­I want to write-up some thoughts on strategy, tactics and operations for those of us non-civilians in the Climate War.

• ­What would happen if we made the entire Carbon Cycle democratic. Not political, but democratic. Not just the science, but the industry too, the business of energy (oil, gas) and agriculture (food and fibre)?
• Or will we have a Carbon Dictatorship ?
• ­Is the Climate Circus in Copenhagen going to fix Climate Justice?

Climate Circus Update

My take on the great Climate Change Circus aka COP15 is looking like a really noisy place

Some of the main events

• Climategate (leaked emails and other disclosures of deleted data have given climate change denialists (Climate Denial Corporate Campaign) a huge boost, giving right-wing popularism, conspiracists and jealous peak oilers new energy. Monbiot “Suppressing Skeptics Unacceptable”

• a militant faction of activists (so called “anarchists”, probably of the “smash civilization” variety) a group called NTAC (never trust a cop) have put out inflammatory video - and seem to want to turn Dec into a big street battle - they have also dissolved the network so that it doesn’t exist formally

• a dodgy Carbon Trading regime is making its way through Australia federal parliament, called the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, an Australia academic from the Australian National University calls this a Big Ball of Mud, the Australian Green’s Senator Bob Brown describes the “Continue Polluting Regardless Scheme” is “locking in failure” on emissions. http://permaculture.tv/?p=1588
• the shadow banking system will have a field day establishing a global climate finance architecture in Copenhagen amidst the ultra-security and resulting secrecy and failing official process

• the Climate Camp TV crew, may or may not, be at Klimaforum, and so video coverage may be limited. PositiveTV people are going.
• Climate Change is real and getting worse i.e. The Copenhagen Diagnosis from UNSW, Australia
  

Democratic Carbon

1. Democratic Science: Why cant ALL the emails of the IPCC be open and freely available ? why not ALL the data ? surely if we want democratic science we should demand such a thing ? if we insisted on democratic climate science then we would have a case for demanding democratic science in BIG pharma, agribusiness, old (oil, gas, coal) and new energy (wind, wave, solar) etc.. the Right are again using issues that the left pioneered, that radical critique of science by Thomas Kuhn in the 60s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and more recently David F Noble [America By Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation & the controversial article, The Corporate Climate Coup (ZNET) or Permaculture.TV including audio interview from Rabble.ca.]
   
2. Genetic Science & Engineering: In the field of genetics and evolution, there is a hegemonic paradigm that justifies BIG Bio-Tech and BG Genetic-Engineering. In a recently published paper by Don Lotter, The Genetic Engineering of Food and the Failure of Science – Part 1: The Development of a Flawed Enterprise (PDF) he thinks the basic science has been molded in the interests of Monsanto and other Gene Giants. Lynn Margulis whose work on Gaia Theory (with James Lovelock) and Endosymbiosis Theory with their implications that symbiotic relationships have driven evolution, describes mainstream geneticists such as Richard Dawkins (author of The Selfish Gene) “wallow in their zoological, capitalistic, competitive, cost-benefit interpretation of Darwin - having mistaken him… Neo-Darwinism, which insists on (the slow accrual of mutations by gene-level natural selection), is a complete funk.” She thinks Dawkins-style of “Neo-Darwinism, excessively focused on inter-organismic competition, as she believes that history will ultimately judge them as comprising “a minor twentieth-century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon Biology.”
3. Politics in the IPCC Process: science as it is now, is effected by politics, and so is the IPCC. There are stage in the IPCC Report Process where governments get involved. In this case, climate science has been structured so as to create conservative reports. In other words, if we made climate science, more democratic, as opposed to politicised, we would get better, and probably much more frightening science. 
4. 
   
   “The Reagan administration wanted to forestall pronouncements by self-appointed committees of scientists, fearing they would be ‘alarmist.’ Conservatives promoted the IPCC’s clumsy structure, which consisted of representatives appointed by every government in the world and required to consult all the thousands of experts in repeated rounds of report-drafting in order to reach a consensus. Despite these impediments the IPCC has issued unequivocal statements on the urgent need to act.”
   
   Global Warming: How History Is Being Manipulated to Undermine Calls for Action
   

 3. Democracy in Science would lead to Democratic Industry: if we had democratic science, it would open the way to more democratisation in industry and government.. the fuedalistic industrial arrangements of today would not withstand complete transparency.. The Corporation and The State would be transformed.

And the leading twentieth-century social philosopher, John Dewey, basically agreed. Much like ninetheenth-century working people, he called for elimination of “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda.” Industry must be changed “from a feudalistic to a democratic social order” based on workers’ control, free association, and federal organization, in the general style of a range of thought that includes, along with many anarchists, G.D.H. Cole’s guild socialism and such left Marxists as Anton Pannekoek, Rosa Luxemburg, Paul Mattick, and others. Unless those goals are attained, Dewey held, politics will remain “the shadow cast on society by big business, [and] the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.” He argued that without industrial democracy, political democratic forms will lack real content, and people will work “not freely and intelligently,” but for pay, a condition that is “illiberal and immoral”—ideals that go back to the Enlightenment and classical liberalism before they were wrecked on the shoals of capitalism, as the anarchosyndicalist thinker Rudolf Rocker put it 70 years ago.

Noam Chomsky: Crisis and Hope, Theirs & Ours

6. Science is not objective; it is embedded in a social and political mileu and reflects the interests of power. Admittedly in the hard sciences like physics and chemistry the science is more objective, but once you get into fields like the social sciences, the power dynamics become transparent.. i.e ECONOMICS. The economics departments of universities are unrepentant after the latest financial and economic crisis. why ? because its undemocratic. They are funded and influenced by The State, The Rich, The Corporations.

