REAL Green Adaptation

The bellow article is another good article on FAKE Green.  It presents a profound concept of “down-cycling”.  This is what we are in danger of doing with renewables.  We are already doing this with recycling.  If one considers the labor, water, and fossil fuels it takes to separate and then try to utilize recyclables we see down cycling fully.  Yet, it is better than nothing at all but let’s not call it green.  Here is a definition:

“Downcycling, or cascading:

is the recycling of waste where the recycled material is of lower quality and functionality than the original material. Often, this is due to the accumulation of tramp elements in secondary metals, which may exclude the latter from high-quality applications. Wikipedia”

Downcycling is a great concept to describe blind techno optimism with its complicated tech and quality destroying efficiency.  Efficiency can actually lessen the quality of life with nature and human social life.  A concept that needs to be added to this blind techno optimism is simplicity.  Simplicity with its essential component of wisdom:

Wisdom     Knowledge of systemness:

“Knowledge of systemness is the hardest won knowledge there is. It includes not just ordinary knowledge, but wisdom as well – the knowledge of what ordinary knowledge to gain and how to use it. This will be more valuable to some future population than computers or solar collectors because from this knowledge all other technical aspects can be regenerated.”

We are now at a time were less is better than more in regards to knowledge and tech.  This is where FAKE Green is a failure.  FAKE Green wants more for less but too often diminishing returns destroy value and Jevons Paradox makes efficiency mean more with more leading to less.

 

 

“Vaclav Smil on natural gas (ethane) and plastics”

https://tinyurl.com/ua9zskr     energy skeptic

 

“The effort of collecting, transporting and cleaning plastics for possible recycling has largely failed, created much more pollution and contributed massively to climate change. The idea of burning plastics and using the energy to heat our homes was proposed by the plastics company Dow more than 30 years ago: it suggested treating all plastics as “borrowed oil”. At that time, ordinary domestic waste had a calorific value of low-grade coal, so the suggestion was that this waste should be burned in efficient plants with heat recovery and treatment of the gases produced, perhaps even trapping the carbon dioxide produced, rather than trying to recycle the complex (and dirty) mix of plastics.  Today, with higher use of more complex plastics, this makes even more sense. Mixed plastics cannot really be recycled: they are long-chain molecules, like spaghetti, so if you reheat and reprocess them, you inevitably end up with something of lower performance; it’s called down-cycling.”  While this could be polluting if not done right, people will certainly turn to burning plastic and anything else they can get their hands on at some point of energy decline. Better to do it correctly now in an incinerator than in backyards in the future as well as to protect our land and waterways from plastic pollution right now.”

 

“In 2010, packaging consumed almost 40% of the total (mostly as various kinds of PE and PP), construction about 20% (mostly for plastic sheets used as vapor barriers in wall and ceiling insulation), the auto industry claimed nearly 8% (interior trim, exterior parts), and the electrical and electronic industry took about 6% (mostly for insulation of wires and cables).  All of these products begin as ethane. In North America and the Middle East ethane is separated from natural gas, and low gas prices and abundant supply led to surplus production for export and favored further construction of new capacities: in 2012 Qatar launched the world’s largest LDPE plant and, largely as a result of shale gas extraction, new ethylene capacities are planned in the USA (Stephan, 2012). The dominant feedstock for ethane in Europe, where prices of imported natural gas are high, is naphtha derived by the distillation of crude oil.  Plastics have a limited lifespan in terms of functional integrity: even materials that are not in contact with earth or water do not remain in excellent shape for decades. Service spans are no more than 2–15 years for PE, 3–8 years for PP, and 7–10 years for polyurethane; among the common plastics only PVC can last two or three decades and thick PVC cold water pipes can last even longer (Berge, 2009).”

The carbon ranch is in an expression of the permaculture side of REAL Green.  What REAL Green does with permaculture is go hybrid with the old ways and new ways to achieve the goal of local sustainability with resilience.  The side benefits are increased benefits to local wildlife plus increase in the health of soil and water through REAL Green permaculture practices.  Rotational grazing with smaller stocking rates on polyculture pasture by multispecies grazing lowers machinery and chemical use.  Small scale hay production with low horse power equipment is lower carbon.  REAL Green intends to go electric with solar power charging of an electric tractor when available.  Real Green goes further with energy production by using a sustainable wood lot for wood heat but also solar energy to heat and supply power.  This energy production is hybrid and still uses the grid.  It is the hope of REAL Green the grid goes greener with more renewables.  The reason for the hybrid of grid and off grid strategies is the increased resilience of the two.  REAL Green is realistic about power and understands the benefits of both.  The grid is reliable and on demand which is useful with varied situations a REAL Green finds himself in.  REAL Green also is dedicated to efficiency strategies that lower consumption foot prints.  These are both technology and behavioral.

 

REAL Green is based on localism because that is the proper human scale but REAL Green is realistic and understands a REAL Green Ranch must dwell in a delocalized world that is carbon intensive.  This delocalized world is with people too who live on demand and discretionary in regards to consumption.  Many people do not factor in resilience, sustainability, and permaculture into their daily decisions but REAL Green does.  Activities are reflected on in this regard by REAL Green.  A trip to town is carbon intensive so the trip is multi-tasked.  Food waste is minimized by feeding animals what is left.  Localism means focusing on doing things at home avoiding road trips for enjoyment yet REAL Green realizes significant others are not REAL Green so there is flexibility to accommodate significant others who don’t embrace REAL Green.  This includes low carbon travel because REAL Greens point is localism enhances the Ranch and travel diminishes it.  That said some educational trips are beneficial and embraced.  Conservation strategies are embraced.  Lights are turned off when not in use.  Showers are done as needed instead of as a routine.

