Getting Stellar into Belém
Many of my friends are unfamiliar with the winding paths that lead to climate treaties like the Paris Agreement, and assume that the annual UN Conferences of the Parties, or COPs, if they have any worth at all, are like a trade convention. In many ways, they are. The conference venue is typically set at a large convention center in some global megalopolis—e.g., Le Bourget airfield near Paris, where Lindberg landed the Spirit of St Louis—and booked a year in advance. Cranes and cement trucks flood in, catering contracts are let, and the site is transformed into something resembling a World’s Fair, with pavilions, restaurants, and transnational corporations displaying their latest wares.
In many ways, COPs are also playgrounds for dead dinosaurs. The fossil fuel industry had 1,700 delegates at COP29 Baku and 2,456 at COP28 Dubai. Both conferences were overseen by presidents who had worked for oil companies. Twelve of the COPs have been attended by representatives of U.S. presidents that owned their own oil companies. The annual spending by Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron and Total on efforts to control, delay or block climate policy averages $200 million per COP. In 2018, Shell’s Chief Climate Change Adviser admitted that the company had influenced the Paris Agreement, including the contentious Article 6 that allows companies to use carbon markets to purchase credits (indulgences) for emissions reductions made elsewhere, instead of directly reducing their own emissions. This turned out to have some good effects, but I’ll get to that later.
The part with the booths, pavilions and stage areas for the public is called the Green Zone, populated by non-state actors, including companies, cities, and civil society—Toyota, Greenpeace, university think tanks and Buddhist vegetarian groups. Anyone can get a pass if they can get past the metal detectors. Interior to that and more heavily defended (machine gun nests around its fenced perimeter) is the Blue Zone, where national delegates get down to brass tacks.
In many COPs I have been privileged to be issued a Blue Zone badge as head of delegation for the Global Ecovillage Network. After years of valued contributions to the negotiations (not just of the climate COPs but of other UN tracks as well) GEN earned “special consultative status.” As an insider, I can tell you, dear readers, that what is about to happen at COP30 Belém in November is no trade convention, appearances aside.
This year, countries seem to be having a bit of a love affair with Paris Article 2.1(c). That’s the one that makes “finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development.” Regional dialogues (Asia, Africa, Oceania, North America) in September led to the release of the Baku to Belém Roadmap to 1.3T, scaling financing for climate action (mitigation and adaptation, particularly in poorer and more vulnerable countries) to not less than $1.3 trillion per year by 2035.
COPs are always preceded by prepcons or pre-COPs, hashing out details so that when heads of state descend en masse, they can party hearty and still ink something meaningful. This year’s final prepcon concluded in Brasilia on October 14. The first wave of negotiators will arrive in Belém for a Leaders Summit Nov 5-7, three days before the 11-day COP officially opens. This is the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement and the halfway point of the UN’s “critical decade” for climate action. It is also significant that the COP will be held in the Amazon, drawing focus to deforestation, biodiversity, and indigenous contributions like terra preta, or biochar.
The biosphere is finite. It’s critical for life itself: the air we breathe, the food we eat and the water we drink, storing and sequestering carbon and nurturing biodiversity. Plundering it while claiming that this is sustainable is the dystopian prospect we all face if bioeconomy falls into the universe where Big Ag and Big Biomass reign supreme.
And lest anyone forget, 70% of planned oil and gas expansion by 2035 is coming from just four Global North countries: the United States, Canada, Norway, and Australia. While the world is on fire, they’re busy pouring gasoline on it. Meanwhile, most other UN member countries and mainstream media politely pretend not to notice.
C&C meets Stellar
Some time after writing my first climate book, Climate in Crisis, in 1989, I had the good fortune of meeting, through Colin Campbell at the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, two alternative economists, Richard Douthwaite and David Fleming. Campbell, Douthwaite and Fleming were part of an Irish group, FEASTA (the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability) and Richard graciously invited me to attend one of their retreats. At the time, FEASTA was very big on the concept of “contraction and convergence” (C&C) formulated by Aubrey Meyer and the Global Commons Institute in the early 1990s. Douthwaite, whom I later made a guest speaker at some of the permaculture design courses and other workshops I gave, connected C&C’s greenhouse gas stabilization formula with his own frameworks for “cap-and-share” and ecological fiscal reform, or what Fleming would then call Lean Logic (borrowed, I suspect, from W. Edward Deming’s “Lean Manuacturing”—I attended a lecture on Deming at another FEASTA retreat).