As David F Noble points out, modern environmentalism in North America was founded by Rachel Carson “Silent Spring” she wasnt a scientist.. nor was Al Gore with An Inconvenient Truth 

7. Intellectuals (not just academics, but corporate and government managers) are a kind of “bought priesthood“. Chomsky The Responsibility of the Intellectual.. especially in the social sciences i.e. economics or in public relations, in which advertising is a subset, and media a subset of that, and news media a smaller subset still. There is a threat of a new class of Climate War Commissars like Monbiot or Flannery emerging, Gore Vidal talks about this in an essay from the 90s “Cue the Green God, Ted“

Wining the Battle Against Big Tobacco: Climate Change Denial campaigns are explicitly linked to the campaign against Tobacco. It’s often the same public relations firms, corporations, personalities involved in both Tobacco and Climate Change Denial i.e. The Heartland Institute. However, as far as I can tell, global Tobacco sales are increasing.. (except for a dip because of the recession. Volume is driving sales in the South, value-add driving sales in the North.. so to think we are winning that one is wrong 

Denialism will Fade Away and Become Amusing: Denialism continues to this day, and its not just the big corporations,  its everyone.. we are all (with the exception of the billions of poor in the South and the Transitioners and the permaculturalists in the North) addicted to mass-consumer society, which is causing climate change.. as addicts we are ALL in denial… especially the affluent middle classes. The Transition Towns Totnes (Transition Network) process is framed in addiction terms, and denial is a stage in dealing with the addiction. 

Assuming climate denialism will simply go away and be amusing is hopeful.

Lets look at Holocaust denialism and the legacy of the Nazi’s and the institutions of fascism.

Have the institutions of Nazi Germany really disappeared and become amusing: (corporatism) The Corporation, Folk (Right wing Polularism), Big Brother (Google, NSA), National Security State (Homeland Security, Patriot Act), Propaganda (Fox News, CNN etc), Eugenics (social Darwinism and a focus on models and movies stars. See book Nazi Nexus on CSPAN

All of these institutions are with us still, bigger than before. Just with different faces and names and slightly better sales and delivery. Chomsky says that the history of the 20th century after the war would be called “How the Nazis Won the War” .. and no, I dont mean clones of Hitler, I mean ideas and institutional arrangements.

David Barsamian: You’ve said that if a real post-World War II history were ever written, this would be the first chapter.

Noam Chomsky: It would be a part of the first chapter. Recruiting Nazi war criminals and saving them is bad enough, but imitating their activities is worse. So the first chapter would primarily describe US-and some British-operations throughout the world that aimed to destroy the anti-fascist resistance and restore the traditional, essentially fascist, order to power.

9. If Climate Change is Real, It Doesnt matter, things will change anyway, there is Peak Oil, Gas etc. we just dont know, most energy “science” is internal to very dodgy regimes - tyrannical states and tyrannical corporations. There is very little democratic energy industry or science. Obviously Peak Debt and Peak Emissions are far greater and more immediate problems.. also, I am not convinved synthetic fuels cannot replace oil. See Nathan Lewis, Caltech; They Didn’t End the Stone Age Because They Ran Out of Stones.

10. Carbon Dictatorship; James Lovelock thinks a world-war style mobilization against climate change, a Climate War with a Churchill and everything, is a good idea. For me, I can’t help think about our existings Wars. The War of Terror, War in AfPak, Iraq, Against Drugs, Against Crime, Against Poverty and Communism. The Pentagon and other national militaries, the global military industrial complex is working on militarizing climate change. Its the reality behind commercialization and financialization of climate change. Tim Flannery, in The Weather Makers has a chapter called The Carbon Dictatorship.

That a failure to act on climate change may eventually force the creation of a global carbon dictatorship, which he calls the “Earth Commission for Thermostatic Control”, to regulate carbon use across all industries and nations - a level of governmental intrusion that Flannery describes as “very undesirable

10. Democratic Carbon: what would it really mean if we made the entire Carbon cycle democratic, not just the science but the industry ? if as a planetary civilization, as grass-roots activists we campaigned and worked for a democratic carbon cycle? what problems would it solve? what eco-systems? what industries ? quite a few, indeed most… isn’t that worth a some embarrassed climate scientists ? wouldn’t energy executives and war-mongering elites like the Cheney-Bush Junta have a far more difficult time?

It will be much more about building a political movement for broad-based, democratic, post-fossil, long-range social planning based on cooperative inquiry.

Ways must be found to find and enforce democratic consensus about what resources must be shared where and when for long-term collective benefit, what institutions will accordingly have to be phased out and what new institutions constructed to take their place, and how the political transition is to happen

One modest example from Europe is the Transition Towns movement, which is going some way toward rethinking demand with its ‘Energy Descent Action Plans’ even if it still lacks a political economy analysis of industrial energy use or an organizational focus on equitable energy distribution.

Larry Lohmann, Cornerhouse

Climate Circus or Climate Justice ?

I am not a policy wonk, a news junkie or a professional pundit. I have no salaried research position or tenure. My analysis is mostly inutuitive, sometimes with flashes of insight.

As such, my answer to the question, will the Copenhagen Climate Circus “fix”, “solve” Climate Justice

1. Protests, demo’s and direct action could increase pressure on official COP15 delegates to do something. Hopefully reduce real emissions and regulate or remove “shadow” and official Carbon Finance. It could go some of the way of democratising decision-making and finance.
   
2. There is a risk that COP15 is a kind of mousetrap for the Climate Justice movement. Copenhagen will be expensive, crowded, noisy, a kind of Climate Circus or maybe better, a Climate Bizarre. A market for corporations, NGOs and governments, capital and social entrepreneurs to sell their wares, there ideas, products, schemes and services.
3. with Climategate pulling the rug out from underneath the Climate Change mandate, at least in the corporate dominated state and capitalist media (i.e. ALL of the mainstream media) police action could be severe.
4. My own view, is that the Klimaforum09, at best, could become a democratic permaculture design process, a massively upscaled version of the open space and community design processes of Tony Andersen’s Scandanavian cooperative design, or the general approach of the Transition Movement
5. A desireable outcome of this could be the 10 000 Trees Strategy, see my interview with Tony Andersen, co-founder of Klimaforum and key author of 10 000 Trees. Planetary Permaculture: A Global Strategy for Climate Change - Tony Andersen of Klimaforum
6. The Climate Circus could become a source of Climate Justice, if the Klimaforum09, creates a global mandate, a global-local permaculture design for a return to indigienous (local) perennial polyculture Klimaforum09 Mandate - Local permaculture people create Gaia Permaculture

 Further references

• What is Klimaforum09? 
• New Deal Permaculture with Bill Mollison

Over the past month we have travelled from the Mondragon Cooperative of Arrasate, in the Basque Country, and then down to Malaga, southern Spain where greenhouses are so prevalent they can be clearly seen from space. We then made our way to Scotland for Climate Camp and a confrontation with Greenhouse Feudalism.