 

Consumerism is reduced but also adapted.  REAL Green embraces a decline paradigm so it is green prepping.  Consumerism is REAL Greens access to a bounty of high-quality material for the REAL Green Ranch.  REAL Green collects and stores the best material and tools for future use.  These items have longevity built in.  An emphasis is on low tech and simplicity. A REAL Green farm will have plenty of hand tools but also exceptional high-tech tools like solar, batteries, and digital tools.  REAL Green understands we are carbon trapped and path dependent so industrial agriculture is accepted as necessary in the fabric of the gradient of decline of a world in overshoot.  This means REAL Green does not try to replace industrial agriculture but offers seeds of change for the local for when planetary and social decline drives the local into less affluence.  REAL Green behavior is an add on for anyone including industrial ag.

 

Green prepping and low footprint living for the benefit of the planet is good and offers meaning.  It does not come cheap because it is hybrid and redundant for increased resilience and sustainability.  Hyper efficiency of the status quo seeks to drive cost down by whatever means.  REAL Green instead seeks to lower cost rationally when applicable in this regard.  A solar system is not cheaper than all electric but the resilience has a value.  Low stocking rates make an operation less efficient in regards to scale with volume but low stocking rates benefit the environment.  Vegetables are cheaper at Walmart but the taste and benefit of having food sources locally has value.  REAL Green uses the status quo to leave it so the value in that mentality is primarily about localizing delocalization.  Scale is the basis of REAL Green.  Humans are not scaled properly and this is primarily the problem with behavior and environmental degradation.  Since our environment is now a delocalized Anthropocene to inhabit, one must adapt but also mitigate.  The mitigation is localizing the damage delocalization does.

 

Ultimately REAL Green is about the wisdom of less.  The reason less is the focus is the fact that we are faced with too much from the delocalized world.  Costs drive us to delocalize because economies of scale and comparative advantage offer cost advantages.  Cheap energy allows transport that harms a local both with products introduced but also the delocalizing ability to leave the local.  REAL Green balances these demands with localism and resilience in mind.  Currently REAL Green localism is not even on the radar screen and for those who read these words REAL Green may be considered nutter.  That will change as the collapse process intensifies.  Since REAL Green is behavioral it is about the meaning that comes with increasing the strength and survivability of a local.  REAL Green does not have to be a ranch but permaculture should be a component.  Real Green can be a trade and might include travel like life found in sailing.  Scale dictates REAL Green value.

 

“The Carbon Ranch”

https://tinyurl.com/rwpb465     resilience

https://tinyurl.com/wv96zvf  carbon ranch picture

https://tinyurl.com/qnrqj5g     marin carbon project

 

“why is society so obsessed with high technology as a solution to our problems, including climate change, when the low technology of nature could be more effective? Why not use the power of photosynthesis as a solution instead?  In the op-ed, I argued that we could store carbon in soils by: (1) switching to planned grazing systems using livestock, particularly on degraded land; (2) restoring riparian and wetland zones; (3) protecting open space from development; and (4) implementing no-till farming practices.  “The time has come to bundle them together into one economic and ecological whole, which I call a carbon ranch,” I wrote. “The goal of a carbon ranch is to reduce atmospheric CO2 while producing substantial co-benefits for all living things. These include local food production, improved ecosystem services, restored wildlife habitat, rural economic development, and the strengthening of cultural traditions.”

I am a green prepper which means I am going low carbon and local for multiple reasons.  I care about the planet and I am seeking more resilience with sustainability.  I call it REAL Green realgreenadaptation.blog.  This starts with acceptance of a systematic decline process that is both with human civilization and the planet.  It springs forward as an optimistic pessimist.  This incongruous juxtaposition meshes by looking at the journey not the destination.  The journey is a departure into an alternative way of life.  The end is acceptance of a dying of the status quo we have been habituated to.  Once the stages of grief involving the decline of place and our way of life is accepted then one goes forth in a hybrid way to restore the local but with the help of the delocalizing global world.  This is again a juxtaposition and a tricky one.  One lives in a hybrid life of being in the status quo to leave it.

 

The world is now Anthropocene which means we are path dependent and carbon trapped.  Within this trap there is free choice to adapt and mitigate the decline of the planet and civilization by a hybridization of the best material and practices of pre-modern and the amazing advances of the modern.  Low carbon capture is the key to this but is also unsupportable for most without support from the status quo of making a living to pay the bills.  High volume and intensive efforts are required these days to succeed in agriculture they also destroy the harmony of the local environment.  This means you must pay to go low carbon.  You may be lucky to cover cost and your labor will go unrewarded.  Restoration efforts cost money and time without economic return likely for years if at all.

 

I do a multispecies rotational grazing operation with goats and cattle.  I do this with low stocking rates.  I chose this mix because my fields through years of being left to themselves have developed a polyculture pasture of numerous plant types IOW they are overgrown with invasives but also have rich stands of grasses both native and introduced, weeds, and brush.  Goats and cattle manage this pasture type well.  This allows me to greatly reduce diesel needs for mowing fields and lower significantly chemical use.  Chemicals are only used along fences and not every year.  I also do renewable power and biomass heating. This involves introducing modern elements of low carbon capture with excellent tech.   I am utilizing biomass in the fields with hay and animal grazing.  I have gone low horse power with collecting hay in small batches at optimum times.  I hope to get an electric tractor if one becomes available to be powered by solar.  I also have custom haying done by contractors mainly in an effort to have some fields adapted to hay production.  I do this operation along with land dedicated to natural growth for wildlife.  I have a garden, orchard, and grapes.  I have opened my farm to beekeepers with several hives.  I garden minimalist because I don’t have time to specialize.  I also have chickens.  I have livestock guardian dogs that also serve as potential security.

