.

—Benj. Franklin, Printer, 1740

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov tweeted, "Starlink — here. Thanks, @elonmusk” He included a snapshot of a truck full of fold-up satellite terminals arriving from the Polish border.

Musk tweeted back, "You are most welcome.” 

By May, there were 150,000 active daily users in Fedorov's country. Fifteen thousand terminals—about the size of a pizza box and capable of being powered from a car cigarette lighter—were in use by the end of that month. Russia’s attempts to block or scramble Ukraine’s internet access were effectively thwarted. Not only could Ukrainians talk to other Ukrainians, they could also communicate accurate information about what was happening to them to the outside world.

It seems unlikely Musk will win a Peace Prize—Greta Thunberg has the inside track for that particular Nobel this year—but Musk's generosity towards Ukraine should not go unnoticed. In the hands of the Territorial Defense Force, Starlink became a weapon. Militias quickly learned to rig three DJI Mavic 3 consumer drones into a relay system to maintain continuous surveillance of a target, such as a column of tanks or a missile battery. Enemy location coordinates were sent back in real-time to a recon unit, which relayed the video feed via Starlink to an artillery battery. The battery even got to see real-time video of their shells landing.

Now Musk is getting requests from Iran.

Recently Global Village Institute got a notice on its Starlink office account in SE Mexico. Starlink let us know that the monthly fee would soon be reduced to half, from 2200 pesos per month ($110 or €110) to 1100 pesos per month ($55 or €55). We have yet to see that on our monthly billing, so we’re still a bit skeptical, but it did make us think.

Space-X performed its first humanitarian service by placing its space-based internet across the digital divide, something the Big Telecoms failed miserably at for 30 years, despite massive incentives from public coffers. If you live in a rural county in Appalachia, Minnesota, or Northern Oregon, or on an Indian Reservation, your chance of having access to broadband is still slim in 2022. The many advantages of living in rural areas outweigh the hardships or people wouldn’t live there, but as we move education, health care, voting, and other vital parts of civic life to the Cloud, without good internet the balance tips in favor of migration to some city where an umbilical to the Matrix can be jacked into.

Starlink is still not available in about a third of the United States—vast spaces of data desert—but as more satellites reach orbit, those dead zones will shrink and then disappear (likely in 2023-24). Then the only barrier will be price. Once capitalization costs are recovered and repair, replacement, and maintenance costs are standardized, one might ask what is a reasonable profit margin for the world’s wealthiest human? Can it be free?

Might the prices gradually come down to a very minimal monthly fee, or even be provided free, as a public service? Why didn’t Jimmy Carter do this already? What is Joe Biden waiting for?

Having nearly free internet offers real hope in places where journalists are being targeted for assassination, like Israel, Brazil, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia. Granted, raw feeds from amateur newsers are not as reliable as curated and vetted stories can be, but better open access than no access at all. That is what Julian Assange has been saying for years.

This leads to the larger questions of whether, in this chrysalis, cyberamphibian stage of our transhumanist journey, we should all be given fair access to the metaverse; whether fostering such dependency is wise or healthy; and whether democracy with a small D, writ large, is really all Franklin, Jefferson and Adams had it cracked up to be.

What is a Right?

There has been a steady creep of things we humans consider human rights, which is probably a good thing but isn’t that more a function of affluent societies having the best of everything by drawing down non-renewable resources at steadily rising rates, and so, having abundant energy slaves and appliances, caring less about preserving slavery, race and gender discrimination, and income inequality? Won’t that same trend be doomed by its own success and eventually reverse? Take away daycare and washing machines and what do moderns—Homo Colossus, as historian William Catton called us—become? Is energy starvation the bane of The Enlightenment?

Make no mistake, the energy supply is shrinking, not growing, rumors of commercially available Chinese fusion reactors by 2028 notwithstanding. OPEC+ is now producing below its targets by a record 3.58 million barrels per day despite record demand. The Ukraine/Russian embargo and busted pipelines will take another 2.4 mbd off the market this winter.

“As natural gas demand around the world breaks new records, U.S. shale producers are struggling to keep up with demand. While natural gas prices in the United States fell after a railway strike was averted last week, it looks likely that prices both at home and abroad will spike this winter. A hotter-than-expected summer and a lack of alternative energy sources have left U.S. inventories below the seasonal average."

   — Irina Slav, Oilprice.com

 

In these conditions, cheapening or free internet powered by a car battery is a blessing. We can at least talk to distant friends while we toast our can of beans over the open fire. Should it be a human right? That’s a slippery slope, but we feel intuitively it will do more good than harm.

In 1731, Franklin was taking particular heat from Philadelphia clergymen over an advertisement he printed in the Gazette. He admitted no wrongdoing but pointed out that

[T]hey who follow Printing being scarce able to do anything in their way of getting a Living which shall not probably give Offense to some, and perhaps to many; whereas the Smith, the Shoemaker, the Carpenter, or the Man of any other Trade may work indifferently for People of all Persuasions without offending any of them; and the Merchant may buy and sell with Jews, Turks, Heretics, and Infidels of all sorts, and get Money by every one of them….

Today he might be canceled for associating Jews and Turks with Heretics and Infidels. But Franklin went on to say,

That it is unreasonable to imagine Printers approve of everything they print and to censure them on any particular thing accordingly, since in the way of their Business they print such great variety of things opposite and contradictory. It is likewise as unreasonable what some assert, That Printers ought not to print anything but what they approve, since if all of that Business should make such a Resolution, and abide by it, an End would thereby be put to Free Writing, and the World would afterwards have nothing to read but what happen’d to be the Opinions of Printers.

And that is the whole point of censorship, why it was prohibited in the Constitution (the same one that young printer later went on to influence), and why Elon should at least be on the Peace Prize shortlist for what he did for Ukraine.

________________

 Towns, villages and cities in Ukraine are being bombed every day. As refugees pour out into the countryside, ​they must rest by day so they can travel by night. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. So far there are 62 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region. They are calling their project “The Green Road.”

The Green Road also wants to address the ongoing food crisis at the local level by helping people grow their own food, and they are raising money to acquire farm machinery and seed, and to erect greenhouses. The opportunity, however, is larger than that. The majority of the migrants are children. This will be the first experience in ecovillage living for most. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad

---

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 backward — 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.

The Great Change is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.