After arriving from the super-hot and super-commercial neoliberal wasteland of southern, coastal Spain, we flew to London to stay with a good friend from UK Indymedia.

After one day of wandering around Portobello Road, we were on a National Express bus (we couldn’t afford a train) to Edinburgh, and then a local train to Lanark, where we got a lift after buying food, camping supplies, and wellies for the mud and rain.

When we arrived at Mainshill, we joined the Mainshill Solidarity Camp, on the rise of one side of the Mainshill, and pitched our tent near a line of sycamore trees that hosted tree-houses high in their branches and defensive tunnels beneath. The trees provided us with much needed protection from the prevailing wind and the rain. Later the tree-houses and tunnels were the stage for some media stunts, photos published in a few national newspapers.

When we set-up our 2 person tent, in the rain, with our Indymedia friend nearby, we were the only ones in the field, and proudly surveyed the grassy slope in front of us, and the two open-cast mines across the road from us, as if we weren’t mere trespassers, but as if we owned the joint.

Over the next two weeks we watched the full Scottish Camp for Climate Action lifecycle, and the number of tents around us multiplied.  The Scottish Camp for Climate Action 2009 was hosted by the Mainshill Solidarity Camp, a resistance group which has occupied the proposed site of a new opencast mine for about 2 months.

The land is owned by Lord Home, who is not one of Grist’s green royals.  In my view, it’s more of a case of a felonous Lord who is liable for forfeiture of his titles, lands and freedom. His dealings with Scottish Coal, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and politicians of all flavours — Labour, Scottish National, and Conservatives — is more a kind of Greenhouse Feudalism.

The 10-day event was very interesting as there were a number of groups with overlapping aims, with strategic and tactical differences. Sometimes these differences created such tension that there were almost breaks. However, we managed to maintain cooperation and the event was a success.

It wasn’t possible to use Climate Change as a filter, or simplify the problem via a kind of carbon rationalism. i.e. “how much emissions, by whom, when, how do we stop it?”. The Mainshill Solidarity Camp, which is a longer term project than the 2009 Scottish Climate Camp, aims to continue to physically resist the opencast mine for as long as possible, and these individuals work in conjunction with the local community.

The context of the campaign, become the Greenhouse Feudalism, the local equivalent of the Australian Greenhouse Mafia. The corrupt planning process, the distorted politics, the money, and most of all, the immediate negative health effects of opencast mining. See the Coal Health Study BLOG.

Kirstie made national press with the Coal Health Study, Sunday Herald “A climate of fear“. A new edition of the study is being prepared under the auspices of local organisations. The Coal Health Study scope is being expanded, and we are making important international connections.

Climate change activists need to decide whether they use climate change as a filter or a lens.

People, most of all climate change activists, must decide whether climate change is a lens through which they analyse the problem and sythesise the solutions. Or is climate change is a filter, that selects and screens-out any elements and aspects not directly related to greenhouse gas emissions.  

Filter 

• remove by passing through a filter; "filter out the impurities"  

• device that removes something from whatever passes through it

  Princeton Wordnet

Lens

• a transparent optical device used to converge or diverge transmitted light and
  to form images  

• (metaphor)
  a channel through which something can be seen or understood; "the
  writer is the lens through which history can be seen" 

• biconvex
  transparent body situated behind the iris in the eye; its role (along
  ­with the cornea) is to focuses light on the retina

  Princeton Wordnet 

If climate change is a filter, screening-out all that is not important, than the only important thing is reducing global warming, especially greenhouse gas emissions and especially C02 emissions and everything else is left for another, later campaign. Revolution will have to wait, lets sort out emissions first. As Monbiot says “Climate Change is Not Anarchy’s Football”

But for many, including the core of activists at Mainshill Solidarity Camp and I would guess a strong current within the Climate Camp movement such as Earth First and Coal Action Edinburgh, anarchy, direct-action and similar democratic tendencies such as consensus and veganism are vital. Climate Change is not about greenhouse emissions, it is about Climate Justice. For them climate activism, its not just about emissions reductions, it’s very much about revolution.

In short, the it’s a super-narrow agenda of GHG emissions reductions versus a neboulous and evolving revolution of Climate Justice. 

Climate Change Campaigns: Climate Deniers, Climate Traders, Climate Justice

For those choosing between the filter or the lens, assuming climate change and global warming are real, its a choice between 3 Climate Change Campaigns, 2 corporate and 1 community

1. Climate Deniers: climate change is not real, not significant, natural and not man-made, will be good & wont hurt you, is worth the inconvenience - the Greenhouse Mafia - carbon emission consumers of producers - coal, oil, gas, automobile, agriculture
   
2. Climate Traders: climate change is the single biggest problem and we can deal with it by exclusively focusing on reducing greenhouse emissions, every other problem needs to cue behind it
   
3. Climate Justice: global warming and climate change are a symptom of a pathological global system that is based on violence and exploitation. Imperialism, industrial and landed fuedalism, capitalism
   

Open Question
Has a climate change filter been set-up withing the Propoganda Model framework?
 (Chomsky/Herman)

Carbon Rationalism

A kind of economic rationalism is possible, indeed tempting, especially for the quantitative science types, and haggling the details of the various carbon trading schemes and other market-based mechanisms.

Mainshill Solidarity Camp, Scotland Climate Camp, UK Climate Camp & Douglas community activists

Looking at the proposed open-cast mine at Mainshill - now home of the Mainshill Solidarity Camp and host to the Scotland Climate Camp - you would get two very different views is you use climate change as lens versus climate change as filter.

Mainshill through the Climate Filter

George W Bush “Sometimes it’s hard to tell when you listen to the filter.”