 

REAL Green involves doing the basics of prep with security, food storage, and basics of sheltering.  This way of life involves a triage effort of distancing oneself from delocalizing lifestyles that damage a healthy local.  This is done with a relative effort that does not damage status quo ties too much.  You do not want to alienate and destroy status quo connections that support your efforts.  Significant others can be alienated by radical efforts.  You do REAL Green under the radar screen but are honest with those who seek this way of life.   The basic REAL Green effort means primarily trying to limit the car and consumer culture when ever possible.  REAL Green is a relative effort which means you live in and out of the status quo.  This is both with relationships and with place.  The relative part is a balance of the status quo and the departure from it.  Your significant others will most likely not be committed REAL Green.  Your place is probably not REAL Green because of delocalization.  Yet, it might have the bones of a beautiful REAL Green monastery with a local both natural and human that can be restored.

 

Since we are Anthropocene dependent you must adapt to it to leave it.  You mitigate the worst of it but with the mentality of being trapped and dependent on it.  If you have the time and the resources you attempt to build a REAL Green monastery that is a manifestation of low carbon living and green prepping.  It is about knowledge and wisdom.  The knowledge is the best of the old and the new and the wisdom is choosing what to use and not to use.  In this day and age most of the wisdom is about what not to use and avoid.  This is also about building up something for the younger members of the family and local.  They will see the worst of the decline process.

 

This process is uncertain because of the nature of decline.  Decline involves abandonment, dysfunction, and the irrational so a cascading drop in economic activity and support is possible.  It is also possible this could be a drawn-out affair.  We are at the cusp of change with many exciting techs that offer constructive growth but within a time of overall destructive change.  This destructive change revolves around planetary decline and a late stage civilization creaking from overshoot of numbers and consumption.

 

REAL Green is local and individual but reaches out to community and ranges to affect as much local as one can but with the wisdom of localism as its mission.  This is about deep adaptation to shocks that involves attempts at resilience through relinquishment and restoration.  This is another incongruous juxtaposition that points to a paradox of living REAL Green.  To build up you must tear down just like nature does with succession and evolution.  You emulate the planet and thereby strengthen your local with the understanding we are now in succession both human and natural.  The planet will support you because this is the WAY. This means we are moving down a gradient of decline into a world that is altered by less complexity and more disruption.  New niches will be created as old ones are destroyed.  You position your REAL Green monastery to hopefully be a seed of change.  This is not a religion it is an add-on to your higher power that is your own personal quest for the truth integrated with the planet and its cycles.

Discussing total doom Is not saying total doom will happen quickly.  Binary behavior that is not capable of seeing a world of grey is what techno optimist tend to be.  Doomers have evolved and others  have gone delusional and now think we are in a techno age of solutions.  This could not be further from the truth.  We are now in a decline and decay process.  This is across the board of human behavior and planetary realities.  There is great tech evolving that could allow mitigation but it shows no evidence of saving us from the traps we are in.  Path dependencies that got us to this point of failure revolve around techno solutions and we somehow think different tech solutions will get us out of trouble.  The so-called golden decade of the onset of renewables was a time of destructive central bank policy that now has the world in a debt trap.  The peak oil crisis was papered over with the malinvestment of debt.  We are also in a carbon trap that means the renewable fantasy of green techno optimism will hit a brick wall.  Renewables can do much for our civilization in decline but it is showing no indication of overcoming the carbon trap.

 

The biggest issue is behavior and techno optimism is just another example of the behavior that must change but won’t.  If they didn’t learn from the last 10 years they never will.  A techno optimist thinks failure is not an option when we are already failed.  Modern man can win a retreat from this decline process but that means tough adaptation actions that acknowledge retreat instead techno optimist are on the offense.  Climate protests are an expression of this offensive behavior that is doomed.  Humans must downsize and live less energy intensive lives.  This does not mean more efficient tech it means less consumption and less people.   Tech can be part of it but not the driver.  This kind of degrowth behavior will be destructive there is no putting lipstick on destructive policy but this will be an organized retreat embracing decline not denying it.

 

Humans must reduce the bad behavior that has no future instead central banks have enshrined the status quo in growth-based behavior.  This continues the energy orgy behavior by repressing and easing the dysfunction of growth-based activities green or brown.  This has allowed investments without good ROI.   The planet is getting tougher on frivolous investments and we are covering that up with debt.  Policy adaptation is needed but wise policy not delusional policy.  Europe is making some good policy steps but will likely ruin it by overplaying its hand of continuing the unsustainable.  Renewable and EV centered policy could be recognized as a mitigation step but not a transition paradigm.  You may think well it is better than the alternative.  To a point this may be true but just imaging this alternative policy properly applied then one can see the wasted resources that might be much better applied with proper behavior adaptation.

 

Proper behavior would be policy stepping back from growth proactively understanding this process means recessionary results.  Degrowth policies mean a strangling of globalism but also allow for better adaptation to the reality of decline.  The climate response is a sham because loop holes are large and fake policy hides the truth.  Climate is lost as is the health of the planet. Less destructive behavior along with mitigation strategies should be where the bulk of policy and resources need to go.  Instead the world will purse tech-based growth that FAKE Greens tout as a green revolution with support of the brown status quo of fossil fuels and growth.   Renewables and alternative transport are not green and cannot be made green.  FAKE Greens are embracing growth and the transport culture when this is what is the problem.

