Every “solution” to climate change being promoted by policy makers, NGOs and most people just makes ecocide worse.
1. Solar and wind – requires toxic mining and manufacturing processes, and leads to land destruction, usually in rural, previously wild, and indigenous lands; a short lifespan and low recycling rates which leads to toxic landfill problems.
2. Batteries – requires toxic mining and water use. Low recycling rates leads to toxic landfill problems.
3. Biomass – leads to deforestation, land destruction, and inaccurate accounting in CO2 emissions.
4. Nuclear – requires toxic uranium mining, and leads to toxic byproducts.
5. Carbon sequestration in trees and soils – stored carbon is often released after a short period of time because of subsequent misuse, leads to inaccurate and shady accounting schemes like carbon trading, and leads to tree farms over forests, and farms over forests.
6. Carbon capture and sequestration underground – highly speculative, low success rate, requires industrial technology in power plants, pipelines, and storage facilities, and leads to massive land use displacing food agricultural land and/or deforestation.
7. Carbon capture and utilization – requires industrial technology to capture the carbon, and the products in which the captured CO2 can be used all contribute further to ecocide (enhanced oil recovery, plastics, concrete, industrial fluids, fuel, chemicals, carbon fiber).
8. Geo-engineering – solar radiation management will chemically contaminate the atmosphere and could lead to unintended and unknown consequences to the climate and weather; snow forest clearance leads to deforestation; marine cloud brightening requires industrial infrastructure and lots of fuels, will impact regions of the ocean, and could have unknown consequences on the weather; cirrus cloud thinning requires chemically contaminating the atmosphere with unknown consequences in the climate and weather; ocean fertilization (dumping iron and urea in the ocean) will have unknown consequences on the ocean.
9. Sustainable development – converting people who have no money because they don’t need it because they live on the land into people who are dependent on industrial civilization, by tearing down forests, moving the people who lived there to cities, and lying to them that they’ll be better off, because someone somewhere decided that people who don’t participate in industrial civilization are somehow contributing to climate change. (Sustainable development is often genocide when it decimates cultures.)
All of these non-solution “solutions” intend and allow, or require, industrial civilization to continue, capitalism to continue, and the growth economy to continue.
In other words, all proposals to “solve” climate change will lead to mass ecocide, extinctions, habitat destruction, and, eventually, an uninhabitable planet.
The absence of discussion about how to end capitalism, how to de-grow the economy and the global population, and how to learn to live small and in harmony with nature indicates to me that almost no one concerned about climate change is really serious about loving the natural world, because almost everyone is willing to throw the natural world under the bus bulldozer in order to “solve” climate change and thus, save our ridiculous, ecocidal way of life.
The absence of discussion about how to end capitalism, how to de-grow the economy and the global population, and how to learn to live small and in harmony with nature by anyone who has any influence or power indicates to me that we will not change until forced, and that we are thus headed for disaster.
Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future, Climate Strikes, Climate Marches — none of these groups and actions have changed our ecocidal path. If anything, they have made the situation worse by “demanding action” that has empowered those in power who understand the non-solution “solutions” above as a way to continue our ecocidal way of life on this planet, and get rich in the process.
There are already quite a few parts of the world currently in chaos from conflict and war, great poverty and desperation from lack of access to clean water and undisturbed habitat, or in trouble because of weather extremes. Given the continued rapid destruction of the natural world, combined with the rapid increase in impacts from climate change, I cannot imagine that the parts of the world we currently view as stable and relatively safe will remain so for long. It is only the fool who tries to predict the future, but it seems to me that global chaos from the breakdown of the global economy and civilization will surely be upon us within 30-50 years, if not sooner, if not much sooner.
Every day I wake up and I wonder, what is the point of continuing life “as normal”? There is no future. I want to go down fighting. What more can I do? I feel so useless.
“Fight to the death for my beloved” (my beloved being the natural world) is my motto and yet I feel so utterly useless in the face of the chaos that is here already and worsening daily.
I like to imagine a time when millions of people might rise up against the forces of destruction, start revolting and tearing down the machinery that makes this ecocidal way of life run.
And then I go out into the world and no one seems to think there is much of a problem. Occasionally when I’m surrounded by people who are planning their winter vacations to Mexico and Hawaii, who are having a new baby, or buying a big house, there’s a split second when I think maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe everything’s fine. Then I remember that most of the big fish are gone, almost all of the prairies are gone, so many birds and insects are gone, forests are gone, wetlands are gone, sage lands are gone, wild places and the wild beings who need them are gone.
How do we live in such times of loss and devastation, when most people don’t even see it?
It is terribly lonely.
“It’s history repeating itself. The idea that liberal, environmentalist greens in a Democratic administration are committing cultural genocide and ecocide is certainly something they don’t want to hear, and so they tune out, like blind mice, but I have seen it with my camera, and with very little embellishment—what needs to be embellished, after all? It simply is the raw truth, the ugly truth of who we are, and how we operate, that to my eyes and ears is 100% unacceptable. And I personally, would be less of a human being if I kept silent.
Like my father said following World War Two—when we kids asked, ‘Why did the Germans do this (genocide) and did not speak up?’—he responded, ‘Because it did not affect them.’ And so we all become complicit in a horrible tragedy, a nightmare of death, weakened by self-interest, greed and fear to the point where we forget the air that fills our lungs is the same. And we can not even muster the courage to be human. May God have mercy on our souls.”
— Filmmaker Robert Lundahl, Is The US Department of the Interior Committing Cultural Genocide And Ecocide?
Watch the film: Who are my People, by Robert Lundahl
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