Looking at Mainshill through the filter 

Emissions reductions is imperative, all else is distraction. Direct-action against carbon producers and consumers and carbon trading are the main focus. The main culprit is Scottish Coal, the policy of the Scottish Executive and the hypocrisy of the UK Government. 

Mainshill through the Climate Lens

Mainshill Solidarity Camp have occupied a beautiful and environmentally important hill near the mansion of absentee Lord Home. If the felonous Lord Home has his way, Mainshill will be an open-cast coal and clay mine and leased to Scottish Coal who will extract 1.7 million tonnes over 4 years.

In my view, The True Spirit of Black Douglas Lives at Mainshill Solidarity Camp

Mainshill is owned by the estates of the 15th Earl of Home, David Douglas-Home. Son of Conservative PM Alec Douglas-Home, who blew-up Douglas Castle in the 60s to avoid the Inheritance Tax of the Old Labour government, which was triggered at the death of his grandfather.

The current Lord Home, called The Ghost Lord by the common Douglas folk, is the quintessential absentee landlord. He has other homes - especially after the Douglas mansion was exploded to avoid taxes. Mainly he lives in London, where his privilidge and positions are staggering even for the the British upper-classes.

 Lord Home

• Chairman of Coutts Bank, banker to the Royal Family, landed gentry and the new economy elite.
• works for the UK government via the bank bail-out of Royal Bank of Scotland and Natwest.
  
• Chairman of the Grosvenor Group which is the international property group owned by the Duke of Westminster, making him one of the richest men in the UK, owning much of London
• President of the British Association for Shooting and Conservation, and hosts shooting and conservation parties at his estates, which he charges money for, apparently when Prince Harry was busted by paparazi wearing Nazi uniforms for fun, he was sent to lay low at Lord Home’s estates. Prince Charles, William and Harry where due to shoot in Douglas this week.

Finances

Lord Home is Chairman of Coutts Bank, which a private banker to the Royal Family, a Coutts teller-machine sits in the basement of Buckingham Palace. Coutts is the private banker of the landed gentry, but now includes celebrities and other new economy elite. Coutts is the private banking arm of Natwest, which is owned by the Royal Bank of Scotland. RBS is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is now majority-owned by the UK government after the so called sub-prime meltdown.

Coutts has offices throughout the world. Coutts is split into two separate entities:

• Coutts has 28 offices in the UK, and 1 outside the UK, in Monaco.
• RBS Coutts, which has its headquarters in Zurich and five other offices in Switzerland – Berne, Geneva and Lugano. Its international offices are situated in Hong Kong, Montevideo, Singapore, Dubai and also Jersey, Isle of Man and Cayman.

Wikileaks estimates that something like 30% of the worlds private wealth is held in Swiss Bank accounts -

Switzerland: A parasite feeding on developing world? . Much of the money that was “lost” in the financial crisis of 2008-2009 will be found in the accounts of such private offshore banks as Coutts. ATTAC is one NGO working to end the tax evasion of corporations and rich individuals, the end of tax havens and the democratic control of finance.

Theoretically Coutts is now owned by the UK people, via the 2008 500 billion pound bank rescue package, the bail-out mechanisms and now the nationalisation - The Times of London’s “The bank that sank“. Therefore at Coutts, David Douglas Home is an state-employee and now the UK public own the Royal Bank of Scotland, which is the banker to Scottish Coal, there is no obstacle for Gordon Brown to stop Mainshill.

• Will New Labour or the green-blue Conservatives (David Cameron’s Green-Tories) pressure David Douglas-Home to walkaway from the Greenhouse Fuedalism ? The government and opposition can instruct both the Royal Bank of Scotland and Coutts Bank, both owned and controlled by the state and by extension the people, to cease the open-cast mine at Mainshill.

• Prince Charles, the green, organic and permaculture royal has declared war on climate change. Will he boycott Coutt’s ? Pull the Royal account from Coutts ? Or does Charles blue-green platform, his green royalty only extend to a Shock Doctrine Green Zone, a kind of neofedualism where the rich live in secure enclaves green enclaves, while all around is a sea of Mad Max brown. Or does Prince Charles rely on David Douglas-Home, his banker, to “greenwash his finances?” If Charles wants the “carbon cost” to be labeled on all products, what would the carbon cost be for Mainshill ?
  

Greenhouse Feudalism

In Australia, according to the authors Guy Pearse (High and Dry) and Clive Hamilton (Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change) and an ABC 4 Corners report “Greenhouse Mafia”, the high-carbon emissions producers and consumers - oil, coal, gas -call themselves the Greenhouse Mafia.They have literally been writing government policy, cabinet submissions and legislation from at least before the Kyoto Protocol. 

As Monbiot recently wrote Scottish climate policy is hypocritical, contradictory and counter-productive. The Scottish First Minister boasts of a the toughest climate change policy in the world, but, also has the biggest coal mines in Europe. According to Scottish Coal, 40% of which are in the Douglas Valley.

A kind of Greenhouse Feudalism - both landed and industrial - is in evidence around Lord Home. Its difficult to describe the titles, positions, connections David Douglas-Home posseses without sounding like a conspiracy theory nutter. Quite possibly why the conspiracy theory industry is given such a long leash.

David Douglas-Home is Chairman of Coutts Bank - the Royal Banker - which is the private banking arm of the Royal Bank of Scotland. RBS is now “nationalised” after the finance bail-out. Royal Bank of Scotland is the banker to Scottish Coal, a private company - after Thatchers privatisation’s. The Mainshill site is owned by the Angus-Douglas Estate, and is leased to Scottish Coal for mining purposes. 

The head of project delivery at Scottish Coal is a former employee from the Grosvener Group, which Lord Home is also Chairman. Grosvener Group is a private property group, owned by the Duke of Westminster.

David Douglas-Home, is also a Conservative Scottish Peer, one of the 92 remaining in the House of Lords. His father was a Conservative PM. But as Margaret Thatcher said, her greatest achievement was New Labour, and the Labour mafia at all levels of government are perhaps more corrupt as at least Lord Home is honest about his privilidge and attitutes. The Labour thugs and machine enable and enrich the industrial and landed feudal lords.