 

Localism is the answer and this involves a degrowth of globalism simultaneously with a growth of local efforts.  Instead FAK Greens are trying to green up the status quo.  Local efforts will not provide the profit numbers needed by globalism.  What is not admitted by techno growth driven people is the fact the system requires financial repression and easing to survive.  This means globalism and techno growth have already failed.  The numbers have just been massaged and the bad economic behavior supported financially.  Since the proper actions of degrowth along with targeted growth locally is not going to be embraced this ensures that the behavior FAKE Greens are pushing is a failure too.

 

REAL Green would start with the behavior of failure driving a policy of reeducation and center around mitigation strategies.  Grand renewable policy of a Green New deal that is touted by regions like Europe or political classes like the liberal left will be a failure.  Some of their policies will yield some good tech but it is the behavior that will waste valuable resources.  At a point the effort to go carbonless will fail.  It will fail because the carbon trap says we can’t maintain a human scale that is global and go carbonless.  There is too much consumption by too many people.  This means we will get to doom but by a route of delusion and deception of FAKE behavior both Brown and Green.

If you are honest about science then one realizes we are path dependent systematically with multiple problems that combine to be predicaments.  I don’t need to repeat them other than to say normally scientist ignore economics which is also a problem with a decline process that means our ability to manage all the other problems will decline and this overall decline will further cause the economics of humans to decline.  It is a vicious circle.

We are carbon trapped so renewables are little more than a short-term techno fix.  Our modern greens are very delusional on this subject.  We also have the modern greens preaching degrowth that is delusional because systematically globalism must grow or is comes apart.  Degrowth will crash the economic system that powers our ability to mitigate the predicament of being path dependent and carbon trapped.  We are clearly in a paradigm of decline on all levels.  Even intelligence is splintering into unwise areas of noise that actually lower overall intelligence because of the corruption of quality intelligence.

Behavior is the key and proper behavior accepts we are in a decline process.  Proper behavior can be reached through Kubler Roth.  Once we are at acceptance than proper behavior can be adapted and then and only then can techno solutions be applied.  This also means the destructive change of degrowthing can be embraced.  Degrowth means abandonment, dysfunctional, and irrational.  Degrowth must be part of the process once behavior has been adapted.  Degrowth and techno solutions then are applied in a proactive way to adapt and mitigate to decline once acceptance of failure is reached.  This means embracing decline with science and engineering but also education and leadership.  This would be like an organized retreat where an army has a flexible withdrawal in force.  If we do not get proactive and begin retreat the decline process could become like a disorganized route.

Of course, the above is just mind games because we are path dependent in the bigger picture.  Common agreement is not there.  We are in competitive cooperation in the big picture which means we tolerate each other to allow survival but we continue to try to overcome our neighbors.  There are no solutions at this level and there can never be with populations at the level it is and with the consumption levels that allow populations to be at this level.  This is a duel force preventing mitigation at the highest levels.  This then means the only place to find solutions is lower down the chain to where humans scale properly and that is some kind of local and small community.

This is where people can change and make a difference but of course only in regards to mitigating and adapting to decline that ultimately will lead to collapse.  The key to all this is behavior that produces a local wisdom that accepts decline and failure.  This then allows a success of sorts that is a local that has increase resilience and sustainability in the face of human and planetary decline.  It means getting out of the denial of death on multiple levels from the personal to the community.  It means lifeboats of techno solutions and hospices of behavioral changes.  The top is gone just as the planet is gone as we once knew it but the local is not.  Restoration can be done to the local in the sense that the natural and the human can be strengthened.  For a cascading decline process over time frame unknown.

The key point here is it must be done in the reality of we are in the Anthropocene of globalism and planetary decline.  You can’t leave globalism and expect to have the resources to power a stronger local.  You will have to utilize dirty behavior of human growth to leave it.  This means a hybrid of using energy intensity to get to where you can live low carbon.  Yes, low carbon is not economic but it the only salvation for the decline process.  So, you build a low carbon life with energy intensity of modern life.  You do this dirty activity to leave it.  You do it relatively and with an advanced behavior that requires strength of being in a twilight zone.

This twilight zone is the surreal of embracing a world you are trying to leave.  To do this one must be practical, flexible, and honest.  You realize there is no hope at the top and with the future of our status quo but you know you can make yourself stronger and more resilient for this process locally.  This is a green prepping.  It is embracing the planets current ecological cycle of succession.  This is non-negotiable and there are no other planets to go to.  We are trapped and the only way out of the trap is to live within it.  Use carbon to go low carbon.  Adapt behavior to low carbon.  Accept death all around and through that create a rebirth of new life that will come from death.  This is how nature operates so emulate it.

Let’s be fair to Greta whether she is genuine or a stooge, it is likely her generation that will experience the worst of what is ahead.  If only climate change were the problem.  In fact, climate change may not be the worst immediate problem but that is what FAKE Greens want us to believe.  They want us to believe that there are techno solutions if and only if we employ them.  This means both employing and taking away.  Yes, both so called green growth and green degrowth are touted as what will save us if we would only follow messages like Greta’s.

 

Honest science that is not myopic with climate specialization, will notice that the trap we are in is both carbon and path dependent.  The carbon trap is obvious to honest science.  Renewables show no evidence of having what it takes to replace fossil fuels and maintain the status quo.  Honest science points to the fact that renewables appear unable to grow large enough to eclipse fossil fuels let alone replace and self-replicating more renewables when they old wear out.  There is also the inconvenient fact that the climate system has probably already been forced into a new paradigm with system-initiated carbon changes meaning human intervention at this point may be too late.  The path dependencies relate to the fact we are trapped in behaviors and system that got us here.  We may be able to change around the edges but a new system is likely only after the collapse of the current.  Globalism that produces so much to support for overshoot of population and consumption has no alternative and cannot be greened up.  The basis of globalism is energy intensity of value chains, transport and economies of scale based upon consumption these support large populations both in mega cities and rural areas.

