The AR6 recognizes that the release of Methane, a greenhouse gas over 80 times more potent than CO2 when first released, poses a serious threat. Stored below the melting permafrost, emitted by cows and other ruminants, seeping from manure pits and landfills, rising into the atmosphere from fossil fuels, and emitted by wetlands, rice paddies and fish farms, it is a monster we must control. As the oceans warm and expand, more methane seeps up from the depths where it has been stored for millennia. Experts on this panel present a variety of plans to capture and to slow the release of human-caused methane.
Youth Activists
Join Rupert Read as he engages three youth activists Luisa Neubauer, Meera Dasgupta and Ecem Albayrak on their goals and activities.
Transforming Our Lives in the Face of Crisis
In Glasgow, on the opening day of COP, a press conference will invite COP26 to get real about adaptation as the primary challenge now facing us.
Said Dr. Rupert Read, co-editor of ‘Deep Adaptation’, “To get serious, COP would put adaptation EQUAL to mitigation. Or even maybe first. Because climate chaos is here.”
Defining adaptation then becomes utterly crucial. The session will argue that Transformative And Deep Adaptation is what we need. Any incremental/defensive adaptation should only occur within that overarching frame of seeking to transform our systems, on the basis of an ethics of unity, of us all ultimately being in this together, and to prepare for the worst.
Dr. Read added: “The Earth’s protective systems need protecting, if we are to be able to adapt. But defensive adaptation – merely building higher flood defenses, etc., the kind of approach to adaptation being most vocally put forward by the Australian Government, does not protect the Earth’s protective systems. On the contrary, perpetuating high-carbon systems, it further damages the Earth’s protective systems.”
“Adaptation is the best route to mitigation/prevention/protection too! Because adaptation makes the crisis psychologically real. Unlike the talk of ‘2050’, or even ‘2035’.”
“So there is a virtuous circle: Adaptation, properly defined, supports and includes mitigation. And mitigation makes adaptation feasible.”
CODE RED, IPCC Climate Report
The 2021 Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change, #IPCC, report marks an alarming turning point, but its summary message for policy makers misses the reality that stabilizing at 1.5-2°C over pre- industrial levels will fail to preserve a livable environment.
Already, at under 1.2°C, extreme weather and climate tipping points have been reached. The #CarbonSinks that supported a carbon budget are already stressed to the limit. The Amazon, once a major sink, is now a net emitter of greenhouse gases, due to rainforest destruction for animal and industrial agriculture and wildfires. The Arctic is melting fast, releasing methane from peat bogs, tundra, and from under the disappearing ice, whose ability to reflect heat, is also essential.
Even as industrial and fossil fuel interests control political and financial agendas, food security may be the decisive threat that makes policy-makers listen. As people become increasingly aware of the devastation around them, surveys show that a large percentage of the world’s population is now in support of the major changes that are necessary to survive the existential threat of climate change.
Code Red is the highest level of alert, but we are almost out of time to heed it and to reduce human-produced emissions sufficiently to slow down the rising concentration of greenhouse gases, and to preserve the Earth’s essential carbon sinks. Peter Carter, Brian Wright, and Mark Anderson reveal that the IPCC report needs to send a clearer and even more urgent message.
Please Sign Petition to President Biden
Please Sign Petition to President Biden
The Climate Protection & Restoration Initiative is an initiative that we have become aware of through our contact with Dan Galpern, who has served as legal and policy adviser to the climate scientist James E. Hansen since 2011.
James and Dan have been frequent guests on our COP programs. Dan is the executive director of CPR Initiative and it is putting together what we feel is a very important petition to urge President Biden to impose rising carbon fees “without delay.”
Please obtain more information and sign the petition at this website: cprclimate.org
Presenting before the US NRC
*** Press Release and Invitation to Attend ***
Tuesday March 9, 2021
at 2:00 to 4:00 PM EST
Please find links to the video recordings of the presentation below.
Presenting before the US NRC
(Nuclear Regulatory Commission)
On Tuesday March 9, 2021, along with nuclear expert Paul Blanch, Facing Future’s Executive Director, Stuart Scott, will be defending the public’s right to intervene on matters of nuclear safety. For many years the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) has been what is known as a ‘captive regulator,’ acceding to nearly every request for ‘regulatory relief’ from the Nuclear Power Industry (relaxing safety rules or enforcement) while at the same time rejecting nearly every public petition aimed at strengthening the rules, or just enforcement of the existing rules. It is quite shameful to know the extent to which the scales are tipped in favor of the licensees and against public and environmental safety in the US.
In Tuesday’s hearing before the Petition Review Board (PRB) of the NRC, Stuart, Paul Blanch, and Public Watchdog’s Charles Langley will make a strong case in support of two of the numerous petitions submitted by PublicWatchdogs.org, and making the more general case that we’ve got the proverbial ‘fox guarding the henhouse’ in terms of nuclear safety in the US. Additional background information about the petition is available here. 