UK level: Coutts Bank is based in the Strand, London, and so to is Lord Home. The House of Lords is the most prestigious club in the United Kingdom. Much of what happens in Douglas is decided far away in Edinburgh or London. The New Labour government gets enormous press from its Climate Bill, which is full of all sorts of policy innovations. Its a policy wonks wet dream, a media junkies fix. As usual, the hype is the opposite of the reality. According to Climate Bill, no new coal mines or power stations. In reality… new mines, new power plants. Company tax is paid from Scottish Coal to the UK Treasury. Scottish Coal sponsor the hand-signed Christmas cards that go to constituents from the local Westminster Labour MP Karen Gillon.

Scottish level; Scottish planning policy has a presumption against new opencast mines, and Scottish climate policy is on-paper the toughest in the world. But with the drop in diesel fuel prices, and carbon trading scheme or, shudder, a carbon tax coming over the event horizon, Scottish Coal cant get mining fast enough. Scottish Coal makes what donations ? What of the revolving door ?

Regional level; South Lanarkshire Council gets paid a fixed amount from the new and existing mines, per tonnage mined and sold. Contracts for mine related work are used as a pork barreling scheme. Political donations ? Contracts ? Cronyism ? Money siphoned off ? Revolving doors ? consulting fees ? The RDT is controlled by trustees mostly from Scottish Coal and South Lanarkshire Council.

Local level: on the Douglas level, the establishment around the church and community hall are promised large sums for refurbishments. The budgets for the swimming pool are massive, much of the contracts goes to corrupt local councillors family businesses.

Finance

Being an employee of a subsidiary of the bank that is financing the mine on his land puts David Douglas-Home in a conflict of interest position. I wonder how many other commercial loans are being provided by Royal Bank of Scotland to favor senior executives and management ? 

Peerage

Is David Douglas-Home fulfilling his aristocratic duties to his family fief of Douglas ? He is destroying the environment, poisoning people with pollution, corrupting the democratic and market institutions of the land. He has also made himself an enemy of his Sovereign, but joining the enemy in the climate war i.e. increasing GHG emissions. He is also endangering the future of the country, the United Kingdom. Therefore he should resign his position, like his father and contest a House of Commons seat if he wishes to remain in government. If he does not, he is a felonous lord, having commited high-treason. He should lose his titles, property, positions and his freedom.

Estates

How can David Cameron, Zac Goldsmith and Prince Charles continue to allow someone so closely aligned to the Conservatives and Royalty undermine the Vote Blue Go Green Tory platform and the Royal’s organic green credentials. Under forfeiture David Douglas-Home’s estates revert to the Queen. A better way would be a community trust be established for the people of Douglasdale. They would take ownership and control of the estates forfeit.

Tradition

James Douglas, or Black Douglas was a famous warlord aligned with William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. They would be turning in their graves if they knew how one of their ancestors was abusing the people they fought for. Black Douglas would consider David Douglas-Home a traitor, whose punishment would be forfeiture. 

Democracy & Industry

Formal democracy has failed. A new, richer democracy from below, in industry and community needs to replace the corrupt formal institutions.

• natural resources
  
• finance
• people
• government
• industry
• environment

Planning system

The planning system is so complex, onerous and expensive that only a large corporation with teams of experts can manage it. Planning is done by corporations like Scottish Coal and the government planning bodies rubber stamp. 

Royal Inquiry

A Royal Inquiry might have some kind of effect, a positive effect. But for real change, a popular inquiry, along with the resistance of the Mainshill Solidarity Camp and the creation of alternative institutions needs to occur

Anarchy

If there ever was a case study for “anarchy” or government, of the people, for the people, by the people, than this is it. Once again, Climate Commisar Monbiot has got it wrong, there will be no solution to climate change, no reduction in greenhouse gas emissions unless there is a fundamental re-organisation of society.

It is possible that a permanent environmental war time economy is established, a kind of Carbon Dictatorship (Tim Flannery), but it is far from certain that the Sustainment scenario would be able to “engineer” the planet.

 

The WSJ - once a bastion of climate change deniers - recently published a feature lift-out explicitly acknowledging the threat of global warming and environmental crisis: The Need for Geoengineering.

 The authors solution is global, corporate, geo-engineering. The problem isn’t that we have not “engineered” too much, we have not “engineered” enough.

You can hear the same arguments from the far-right - and increasingly liberals and blue-greens - on all kinds of issues.

The problem isn’t with capitalism, or conservatism. The problem is that we haven’t engineered the planet enough. We haven’t been conservative enough, capitalist enough. The problem isn’t that we shouldn’t be fighting in Iraq of AfPak, the problem is that we are not fighting harder with more troops. 

The corporate geo-engineers are co-opting the momentum created by the climate change campaigners (with Al Gore the self-appointed saviour) and justifying a further expansion of human domination of the living planet.

Radical historian of science David F Noble calls this the Corporate Climate Coup (audio from Vancouver Cooperative Radio and and text from ZNET in a mashup at Permaculture TV)

1. Corporate Climate Campaigns: Denial vs Trade - Corporate Climate Coup - Part 1
   
2. Anti-Globalisation - Corporate Climate Coup - Part 2
   
3. Climate Commisars & Community Climate Campaigns - Corporate Climate Coup - Part 3

RAND corporation had a military analyst research and publish a couple of papers on the potential for perennial polyculture to be used to save the environment and create employment. Seeds of Another Agricultural. Revolution?. 

His conclusion was that it might be difficult to find a place for perennial polyculture in todays market place.

However, with the growth of corporate “fair-trade” branding such as Mc Donalds fair-trade coffee, and the awareness raising of such movies as Food Inc, perennial polyculture will become a value-add for corporations looking for environmental sustainability and better branding.

A recent book, by University of Davis couple, have managed to “marry their separate fields to argue logically for the use of GM technologies to improve organic agriculture” Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food

So the elements are being assembled for a McGaia future. A family friendly, geo-, genetic & socially engineered organic perennial polyculture planet.

Unless resistance and alternatives are created, such as worker-cooperatives, popular inquiries, community associations etc, a nested, fractaline organisation of work and community democracy, we will find that corporations are perfectly able to adapt and co-opt the techniques that have been nurtured by the permaculture and associated movements. 