 

So, the climate argument is trapped in physics and economics.  Economics is behavior based so how do you model irrational human behavior?  This then goes to the heart of the issue of the message of Greta and its legitimacy.  She is not acknowledging failure as she should.  I she acknowledged failure and then said we must build life boats and hospices then she would be a true enigma rising above the tired human narratives of perpetual growth by whatever it takes.  She could say that renewables are vital in extending out pain and suffering and degrowth is also vital in cutting out the fat that is waste.  We need to quit bad behavior based growth immediately but doing so is self-destructive to globalism.  She could say we need to choose polices that are proactive and preparatory for collapse and by doing that this ensure collapse will happen.  This shut door is because once you pass through that door there is no turning back.  Once growth policies green or brown are adapted to proactive and preparatory for collapse then globalism will end and with that overshoot will have to adjust to a level of stability far lower.  This assures pain, suffering, and death.

 

With economic abandonment comes irrational and dysfunctional of the forces of mathematical chaos IOW cascading destructive change has no modeling to determine the outcome.  What would be needed is coordinated constructive change to adapt and mitigate this like emergency maneuvers are for a controlled crash.  Greta can’t go there because she does not believe that nor do her handlers.  This is not an acceptable message by the FAKE Green establishment and of course from the Brown Denialist.  Failure is not an option at these levels.  A message that disruptive of the status quo cannot be gone to.  It is ok to talk about green solutions and even some green degrowth but you can’t talk about failure from collapse.

 

Greta deserves to get angry but she should study up on Kubler Roth and realize she is still stuck in the first 3 stages.  This FAKE Green movement of techno solutions and sweetened degrowth fantasies will end in depression and once the acceptance part shows its head so much will have been wasted on the bargaining.   Unfortunately, that is human nature so let’s just say Greta deserves to be angry and deserves to learn from her mistakes.  Old 55-year-old people like me did the same and this is part of the reason we are where we are at.  Some mistakes are to big to fix.  Modern globalism is one of them.

Behavior is indeed the key to constructive change but it must first start with the Kubler Roth of acceptance.   This acceptance then accepts destructive change is the paramount force now in the paradigm change of planetary decline.  The acceptance is all humans are in a vicious circularity of a carbon trap with path dependencies.  This is a circular economy and social system that is a trap not a solution like often pitched by greens with a circular economy.  There is no circularity in nature with ecosystems.  They are always evolving and entering succession.

 

This goes to the very heart of the matter with the first step of denial and the second of anger and the third of bargaining.  We see denial in a significant portion of the population.  There are the most obvious with the Brown DENIALIST.  These people dismiss the science for a variety of reasons or cherry-pick science to prove a false point of there are no problems with growth.  A Brown DENIALIST will advocate growth as the only solution and they are right to a point.  Entropy does not allow degrowth of complex systems except in destructive change.  Brown forget about limits though.

 

We have FAKE Greens which represent the vast majority of greens who accept the science but are in denial of the solutions and bargaining with the false claim that renewables and an EV car culture can work with our carbon predicament.  There are other FAKE Greens advocating degrowth but then are in delusional bargaining with the economic consequences of collapse that economic abandonment represents.  They ignore the destructive dysfunctions and the irrational behavior which become powerful forces with economic abandonment.  The narrow specialists found in academics and science fall into these categories also by proposing and supporting unsound techno and social policy.  The unsoundness is believing we can geo engineer or solve techno problems with techno solutions.  Then there is the social belief we can all eat plants and save the planet and at the same time pitch vertical farming and organics behind a techno society.  It comes down to a culture that bargains with “failure is not an option” when failure is the underlying planetary trend of succession of complex ecosystems, we are trapped in.

 

There is then the awakened ones who have gone to the acceptance phase.  I call these people REAL Greens.  A REAL Green accepts the science, is not in denial of the solutions, and passes through the depression phase of failure by going forth in adaptation and mitigation.  A REAL Green is an optimistic pessimist and it is the paradox of that juxtaposition that becomes a truth that can be manifested locally and in small groups.  A REAL Green understands that in an overpopulated world in global overshoot caught up in a competitive cooperative of globalism there can’t be reform of the macro status quo.  This status quo is self-organizing and complex with complicated nodes.  What supports such a large population and also nodes of production and control are dependent on high consumption is the essence of a trap.  Even those areas that are subsistence and in poverty are at risk for a cascading collapse.  There are no refugees nor solutions to predicaments of this type.

 

A REAL Green then realizes that he can make a difference locally with small groups and small footprints.  A REAL Green can build networks, skills, and structures of resilience and sustainability.  Not many are capable of going REAL Green because so many are locked into survival in the status quo.  They are path dependent prisoners.  Many don’t have the education or the wealth to do it.  Those who do should do it but many don’t because the enjoyment of affluence is too great.  This includes a many of the affluent FAKE Greens.  Any FAKE Green has the potential to be REAL.  A REAL Green will leverage the status quo with things like fossil fuels and Amazon to leave it.  He will dive into permaculture with a hybrid of the best of the old like the Amish and the best of the new with simple and effective techno solutions like renewables.  It may have to be a hobby or passion so he quits vacations and luxuries as needed in sacrifice.