Thanks to these academic activists, C&C gained momentum at various European Parliament discussions, found its way into legislation in Ireland and the UK, and emerged as the most scientifically rigorous and ethically coherent path toward a post-Kyoto world of ever-diminishing fossil dependence. C&C is a fairness-based carbon framework. It requires greenhouse gas emissions to decline to sustainable levels (net zero following a period of overburden drawdown), while entitlement—the social safety net—converges on a fair per capita support level, such as a living wage or guaranteed minimum income. The Alaska Permanent Fund is a good example.
There are some blemishes. C&C presumed a carbon budget, which was very popular at the UN and for the media, a soft sell—but scientifically unsupportable. Targets were set at 350 parts per million of atmospheric CO2, then 2 degrees, then 1.5. Looking back from 2025, all of those targets were unrealistic—we are already exceeding the point of extreme weather events and catastrophic droughts and wildfires. We passed 350 in 1988, 1.5 in 2024, and will blow through 2 degrees presently if we haven’t already. 4 or 5 degrees by 2050 is not impossible. If the Atlantic conveyor (AMOC) shuts down, chaos. We are riding a tiger.
The Sun and the Stars
In Stellar: A World Beyond Limits, Tony
Seba and James Arbib claim that converging disruptive
technologies—solar, AI, robotics, precision fermentation, and energy
storage—are triggering an “end to the extractive economy” and ushering
in a self-sustaining “stellar” economy powered almost entirely by
sunlight.
The McKibben/Seba concept of clean energy disrupting hierarchical, brittle, undemocratic economic ecologies is not new. It was originally proposed in October 1976 by Amory Lovins in an article in Foreign Affairs called “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?”. McKibben/Seba go beyond C&C’s focus on emissions contraction to unearth Lovins’ vision of a “phase shift in civilization,” where clean energy becomes so superabundant as to be almost costless. In the stellar world, A.I.-controlled production detaches itself from material inputs, dissolving scarcity and competition. It is not that C&C’s equitable carbon budgeting was misplaced; rather, it is that it will soon be obsolete.
In the stellar world, the too-cheap-to-meter superabundance of a solar buildout will converge to solve the data center energy deficit, permitting A.I. to eliminate human toil, necessitating some sort of entitlement regime like Universal Basic Income (UBI). That is their dream. Contraction, in the stellar view, will be unnecessary, apart from the natural atrophy of fossil and nuclear energy once they have been eclipsed by market forces (as they already have been).
And that is where I think the technocornucopians err.
In my latest book, Retropopulationism, I challenged this Tech Bro framing of the demographic downturn to smaller families and more manageable population size not as a fertility crisis that Elon Musk is doing his singlehandedly best to reverse, but as desirable and beneficial for humanity, not to mention all the other life forms.
We may have a genetic drive to increase our number, but it is killing our planet. Colonizing other planets is not the solution. Décroissance is.
“There will be religious hostilities, riots, wars and natural disasters… but thereafter peace and brotherhood will come back into the world”
— Meher Baba, 9 July 1925, Meherabad
Back to Belém
According to current UN thinking, endorsed by the World Economic Forum, the International Chamber of Commerce, and others, each nation should calculate an allowable carbon budget (Nationally Determined Commitment) based on temperature stabilization (e.g., ≤1.5 °C). These annual emission ceilings will gradually tighten to ensure consistency with science and the needed climate stabilization trajectories, returning us to the comfortable Holocene conditions of our birth.