As Mollison says, permaculture is more than a gardening system. Its about fair share, people and earth care.

Chomsky recently spoke Noam Chomsky on the Past 10 Years: Seattle ‘99 to WSF to Climate in ‘09 and said that it is up to us to decide if that extends to international solidarity and a global system of management that integrates and coordinates democracy in the community and the workplace from the bottom-up. 

We can choose between a hellish ecocide (ecological disaster), a McGaia sustainment (military-industrial sustainability) or a global framework of Gaia Permaculture. A framework which gives rights to all of nature, including the poor, and especially the living ecologies.

See also Monsanto and Gates Foundation in Africa, Stuffed & Starved etc

For the last few years I have been struggling to articulate the outline of a book called Climate War: Sustainment, Apocalypse and Liberation.

In a couple of emails, and a number of threaded discussions off those emails, this concept developed. The initial seed came while studying (and failing my coursework through inattention) the Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Sustainability Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra.

Having read a lot of Noam Chomsky and then the essay Corporate Climate Coup by David F Noble, parts of the book Al Gore a Users Manual and watching the Carbon Finance created carbon trading options marginalise alternatives and debate the climate justice movement, I became increasingly convinced that a faction of the elites where coopting - again - the climate change agenda, and at first financialising it with carbon Finance, and in the background, increasingly militarising it. 

With the change of US administrations, and the economic depression developing, I feel I have enough evidence to elaborate this project. 

Climate War: just as the Cold War subsumed and defined the peace after World War 2, the Climate War subsumes and defines the period after the Cold War. The Cold War ideology on the US side was anti-communism. The Climate War ideology (shared by most central governments) is anti-environmentalism, with communists being replaced with terrorists and increasingly eco-terrorists. Green is the new red, the FBI’s most wanted is an eco-terrorist. Insurgencies have always been embedded in a place, and so, in reality, all terrorists are fighting for rights to control an environment. The Climate War is the Cold War within the context of climate change, peak oil, peak debt, indeed peak everything. The US framework for managing the world, within the context of Climate War, is Sustainment. 

Sustainment: sustainment is an extension of the military term describing the supply and operations of maintenance to military operations. Sustainment is military-industrial supplied sustainability. In the latest US Counter-Insurgency military doctrine, Sustainment leads all counter-insurgency operations. Within the Human Terrain System, hearts and minds are won by the the supply of infrastructure and utilities. Sustainment leads operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the “civilian surge” is sustainment. With the increasing instability of the climate system, the global economic and geo-political system, sustainment will be supplied with the strongest aspect of US national power; the military industrial complex. Within the neo-liberal environment, the military-industrial compex is increasingly privatised and fragmented. As Noam Klein describes in Shock Doctrine, disaster capitalism profits greatly from crisis, real or imagined, and as the Climate War becomes the dominant organising principle for the planet, through real and imagined crisis, sustainment supplied by corporate-state military industrial system. This military industrial system will seek to profit and expand from both the crisis of conflict, of destruction of war and the maintenance of peace, and the rebuilding of damaged systems.

Apocalypse: the Bush administration actively promoted an Apocalyptic - as in catastrophic - self-fulfilling prophecy for the future of the planet. This end-times world-view sees the natural and correct direction of history taking humanity towards a historic conflict in the Middle East - centered on Jerusalem - involving the three major religions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity. The true meaning of Apocalypse, the revelation at the end of the world, offers a hope that all people will recognise that only a global and radical transition of planetary management can take the world of peak everything and crisis.

Apocalypse is also eco-catostophie or eco-cide being committed on most of the worlds peoples and ecosystems. Except on tiny pockets of economic, ecological and social sustainability, won through resistance and resilience, and often conquest and empire building. The green zones at the core of the world system, as described in the Shock Doctrine, are often subsidized by exploitation and despoilation at the perpiphery.

Liberation: Every system on the planet needs revolution. Key to these revolutions are democratisation of decision making and finances, within the constraints of equity, justice, the limits to growth, peak oil and climate change. All institutions captured by the narrow interests of elites, need to be liberated and transitioned to democratic and sustainable management. 

The Sustainment future is an extension of the Cold War paradigm dominated by multinational corporations, financial capital and militarisation. The Green Revolution (which was the extension of war technology to agriculture) used industrial processes, mechanization, petro-chemical based fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides and a concentration of control through financial capital, contracts and legal requirements that could only be matched and master by the largest corporations. Although organic farming has changed some aspects of soil and plant management it has operated with the context of corporate industrial capitalism.

The next Green Revolution is hailed by popular magazines such as Wired, The Economist, Scientific American and Popular Mechanics and relies on further developments in Genetic Engineering, and industrial processes. Sustainment wil also involved financialisation of climate change through complex financial products based on carbon emissions trading. 

As this RAND corporation report notes, corporate industrial capitalism may adapt to perennial polyculture and organic techniques in the narrowist sense.

Economic and environmental sustainability might be possible through the Sustainment scenario, however, full social sustainability cannot ever be supplied or created, sustained, by tyrannical systems such as the modern corporation, financial capitalism, centralised government.

Sustainment, as practiced now, is leading to eco-cide, eco-catastrophie and a violent mega-death, which may be the result of abrupt climate disruptions through rapid climate change and/or triggered by a world war.