 

It all starts with behavior first for a REAL Green.  A REAL Green accepts failure as the starting point then goes forth in relative effort based upon his local of people, place, and position in adaptation and mitigation. This is done with local life boats of resilience and sustainability along with hospices of empathy and understanding for those who are not awakened.   It includes regeneration of the local land a REAL Green inhabits.  The hospice is human and natural and both will suffer the final chapter of the Anthropocene but that does not mean they cannot be regenerated to be better able to face the coming decline.  So, behavior is the key but behavior that is honest with science and human nature.  This behavior becomes  a physical and mental monastery of seeds that might be a flap of a butterfly’s wing into seeds of recovery post collapse.

 

“We Can’t Do It Ourselves”

https://tinyurl.com/wg4pctx     local futures

 

“Advances in energy efficiency have not resulted in lower energy demand, because they don’t address new and more resource-intensive consumption patterns that often emerge from more energy efficient technologies. [1][2] Likewise, renewable energy sources have not led to a decarbonisation of the energy infrastructure, because total and per capita energy demand are increasing faster than renewable energy sources are added.[3]  Consequently, the only way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to focus more on social change. Energy efficiency and decarbonization policies need to be combined with “social innovation” if we want energy use and carbon emissions to go down. This is where behavioral change policies come in. The third pillar of climate change policy tries to steer consumer choices and behaviors in a more sustainable direction.”

This is a good article to highlight the hybrid nature of REAL Green.  In this article we see the tension between a green realist and an ambitious green.  A green realist argues we need to accept science and facts that point to failure.  Renewables are not solving the carbon trap and path dependencies.  They are only mitigating it.  An ambitious green that I often call a FAKE Green believes in doing whatever it takes and offer examples that are usually special cases and cherry picked of where strong transformations can occur.   Their moto is “failure is not an option” but the failure is the moto itself because it does not start with honesty of our existential situation.

 

A green realist and an ambitious green are only covering part of the issue because they are focusing on techno solutions.  They often do not include in the debate economic decline.  They are focused on climate and not adding to that planetary decline in ecosystems and the web of life.  The green realist does accept the fact that people’s comfortable lives will be wrecked.  That point of view should be adapted though because how comfortable are modern lives that are often empty and sad in consumerism and inactivity of the digital world, we live in.  The ambitious green talks about optimism and doing whatever it takes.  REAL Green is fine with this but stresses this type of attitude must come from acceptance of failure first.  This failure is acceptance of the carbon trap we are in and goes even deeper with the systematic path dependencies of society itself.  These path dependencies are at all levels from the very top down to the individual.  Path dependency means society does not have an effective plan nor the education to change so it won’t happen.  This is a trap not a puzzle.

 

This does not mean we cannot be optimistic and ambitious with our personal and local lives.  This decline process has a time frame with a measure of degree with duration. This means degree and duration that are so important to a species survival in crisis might be less severe if we have ambitious greens doing what it takes.  This is especially true in locals and small groups where seeds of change can be stored for the likelihood of an existential crisis.  It is here where resilience and sustainable strategies will come into play.  REAL Green takes both the realistic green and the ambitious green and combines them.  It does this once acceptance is made that our status quo lives will be wrecked in a process and possibly rapidly depending on how unsustainably we are located.  REAL Green’s approach is having Kubler Roth as the center of optimism and ambition.  The reason for this is the honesty of this acceptance of failure is a spring board for the application of efforts and techno solutions that reflect the truth.  A terminally ill individual will generally choose beneficial behavior if they are honest.  The honesty of failure will naturally lead to spartan, stoic, and humble living which is what it will take to mitigate and adapt to wrecked status quo lives.

 

REAL Green says we are screwed but that is not where it ends.  That is the start.  This is where the ambitious green can offer optimism and ambitious effort of doing what it takes to mitigate and adapt to something that will be a process with measure.  The key to REAL Green is ambition and realism and what is to be avoided is delusional FAKE Green which is just a green washed form of Brown DENIALISM.  FAKE Greens make up the majority of greens today.  Green today is about doing more of the same with clean and renewable but anyone who is honest with the science immediately sees this lie.  REAL Green says you can be ambitious and optimistic but mostly local and in small groups.  REAL Green also says techno solutions are part of this process but behavior is the key stating point.  Behavior is the building block not more panels and turbines.  The acceptance is more than green in REAL Green because we are also going through a destructive change with globalism that has powered techno optimism of the green revolution.  What this means is techno optimism is not going to solve the economic crisis we are on the cusp of.  This is a key area of failure of the FAKE Green and most scientist and academics who promote delusional programs like the green new deal.  They never really get into the economic detail.  There is then all the other problems that will require huge investment besides the climate.  FAKE Greens can’t get their mind around failure so they do not address the entire picture of a multilevel predicament of many problems and traps.  REAL Green transcends this with honesty by saying we are screwed but not right this moment.  In the meantime, we have lots of prepping to do and further green prepping is a rewarding life that can make a difference locally with the environment and community.