There is an extraordinary safety risk involved in the substandard storage of ‘spent’ nuclear reactor waste in the US, both at Southern California Edison’s decommissioned San Onofre nuclear power station and at nearly a hundred other nuclear utilities around the nation. The San Onofre station happens to be adjacent to a popular surf spot, immortalized in the surf-rock song by the Beach Boys, “Surfin USA,” in which San Onofre is mentioned.
But numerous other nuclear power plants around the US use the same substandard canisters manufactured by Holtec International, and similar companies. The plant is located on the Pacific Coast Highway between Los Angeles and San Diego, and is embedded on land belonging to Fort Pendleton, a military training base famous throughout the world for the training sessions held in amphibious landings for both American and foreign troops. This makes San Onofre a legitimate military target for potential missile attack from Asia (think North Korea).
The nuclear waste is stored in 73 twenty-foot-high, thin-walled (5/8”) stainless steel canisters. The engineering of the site does not properly account for risks of flooding, earthquake, tsunami (the site lies in the tsunami zone on inundation maps), enemy attack, or terrorism on the ‘cemetery’ of 73 canisters buried in the ground about 100 ft from the ocean. The result of even one canister being breached or leaking could be a radiation release on the order of what was released at Chernobyl in 1986. Attendance at this meeting by the public and press is strongly encouraged as the nuclear waste issues have remained largely ‘concealed nuclear risks,’ while the actual plant accidents (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima) have received widespread public attention.
“The highly risky way that nuclear reactor waste is treated in the US is quite shocking. It’s the result of a stark and obvious prioritization of the power and financial interests of the Nuclear Power Industry over Public Safety by the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission),” says Stuart Scott.
“We have shown clearly that the NRC is highly responsive to the requests for regulatory relief (relaxation of rules or their enforcement) by the industry they should be regulating. At the same time, they virtually ignore public input. They refuse to consider most public petitions filed, and then reject almost all of the few they even choose to consider. It’s a shame and a crime against the public and future generations, who will bear the growing risk of over 3,200 substandard storage canisters in use around the US.” [For more information on how these canisters are substandard, click here (video).]
“That does not take into account the completely unprotected ‘cooling ponds’ in which so-called ‘spent nuclear fuel’ is left for years until it is cool enough to be welded shut into relatively thin-walled canisters. This flaunting of public safety is a direct result of the increasingly cozy relationship that has developed over the years between the regulators (NRC) and the licensees (nuclear power utilities),” Scott adds in a combination of disbelief and disgust.
Who:
Paul Blanch, registered Professional Engineer, US Navy Reactor Operator & Instructor, with 55 years of experience with nuclear engineering and regulatory agencies.
Stuart H. Scott, the Founder and Executive Director of Facing Future, best known for bringing Greta Thunberg to the 2018 UN climate negotiations in Poland (COP-24) and Dr. James Hansen, the 32-year veteran Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies to COP-21 in Paris in late 2015.
Charles Langley, Executive Director of PublicWatchdogs.org, is a public advocate with more than 25 years of experience in the field of energy law, energy policy, and utility rate-setting.
Where:
Please find the original NRC announcement here.
Webinar Link: This is a Webex link. Click here.
Audio Conference:
Phone Number: 1-415-527-5035
Access code: 199 168 0575
Registration Instructions: To register click on the Webex link above where you will have the opportunity to register for the presentation.
When:
Tuesday March 9, 2021, from 2:00 to 4:00 pm EST. (Please calculate the local time for you.)
Why:
It is imperative that the press and public attend. For too long the NRC has granted the nuclear power industry nearly everything it has asked for while systematically rejecting even from consideration the many public submissions of informed petitions. Of the 387 petitions that have made it past outright rejection from consideration, only 2 have passed on to being considered, and one of those was from the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant itself! Discounting that anomaly, only 1 out of 387 petitions has been granted, and in that one case, ‘no substantial relief’ was provided by the NRC, a finding by the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) in a case brought before it in 2012.
If you are a member of the press, we encourage you to publish a small piece about this important meeting even if you are unable to attend in person.
More information and interviews with Paul Blanch, Stuart Scott, and Charles Langley can be requested by email to contact@facingfuture.earth
Epilogue:
The presentations before the NRC were recorded and posted on FacingFuture.TV . Please find them as follows:
The Facing Future Mobile App
The Facing Future Mobile App
Note that the Facing Future Mobile App was decommissioned on Dec. 2, 2021 due to circumstances beyond our control. See here for more information.