Most economists believe that price signals will emerge from those budget settings. Carbon prices—the cost of polluting—must rise when emissions exceed the NDCs, boosting drawdown incentives. A progressive floor price, indexed to per-capita income, integrates fairness between overdeveloped and underdeveloping states. Lump-sum rebates or “carbon dividends” would equalize household impacts while shifting the burden to industries, not consumers. Some portion of the taxes collected from polluters would be rebated to every citizen, perhaps rewarding the most frugal as an added incentive.
But these economists are missing the big picture. As long as you have eight billion hominids aspiring to populate a wealthy and wasteful consumer culture (it was called “getting to Sweden” by Lovins), it really doesn’t matter whether they are supported by their own pluck or by a solar-powered robot workforce. They are still consuming resources and willy-nilly dumping waste. Seba and Arbib say (and I paraphrase), ‘Don’t worry, with precision fermentation and cradle-to-cradle recycling, we will bring the human footprint to net zero even at 10 billion or more.’ Color me skeptical.
Contraction is desirable and should extend beyond fossil fuels. We need to de-grow, gracefully, placing our highest priority on ecosystem regeneration and restoration. Meher Baba predicted that a 75% population reduction would be about right. At COP30 Belém, adopting a carbon pricing strategy involving biochar would be a scientifically robust, ethically grounded, and economically feasible global solution that operationalizes the Paris Agreement’s equity ambitions. The UN should push for decisions to institutionalize contraction-compatible global and national budgets, promote carbon fee and dividend policies like the Alaska Permanent Fund as a key transition pathway, and adopt equitable financing mechanisms such as the 1.3T Roadmap.
Meanwhile, we all should learn to live with a little less, and work to give back to nature what we have taken from her.
We can spend 1.3 trillion dollars per year on enough solar cells, windmills, ocean thermal, wave and geothermal energy to create the superabundant stellar economy. Would that stop climate change or the extinction of honey bees and corals? Probably not.
The world storm, which has been gathering momentum, is now having its greatest outburst; and in reaching its climax, it will work universal disaster. In the struggle for material well-being, all grievances have assumed fantastic proportions. And the diverse differences of human interest have been so accentuated that they have precipitated distinctive conflict. Humanity has failed to solve its individual and social problems, and the evidence for this failure is but too plain.
The incapacity of men to deal with their problems constructively and creatively reveals tragic deficiency in the right understanding of the basic nature of man and the true purpose of life. The world is witnessing an acute conflict between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.
On the one hand, there are selfish persons who seek their happiness blindly through lust for power, unbridled greed and unrelieved hatred. Ignorant of the real purpose of life, they have sunk down to the lowest level of culture. And they bury their higher selves in the wreckage of crumbling forms which linger on from the dead past. Bound by material interests and limited conceptions, they are forgetful of their divine destiny. They have lost their way, and their hearts are torn by the ravages of hate and rancor.
On the other hand, there are persons who unveil their inherent higher self through the endurance of pain and deprivation, and through the noble acts of bravery and self-sacrifice. The present war is teaching man to be brave, to be able to suffer, to understand and to sacrifice.
The disease of selfishness in mankind will need a cure, which is not only universal in its application but is drastic in its nature. It is so deep-rooted that it can be uprooted only if it is knocked from all sides. Real peace and happiness will dawn spontaneously when there is the purging of selfishness. The peace and happiness which come from self-giving love are permanent. Even the worst sinners can become great saints if they have the courage and sincerity to invite a drastic and complete change of heart.
The present chaos and destruction will engulf the whole world. But this will be followed by a very long period in which there shall be no war. The passing sufferings and miseries of our times would be worth enduring for the sake of the long period of happiness which is to follow.
— Messages of Meher Baba, East and West (ed. Adi K. Irani, 1945), pp. 22-25
Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in the West Bank and Gaza and
the efforts to cease the war in Ukraine immediately. Global Village
Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green
Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West
Bank for over 30 years. It will continue to do so with your assistance.
We aid Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture
farms along the Green Road and work to heal collective trauma
everywhere through the Pocket Project. You can read about it on the
Global Village Institute website (GVIx.org). I appreciate your support.
Courtesy Al Jazeera
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#RestorationGeneration.
When humans are locked in a cage, the Earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.
We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.
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