 

 

“OK Doomer”

https://tinyurl.com/te4pwc2     resiliance

 

“William Rees has challenged us to accept his “realistic facts” that renewable energy can’t end the climate crisis, and green energy is no substitute for fossil fuels. The only solution he sees is a deliberate contraction, but since “That’s not going to happen!” we face the possibility of global societal collapse. He argues in The Tyee that hundreds of millions of people must be persuaded “to risk wrecking their comfortable lives” to stave off the climate crisis…Andrew Nikiforuk backs up Rees’s argument, arguing that the radical reduction in fossil fuel consumption needed to tackle the climate emergency “will radically change our economy and de-energize our way of life,” and “we must contemplate an energy descent for which our civilization doesn’t have an ethos or a vocabulary.”  Rees and Nikiforuk call this “realism,” but that’s a very loaded word. It says, “These are the facts: you can’t argue with them.” “Be realistic” invariably means “Stop being ambitious.” This kind of realism, applied to the climate and ecological emergencies, sends the message that we’re screwed…Rees is right with the data that wind and solar are only keeping up with the increasing global demand, and that the use of climate-disastrous fossil fuels is still increasing. I don’t dispute the need for a rapid acceleration of renewables, coupled with a rapid, regulated phase-out for coal, gas and oil.  We need to switch from being “realistic,” implying the need to accept defeat, to being ambitious, bringing a determination to do whatever it takes. We need to stop spreading the fear that the energy descent needed to tackle the climate emergency will wreck people’s comfortable lives, or that it is something “for which our civilization doesn’t have an ethos or a vocabulary.” Tell that to the Copenhageners.”

 

REAL Green is for degrowth.  REAL Green believes in limits both planetary limits and personal limits.  What REAL Green says on the subject is society can not and will not limit itself.  This is because of competitive and cooperative globalism in a carbon trap with path dependencies.  What this means is we are systematically determined and limited to what we are doing now.  If there are any efforts at degrowth and respect for limits it will be around the edges.  To change this determined condition is to collapse it.  This is the position global society is in but nature has a different scenario.  The planetary system is about planetary cycles of the carbon, nutrient, and hydrologic cycles that behave in a way that seeks balance.  This means human forcing of the planetary cycles will cause imbalances that self-correct.  We are now in a self-correction event.  Science tells us this and what it means is an end of business as usual at an unknow point in the future.  No amount of FAKE Green techno optimism or Brown DENIALISM will change that.  It is determined there will be consequences for the extreme human actions of the Anthropocene.  It is science and it is happening.

 

So, what REAL Green says is decline now and bet the rush.  Withdraw to a local that offers relative resilience and sustainability.  If you can and if you can’t withdraw in your mind.  What this means is an ascetic “characterized by or suggesting the practice of severe self-discipline and abstention from all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons.”  Insert planetary reasons instead of religious and adapt it further with relative effort.  This can be a religious experience and or an add on to your higher power purpose.  This means Spartan living “showing the indifference to comfort or luxury traditionally associated with ancient Sparta” this is again REAL Green adapted.  This means stoic living “a person who can endure pain or hardship without showing their feelings or complaining” again REAL Green adapted.

 

This adaption is relative to your local and part of your local is your significant others.  A local is physical and the abstract of relationships and intelligence.  What this means is you have done the Kubler Roth and like Arthur Schopenhauer observed as you do “all truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; and third, it is accepted as self-evident.”  What this means is the decline of the collapse process has a scientific expression.  It is self-evident in human history and planetary ecology.  A REAL Green embraces this truth and emulates it with personal lifestyle.  A REAL Green lives succession.  To live succession means to embrace abandonment, dysfunction, and the irrational of the scientific force of chaos.  The act of embracing decline with its destructive effects allows a REAL Green to create constructive forces of change that yield and adapt to the destructive planetary changes and human socioeconomic decline.  A REAL Green knows he can’t leave the status quo so he leverages it to leave it as much as he can in relation to what is more resilient and sustainable.

 

REAL Green is then is a state of mind and action that is a hybrid.  You triage out the worst and incorporate the best into an adapted lifestyle.  To know what dead wood to clear and what seeds to plant is an individual and local effort constantly being pursued.  It revolves around the old ways and the best of the new ways particular to your local but also borrowing from best practices of other locals.  The reason this effort has to be constant is entropy never rests.  Your local and your life system will be under constant threat.  You embrace this as away of life adapting with a lower footprint but higher meaning.  This takes you to an ascending level of activity.

 

A REAL Green is first awakened to the truth of the paradigm of decline.   REAL Green then embraces action and goes forth into a collapsing world to build a monastery.  The monastery might be very small or larger like a community of enlightened individuals.  The monastery is the place where the status quo is adapted in a hybrid life of living in it to survive but leaving it to plant the seeds of a new life that is on the horizon.  This may not be your life.  It may be for others.  REAL Green is other orientated and planetary which means you live a life of making and giving in respect for the planet and your neighbor.  You do this relatively and local.  The bigger world is crashing down around us.  You study this and follow trends not because you think you can change it but because you want to get out ahead of the gradient of the collapse process with proactive efforts that will have staying power.  You may only buy yourself a little time in a collapse but REAL Green is about the journey not the destination.  We are all dead in the end even the pyramids will be washed away someday.  REAL Green is about life now in vitality in a painful world of decline.

 

 

“Defending Degrowth is not Malthusian”

https://tinyurl.com/rxf4vub     resilience

 

“In my book I show how such romantic (and related socialist, feminist and anarchist) ideas articulate a notion of limits as a source of freedom and abundance. Likewise, those of us who defend degrowth today do not call for limits because the world is running out of stuff. We are not worried that growth might come to an end – we want to end growth and stop its catastrophic and meaningless path, despoiling the abundance of this planet that we can enjoy in common.  To put it differently: environmentalists like us are not warning of limits. We want limits. Limits in order to stop ecological and social destruction. Limits to stop in its tracks a capitalist system that knows no limits and is exploitative and ugly. Limits to leave space for others, human and non-human.  Limits bring freedom. A pianist can make infinite music with a limited keyboard. Give the pianist an infinite keyboard, and she or he would paralyze. Limitless choice is debilitating. Capital’s limitless and senseless pursuit of more is not freedom – it is slavery.  The call for ‘self-limitation’ is different from (neo)Malthusian views of limits as a natural property of the world. The atmosphere is not a limited ‘sink’ (what a terrible way to think of the sky) – it is we who should limit emissions so as not to screw the climate. The limit is on us, not the sky. There are no ‘natural limits’ that force us to do this or that. There is an ethical and political imperative not to: not to do everything that can be done, not to despoil the beauty we have inherited.  Self-limitation the way I see it is not about constraining, but about defining collectively as societies our limits. Collective self-limitation is the essence of democracy. This is why capitalism has always had little tolerance for real democracy.”