We are pleased to announce the release of a Facing Future Mobile App. The App is available for use on both the Android and iOS mobile operating systems. The App acts as a convenient portal to access Facing Future’s content from its YouTube channel and website.
We’d like to thank Bubblr Limited who donated their services to produce the App.
iOS instructions:
– Simply open the App store and do a search for “Facing Future”
Android instructions:
– If you search for “Facing Future”, our App may not appear. If this occurs, try searching for “Newzmine” then click on “Bubblr Limited” and it should appear in the search choices.
Lack of Ethics is the Prime Disorder
Lack of Ethics is the Prime Disorder
by Dr. Peter Carter
We live in a world of our making. A world of impending planetary catastrophe, a world in the midst of the 6th mass extinction of life. A world being heated up and burned down, with sky rocketing atmospheric levels of climate-disrupting carbon and ocean-poisoning CO2 acidification. A world of conflict, constantly at war, mainly over oil. In a world of plentiful food, world hunger is on the rise again. In regions of climate change impact and conflict, 820 million people do not have enough to eat. For the first time in human history, our future as a species is in doubt.
Ethics is the prime disorder and so it should be our prime issue in attempting to rescue the future. I believe we should prioritize ethics as the climate solution, incorporating as priorities within ethics the rights of future generations, and ecological rights of Nature.
People do understand ethics, though to most, economics — the greatest confidence trick — is a mystery.
Small children know what fairness means. There is nothing complicated about ethics. The Golden Rule has ancient origins. Just one short sentence, it is packed with civilization-sustaining wisdom: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Searching for a universal modern human ethic, Albert Schweitzer defined ethics as simply deep respect for all life: “Ethics is nothing other than Reverence for Life. Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting and enhancing life, and to destroy, to harm or to hinder life is evil.”
For most of our time as a species on this planet, Respect for Mother Earth (Mother Nature) and all life has been the simple, self-evident fundamental ethic, which Indigenous people worldwide have relied on to live sustainably for thousands of years. By this universal ethic of All Life, trees are standing people.
Today’s greed-driven, profit-focused, credit (usury)-based economics hinges solely on money. Our economy has done away with ethics, twisting the deadly sins into deadly virtues. It is explicitly based on individual material self-interest that leads to individual power (over) — although this is not human nature, which it perverts. It is an evil economics of doom and destruction.
In 1996, Richard Leakey wrote (with Roger Lewin) The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind. “Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims.”
Life and a future are being wiped out before our eyes, which ethically is the greatest evil barely imaginable. Perhaps that is why this annihilation is not being recognized as evil. The enormous energy power of fossil fuels has become the tool of economics, and has driven the obsessive oppressive lust for limitless national and individual power.
Though I cannot find a specific “ethical economics,” we do have better ideas and plans.
- Cambridge Economics Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, a leading academic example:
“In the quantitative models that appear in leading economics journals and textbooks, nature is taken to be a fixed, indestructible factor of production. The problem with the assumption is that it is wrong: nature consists of degradable resources.”
- The classic Man and Nature: Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, by George Perkins Marsh in the 1800s:
“Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste.”
- David C. Korten, American author and former Harvard Business School professor:
“A handful of corporations and financial institutions command an ever-greater concentration of economic and political power in an assault against markets, democracy, and life. It’s a suicide economy, [which] destroys the very foundations of its own existence. (When Corporations Rule the World, 1995)
“Our defining gift as humans is our power to choose, including our power to choose our collective future. It is a gift that comes with a corresponding moral responsibility to use that power in ways that work to the benefit of all people and the whole of life.” (Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, 2010)
- Stan Rowe, geo-ecologist, environmentalist, research forester, professor of plant ecology:
“A trusting attachment to the Ecosphere, an aesthetic empathy with surrounding Nature, a feeling of awe for the miracle of the Living Earth and its mysterious harmonies, is humanity’s largely unrecognized heritage.” (“A Manifesto for Earth,” 2004)
- Richard Douthwaite, British ecologist and economist; co-founder of FEASTA (Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability):
The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth has Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many and Endangered the Planet, 1992
Today our economics rules civilization irrationally, explicitly denying all human and economic rights to future generations because they are not (yet) living. Economics, pretending to be a science, has usurped the leading position of ethics in civilization; however an ethics for our future must go beyond the rights of humans, to follow the example of the Indigenous peoples.
We have institutions that partner (conspire) to use this irrational perverse economics to exploit, oppress, kill and destroy on a vast scale. They “manage” to subvert all our good ideas and plans. Somehow they must be overcome or radically reformed for our survival.
They are the big investment banking corporations, the extractive industry corporations, and the compliant nation state governments. The banks are consuming our planet. The 35 leading investment banks show financing of more than 2.66 trillion dollars for fossil fuel industries since the 2015 Paris Agreement (attached top 18):
A February 2020 Chase Manhattan research report recorded in great detail the catastrophic destruction of continued climate disruption, but ended up saying there was no alternative to business as usual. The 1992 UN Earth Summit made a bold attempt to reform economics, but the axis of evil prevailed without any real reforms. Through economic globalization, the power of the corporations has increased enormously.