Notes

Maslows hierachy of needs

different aspects

human systems: food, air, money, water, social, education, health,

cycles i.e carbon cycle, democratising the carbon cycle

12 leverage points on systems

permaculture ethics: 3 ethics, 12 principles

gaia 

gaiapermaculture synthesis

climate systems

transition movement - transitions from sustainment - through apocalypse - heaven or hell - to liberation

liberation ecology, theology

end times - interfaith compare

carbon finance, oil,war, energy politics

water

 

[permaculture] Fwd: Great Depression 2.0 + Climate Crisis = Climate War (Cold War 2 + WW3)

Nicholas Roberts nicholas at themediasociety.org

Thu Nov 27 13:16:01 EST 2008

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nicholas Roberts <nicholas at themediasociety.org>
Date: Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 10:03 PM
Subject: Re: Great Depression 2.0 + Climate Crisis = Climate War (Cold War 2
+ WW3)
To: Noam Chomsky <chomsky at mit.edu>

fyi

*A Grand Strategy of Sustainment*

*By Shawn Brimley, Small Wars Journal
*
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2008/03/a-grand-strategy-of-sustainmen/
A grand strategy of sustainment would be more selective in the use of
American force. Sustaining a global system will at times require the use of
military power, but would shun the preventive use of force. As a global
leader, the United States should invest sufficient resources to ensure it
continues to field the world’s most dominant military. When force must be
used, a strategy of sustainment would accept some risk to ensure the
participation of allies. Working by, with, and through security alliances
helps sustain American legitimacy and moral authority and are not
deleterious to success, especially when ideational dimensions are central to
modern conflict.

*Shawn Brimley <http://www.cnas.org/en/cms/?133> is the Bacevich Fellow at
the Center for a New American Security. <http://www.cnas.org/>*

—-

*SWJ Editors’ Links (Updated)*

A Grand Strategy of
Sustainment<http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/03/a_grand_strategy_of_sustainmen.php>-
Matthew Yglesias,
*The Atlantic*

Sustainment <http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2008/03/sustainment.html> -
Ilan Goldenberg, *Democracy Arsenal*

Sustainment<http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/03/strategy-of-sus.html#more>-
Andrew Sullivan,
*The Atlantic*

Kinder, Gentler
Superpower<http://www.julescrittenden.com/2008/03/22/kinder-gentler-superpower/>-
Jules Crittenden,
*Forward Movement*

A Grand Strategy of
Sustainment<http://www.d-n-i.net/dni/2008/03/20/a-grand-strategy-of-sustainment/>-
Chet Richards,
*Defense and the National Interest*

4GW: A Solution of the Second
Kind<http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2008/03/22/grand-sustainment/>-
*Fabius Maximus*

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 5:04 AM, Noam Chomsky <chomsky at mit.edu> wrote:

>  You might be right.  I don’t have the technical competence to judge.  I
> know that highly regarded engineers here at MIT think there are
> technological fixes, particularly solar.  Not nuclear of course, another
> wasting resource apart from numerous other problems.
>
> Thanks for the reference to Beevor.  It’s been on my reading list.  On the
> Latin American efforts, I doubt that there’s much systematic work — too
> recent.  Mark Weisbrot of CEPR is likely to know, if anyone does.
>
> Hard to judge whether the global justice and related movements are more
> marginalized than they’ve been since the beginning.  What’s really important
> is whether they can flourish.  To an extent they do.  But it’s also not easy
> to evaluate.
>
>
>
>
> —– Original Message —–
>  *From:* Nicholas Roberts (by way of Noam Chomsky <chomsky at mit.edu>)<chomsky at mit.edu%3E%29>
> *To:* Noam Chomsky <chomsky2 at mit.edu>
> *Sent:* Wednesday, October 29, 2008 9:02 AM
> *Subject:* Re: Great Depression 2.0 + Climate Crisis = Climate War (Cold
> War 2 + WW3)
>
> hi
>
> Nathon Lewis really deserves more attention…mostly because he seems to
> prove (to me at least) that we have no technological fix for energy supply
> going forward… from any know source.. even if we did decide to use ALL the
> nuclear material available for instance…
>
> just like the Cold War framework was containment, the new Climate War
> framework will be sustainment… as in the US counter-insurgency manual..
> supply of basic services for life directly from the military, indeed the
> disaster capitalism complex
>
> http://books.google.com.au/books?id=FHy5Ev8yg20C&pg=PT156&lpg=PT156&dq=sustainment+counter+insurgency&source=web&ots=03gqEL1V0C&sig=kVfxJMQgjFa9crZScofTMseAcPw&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result
>
> my intuition is that a green technocracy will convert the world capitalist
> system (which is based on the military industrial system anyway) into a
> sustainable world military industrial system with a focus on carbon trading
> and ecosystem services financialisation, privatisation, genetically modified
> organisisms, nuclear power, (some renewables), massive surveillance,
> geo-enigneering, social engineering, and a massive epansion of the
> entertainment and other de-carbonised, service based industries where
> complex growth can still occur. In Revenge of Gaia Lovelock talks about a
> new low-carbon economy where most people live in cities and spend their time
> eating GMO fungi and entertaining themselves consuming digital and
> de-carbonised services… Lovelock is closely connected to various
> conservatives and captains of industry and has a big effect on the UK
> environmentalists such as Monbiot and also the new scheme Kyoto2
> www.kyoto2.org. Kyoto2 is market bases, advocates GMO, nuclear,
> geo-engineering… and is backed by many ‘radicals’. It contains 4 quotes
> about climate change by Margaret Thatcher ! 2 more than Lovelock. The UK
> environmental movement is being subsumed by the Vote Blue Go Green campaign
> of the Tories under David Cameron which is an front for the broader green
> consumerism. Kind of a UK equivalent to the guilt-free green Governator in
> California.
>
> capitalism is trying to create markets in these de-carbonised complex
> growth modalities… finance, entertainment, education.. .largely around the
> internet.. for instance you can buy Second Life consumer objects, and other
> games online. although, its largely a fraud right now, supposedly Second
> Life uses more electricity than Brazil.
> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/12/avatars_consume.php
>
> regarding libertarian socialism or anarcho syndicalism you might be
> insterested in new research referenced in The Battle for Spain: The Spanish
> Civil War 1936-1939 which suggests that the anarcho-syndicalist sections of
> the country had more efficient and productive economies than ceratinly
> Monarchist Spain, Francoist Spain, and probably the Socialist/Communist
> sectors. Has there been any good work done of the economic productivity,
> efficiency of the Bolivarian Revolution with its heavy emphasis on
> participation ?
>
> http://books.google.com.au/books?id=_Mt_AAAACAAJ&dq=the+battle+for+spain&ei=fqIHSZKjH4WYsgOt8eDdDQ
>
>
> having worked in some large organisations (NEws Ltd in Australia had 2000
> people in its HQ) and within the internet, it makes intuitive sense that
> collective, cooperative, particpiatory and social economies are best
> described by idea of anarcho syndicalism, libertarian socialism, or the
> participatory economics
>
> the hype around the particpation age in the internet is revolting, but it
> is really significant that such free software projects such as Linux and
> free content projects such as Wikipedia can be organised with a social and
> cooperative framework and are based on voluntary associations and
> affinities….
>
> there seem to be principles common to all historical examples past, present
> and emerging and its only some minor parameters that are different
>
> my feeling is the global justice movement and the peoples revolutions are
> being increasingly marginsalised like during the Spanish Civil War..
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 4:52 PM, <minqi.li @economics.utah.edu> wrote:
>  Dear Nicholas Roberts:
>
>  Thanks a lot for your interest in my work and thanks for bringing Nathan
> Lewis’s work to my attention.
>  I am all participatory socialism or communism (though I’d hesitate to call
> it libertarian socialism).  But I tend to think that participatory democracy
> is more likely to grow out of the practice of workers’ struggle than from
> theoretical schemes.  Theoretical analysis can only help to illustrate the
> broad historical possibilities and necessities.
>  It is a real possibility that the system’s elites would pursue
> environmental/resources war economy as their preferred solution.  But I
> suspect the outcome is likely to accelerate the bankruptcy of the system.  A
> military-industrial economy cannot be be sustained for very long for
> economic, social, and ecological reasons.
>  The ruling elites cannot just have whatever system they want.  A viable
> system, even an exploitative one, has to meet the following criteria:
> (1)ecological sustainability (so the economy must not pursue growth, either
> for more consumption or for more military); (2)meet people’s “basic needs”.
> It can starve some people but the percentage of starvation has to be limited
> - this will not be easy for the current and future elites; (3) the political
> constraints imposed by the historical context - in our case, bourgeois
> democracy in some countries and socialist legacy in some other parts of the
> world as well as the global working class.
>  I think ultimately people will not wait to die, but will rise up to save
> themselves, though things probably will first get worse before a new path is
> opened.
>
> Minqi
>
>
> Quoting Nicholas Roberts < nicholas at themediasociety.org>:
>
>  hi Minq Li
>
> I have become an avid reader of your work after seeing you on The Real News
> talking about New Left in China, climate change etc
>
> am just reading your article regarding needing a kind of global socialism
> to
> deal with global climate change, http://www.monthlyreview.org/080721li.php
>
> regarding energy futures you might find the work of Nathan Lewis at Caltech
> useful, regarding the lack of technology for world energy.. Nathan Lewis’
> work is seriously under-reported, I guess mostly because it portrays a very
> grim picture going forward.. http://nsl.caltech.edu/energy.html
>
> I also wonder whether you have considered Libertarian Socialism or
> Participatory Economics in your advocacy for socialism or the 21st century
>
> Certainly some of the leading radical left intellectuals in the US and the
> Bolivarian Revolution are heavily based on participation
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parecon
> http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Venezuela
>
> http://books.google.com.au/books?id=CI5d2CpL60oC&dq=Economic+Justice+and+Democracy:+From+Competition+to+Cooperatio&pg=PP1&ots=zNUSctPrY6&source=bn&sig=cdMrXNJ14XAFyEKzn19Z-X4amZQ&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result#PPA139,M1
>
> it seems to me that we could possibly switch from neo-liberal
> corporate-state “environmental un-sustainability”, to a neo-socialist
> corporate-state “environmental sustainability” but human development would
> suffer
>
> my worry is that we will be placed in a Permanent Environmental War
> Economy… a military industrial sustainability, Sustainment, you can find
> threads of this future everywhere; Revenge of Gaia, Thomas Friedman, Tim
> Flannery’s chapter The Carbon Dicatorship, Naomi Klein’s Disaster
> Capitalism, even Climate Code Red (Friends of the Earth co-opted), Gore
> Vidal’s essay “Cue the Green God, Ted”, David F Noble’s The Corporate
> Climate Coup, reports by the Pentagon, UN security council etc etc
>
> “Environmental War Economy
> Governments have left it late to deal with climate change and have been
> forced to rationalise whole industry sectors and take control of many
> aspects of citizens’ lives.They build dams and powerful sea wall defences
> to
> protect land from the raging oceans, yet growing numbers of environmental
> refugees must find new countries willing to accommodate them. Greenhouse
> gases are beginning to decline, but the cost to individual liberty has been
> great.” http://www.forumforthefuture.org/projects/climate-futures
> a book that explores the converagance of these themes is American
> Theocracy:
> The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the
> 21stCentury (Hardcover)
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067003486X/leftbusinessobseA/
>
> for a while, I’ve been researching a book idea: Climate War: Apocalypse,
> Sustainment or Liberation, which explores these ideas, and your work is
> exteremely useful
>
> I was working a News Corp when the War on Terror was re-announced after
> S11,
> and many people trusted our glorious leaders, it seemed like a just war, it
> seems to me, that we are making the same mistake, when we rush to support
> the new war on climate change
>
> we need to ask who are we fighting for ? what kind of war are we fighting ?
> are we setting-up a new Green technocratic elite ? or is this a war of
> liberation ? is more war even the right way to frame and to act ?
>
> keep up the good work
>
> cheers
>
> –
> Nicholas Roberts
> [im] skype:niccolor
>
> Australian Social Forum
> http://www.AustralianSocialForum.org
>
> “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the
> new
> cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms
> appear.
>   * Gramsci. Prison Notebooks
>
>
>
>
> Minqi Li, Assistant Professor
> Department of Economics, University of Utah
> Salt Lake City, UT 84112
> Phone: 801-581-7697; Fax: 801-585-5649
>
>
>
>
>
>
> –
> –
> Nicholas Roberts
> [im] skype:niccolor
>
> Australian Social Forum
> http://www.AustralianSocialForum.org
>
> “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the
> new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms
> appear.
>   * Gramsci. Prison Notebooks
>
>


–
–
Nicholas Roberts
[im] skype:niccolor

http://www.Permaculture.TV
http://www.WorkerCooperatives.com
http://www.AustralianSocialForum.org

 

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