REAL Green starts with individual and local but aspires to community.  This is because REAL Green is green prepping and the real standard of prep is longer term prepping and that is based upon viable communities with producing local environments.  Viable communities start with enlightened individuals.  REAL Green understands that in our delocalized and individualized world viable communities are in danger.  In fact, with the digital age viable communities are even more at risk.  This is not to say digital connections are all bad.  In the case of the decline of viable small communities digital connections represent lifeboats.

 

The basics of REAL Green starts with behavior and that beginning is in acceptance of decline.  This then is included in the basics of localism and community.  It asks people to be aware of delocalization and the dangers of a declining globalism.  REAL Green says this is what should spark a REAL Green effort.  REAL Green says ultimately a viable small community of like-minded individuals active in a common effort locally is the best it can get.  Viable small communities abound but many are delocalized and not aware of it.  These communities should first embrace a collapse process in localism and understand the tendency for small communities to be delocalized and dependent on the status quo.  The status quo limits small communities to this because of the homogenization of life.  People and small communities are trapped in this homogenization by the fact that survival and advancement requires it.  A very lucky few can withdraw away from this trap but since we are in the Anthropocene all locals are delocalized or exposed to a bifurcating globalism of collapse and migration.

 

What is even more difficult is real viability of small communities in local production.  Take a church group for example, they are locked into a structured belief system.  Many of these belief systems are struggling themselves against homogenization which is the loss of uniqueness.  This struggle which often involves resources then taxes groups away for the real need for resilience and sustainability locally.  These critical elements are then forgotten about because of the needs for identity preservation instead of a viable local that can withstand destructive change with sustainable practices.  There are very few small communities that are apex in resilience and sustainability.

 

REAL Green has a monastic individual approach for those awakened and those who have resources.  Many cannot be REAL Green because they are caught in many different traps from education to lack of basic security.  If a person has REAL Green that person seeks to build the seeds of a viable local community individually.  If the environment is conducive then a viable small community which is resilience to collapse and relatively sustainable to decline will develop naturally.  If this does not happen the individual is still doing good works for the local and attempting to lower the foot print the individual inhabits.  This is done both for self-preservation but also as an act of caring and compassion for one’s local environment.

 

REAL Green is about relative effort with hybridization.  The relative effort is what is optimal in the hybridization of using the status quo to leave it with leverage.  This lever is a tool but it is also dangerous so a REAL Green must always use wisdom in its application or else the individual can be consumed from within and from outside.  Further hybridization involves cultivating low carbon approaches of our ancestors with modern skills, tools, knowledge, and materials.  REAL Green wisdom attempts to pick and choose what should be mixed.  This then involves triage and the clearing of the deadwood of the status quo and in its place building a REAL Green monastery.

 

This monastery that is characterized by asceticism is not religious but it can be because REAL Green is an add-on not a way to embrace a higher power.  Locals have unique characteristics and by extension the individual.  REAL Green adds to this the Kubler Roth of acceptance of decline and seeks to use wisdom of decline to adapt and mitigate a local to this collapse process.  This is human and natural.  Since we are in the Anthropocene humans are an apex species in all sorts of ways including advancing ecological health or more often attempting to do less harm.  A viable REAL Green influenced community is the best a local can get.  What this means is a local that optimizes its human and environmental situation emulating natural ecology but within the decline and failure of the Anthropocene.  In other words, REAL Green relatively adapts and mitigates the collapse process to reduce pain and suffering which is the basis of the REAL Green awakening.  Unless an individual and or a viable small community acknowledge the collapse process with both human civilization and the planetary environment, they are FAKE Green and or Brown DENIALIST.  REAL Green seeks to navigate these groups yielding to these greater forces and by doing so beats the rush by proactive and measured declining in place.

 

 

“Gathering in groups as society falls apart – by Vicki Robin”

https://tinyurl.com/ur7ump9     jem bendell

 

“How do we, who are so accustomed to individualism, enter into a new reality of living in concert with others? Not as a condiment but as a necessity. Not through idealistic eyes but as a sober process of surrendering attachment to the ego’s demands and entering a state of belonging to a people and a place.  I’ve lived in several communities and learned many lessons, surprising ones and hard ones. Here are some ideas for those of you contemplating moving to an existing rural community or forming your own, given your perspective of deep adaptation…In short…People. Power. Process. Projects. And sex. These will arise in any group that bands together for mutual aid. Best to talk about this – early and often.  Diversity of perspectives bring depth and wisdom to choices…Community survival is not the same as survival skills like fire building or hunting. Communities need a range of skills. Gardening, cooking, raising animals for food, fiber and fertility, foraging, turning dandelions (and beets and apples etc) into alcohol, natural building, natural medicine, composting waste, food preservation… and on and on. However, it also needs talents like mediators, meeting facilitators, priests or shamans of all sorts (for confession, for learning from mistakes, for healing from pain, for solace, and on and on), comedians, actors, artists, group game leaders, meditation (and other transformational) teachers, wise-elder leaders, and on and on…”