As a medical doctor and life-long student of Mother Nature, one thing I have learned about all life, even on the very smallest individual scale, is that life never gives up on Life. No matter how great the threat or overwhelming the odds to existence, life never surrenders.
There are countless inspiring examples of such great courage, including personal sacrifice, even in the darkest times of human history.
On the 22 of February 1943, a defiant non-violent 21-year-old German student, Sophie Scholl, who was an anti-Hitler activist, made a prophetic final statement before she was sent to the guillotine: “But what does my death matter, if through us thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”
Today, 26 March 2020, there is encouraging good news. In a major victory for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in the United States, a federal judge struck down permits for the Dakota Access Pipeline, the notorious oil pipeline plan that crosses the Tribe’s ancestral lands.
A federal court found the Trump administration violated the law when it issued permits for the project. Specifically, the Court found that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers failed to consider the health and environmental impacts to the Tribe in the event of an oil spill. The climate science is certain. If our species is to survive, there must be no more fossil fuel pipelines built, and the transport of oil and gas by the many pipelines that already exist must be phased out. Our only future is the clean, affordable, endless energy non-combustion future. We literally have no future with any fossil fuels. This is where ethics, economics and science join.
Onward the struggle
Dr. Peter Carter (M.D.) is founder of the Climate Emergency Institute and has served as an expert reviewer for the IPCC. He lives in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, with his wife, Julie Johnston, who edited this post.
Rollbacks, An Assault Against Life On Earth
Rollbacks, An Assault Against Life On Earth
by Old Dog Documentaries
The face of Greta Thunberg speaking out so clearly and confidently and with such urgency, both gives us hope and alarms us.
We have hope because there are many, among them many young people, who are stepping up to warn us further about the climate crisis and urging us to take action. We are alarmed, because such young people have had to take it upon themselves to lead the clarion call on climate action.
Our form of action was to produce ROLLBACKS: An Assault Against Life on Earth and make it available to you.
The 30-minute film is meant to be used as a tool for discussion and a resource for knowledge and action.
The impact of climate change is undeniable and catastrophic. The recent and ongoing fires in California and now in Australia are a heartbreaking demonstration of this. The Trump administration has met this crisis by systematically and efficiently enacting an alarming number of regulatory rollbacks, reversing past policy progress and putting our very existence at risk.
Because we are in a crisis and urgent action is essential, Old Dog Documentaries is offering the film FREE OF CHARGE to view and to share.
You may download a 1080p copy (834 MB) of the video made available on this webiste here.
You may also purchase a DVD version of the video here.
If you’d like to help spread the message of this documentary by hosting a screening in your home or community there is more information on the Old Dog Documentaries website here. If you require a higher resolution of the video for viewing on larger screens you can get it here and click on Download where the original version (24 GB) is available. There is also an eFlyer template available in both Pages and MSword format.
You may view the video on ScientistsWarning.TV here.
In addition to this video, Scientists Warning, has produced a video called “Rollbacks, The Menace of Donald Trump” which is a commentary on Rollbacks, An Assault Against Life on Earth and includes a discussion about the urgent need for US citizens to take action by VOTING in the primaries and election in 2020. This program was one of eleven programs that Scientists Warning produced at the 2019 COP-25 in Madrid.
About Old Dog Documentaries
We are two “old dogs” saddened by the suffering we see all around us and moved to take action. Since 1985, we have produced and directed documentary films about the subtleties of individual human experience and the complexities of our collective challenges.
Our political leaders cannot solve the problems of our time. They themselves are too beholden to privileged, powerful constituencies motivated to preserve the status quo. Change must start with ordinary people who understand the interrelatedness of our global community. Ordinary people have the will, resourcefulness, and compassion to craft new solutions serving our common good.
We offer our films as catalysts for this kind of solution— as tools for education and activism in the name of social change. We invite you to watch them at home, show them to your friends, share them with your classes and your community. We are happy to answer questions, provide additional resource materials, and suggest ways of using our films that will support your own efforts to nurture and protect this world we share.
Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency (2019)
Approximately 2 years after the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity (2nd Notice) was released in 2017 an additional warning in the form of the “World Scientists’s Warning of a Climate Emergency” has been released. The paper opens with “Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to tell it like it is.“
The pdf file of the paper by William Ripple et al. is available as follows:
Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency
The paper was also published in the prestigious journal BioScience, and is available here.
Paul Beckwith, one of 11,000+ signatories of the paper, has two videos that present the information in the paper as follows: