REAL Green Adaptation

The key question none of us can answer is how fast and how hard will the decline be.  That is the key question because this introduces the scientific method into the equation.  Rationality in this case is respect for the unknown.  The other aspect to this gradient of collapse is stair stepping and “locality” There may be a period of severe crisis that has locality then a stabilization.  In the case of a stairstep this will continue with again the unknown of what is the next step except that it is likely the further a local gets down the gradient in tact the more stable the local.  If your local survives the first step you will likely be closer to sustainability with hard fought resilience.  When I say local, I mean your immediate life, community, and significant others. 

Systems science will tell you that systems tend toward stasis.  Perturbations will knock a system that is unstable towards stability.  The reason I mention this is humans are no different than other ecosystems that undergo succession from being at thresholds of instability.  Modern man is due for succession because we are clearly in overshoot with population levels and consumption.  The key identifier for species survival has always been the degree and duration of a perturbation event.  There is no doubt we have some bad events coming.  Will they be widespread, regional or primarily dispersed failures of locality?  In my opinion due to the degree of overshoot that is really global this will be all of the above with a complexity of consequences. 

We can use science to pinpoint where populations are most vulnerable but there is the element of randomness and nonlinearity that is found in the science of chaos.  You know the flap of a butterfly causes a hurricane thing.  My point is this defaulting as so many doomers do to mad max is a poor doom strategy.  It is similar to the mistakes gamblers and investors make.  These are well known errors of behavior.  In my opinion as a doomer now for 20 years and a dedicated prepper for 15 a strategy that minimizes poor doom behavior is essential as well as realistic behavior of the consequences. 

My recommendations are first a detailed evaluation of your local this means more than place it means the abstract parts of it like relationships and activity.  If your local is significantly unstable get out.  If you are stuck then prep according to the condition of your local.  A local that will likely fail needs a strategy of bug-out.  One that is more stable and defendable needs defense.  All need a degree of offense and defense as well as diplomacy.  The best strategy for all situations is decline in place beating the rush.  Clear out the deadwood and utilize strategies of salvage, hybridization, and spartan living.  Do it now or at least mentally go over the steps. 

This doom and prep are significantly mental with behavior and attitudes.  A marine with a level action 30 will beat an inexperienced person with an AR most of the time.  This is because of training and morale.  Yet, the best soldiers also need good provisions.  This dooming and prepping have degrees of attainment to.  I have gone through the steps.  I have experienced failures with learning curves.  I have experienced attitudes of others who think I am a nutter.  To be fair in my earlier days I was at times radical about this process.  Most of all I have faced “time” which is making an effort at something that does not happen.  Time in some ways is the hardest test because it goes to the core of your effort with cognitive dissonance and opportunity cost of a different life. 

I am now at the level of a shaman and monk with a monastery.  Now, this does not make me better than another just getting started.  There are others out there smarter and more prepared than me.  What I mean in my own little world this is where I am at.  The key to a good doom and prep is to maximize localism and avoid comparisons to others.  Localism is a very diverse subject keep that in mind so you don’t fall into the pitfall of bad prep because you are keeping up with the Jones.  The point of doom and prep is resilience and sustainability of YOUR local.  You can be the best prepared and dumb or smart luck passes you by in failure so accepting failure is at the top of the list.  In fact starting from failure is the best start point.  It will give you necessary humility of moderation and realism.

My opinion of my efforts and my monastery is it is only as good as my local community longer term.  Shorter term I do have the mentality, skills, and the provisions to ride out many SHTF storms.  I feel this is important because it is the first part of the crisis when decisions have the greatest impact.  Right before the worst is when you need to be optimally positioned mentally and physically.  My conclusion is be careful of poor doom behavior that leads to malinvested prep.  Have a good attitude that you might not make it because of the basic principles of randomness and nonlinearity.  I am now to the point of a doomstead that is really just a homestead of old but leveraged with the best practices and material of our modern time.  I am using the status quo to leave it and taking good knowledge and material with me.  I am trying to go 18-19 century.  I am living with the local sheeples who are indoctrinated into the status quo narrative.  You have to be careful with the sheeples because you need to keep your distance but you also need them.  I try to stay below the radar screen yielding to greater forces.  Pick your battles and practice flexible retreat.  Ideally make this whole process a hobby and or way of life.  Have a passion for it.  I feel it represents the truth so it is also giving me meaning. �����h

I have a 48-volt system with inverter that has 8 Trojan gel batteries.  I have 12 x 300-watt Hanwha panels on pole mounts.  I have all circuits in my breaker boxed switched for grid or solar.  I do demand management during the day maximizing my solar gathering.  I do not use the system at night.  I then have maximum battery power available if grid goes down.  I also lower battery cycling for longer life.  I intend to upgrade lead/gel trojans in the future moving these to my barn that is also solar with older watered batteries.  I am looking at lithium iron phosphate batteries that look promising.  I am on the fence because batteries are changing so fast so still watching.  I also have a throw switch at my transformer so I can run hose on a 50amp generator/welder.  This is on wheels so I can move it around the farm as needed. 

Also, part of my system is a Heatmaster wood gasifier.  I also have a Daikin split HVAC unit.  This Daikin heats and cools.  I have several low wattage (500 watts) ceramic heaters in the house.  This allows me to heat and cool with my solar if there is excess power available.  My wood boiler can be run with solar.  In the summer I have my wood boiler tank heated with evacuated solar tubes instead of using wood.  The solar water heating system disassembles and is put away for the winter when I switch to wood.  This wood boiler system has forced air and water to air heat exchangers.  These different sources of heat are all manually switch by simple values.  Potable water is warmed to an electric water heater through a heat exchanger.  The water heater is valved so I can take it out of the loop if grid power goes down.  Most of the time my boiler using wood or solar that preheats the water heater.  My well can be run off the solar system.  It takes lots of power so if I am using the solar to run the well I have all other circuits switched off at transfer switches.  I have an oversized pressure tank that I can then fill and use as needed.  I can switch off the well once pressure tank is full strength then power up my wood boiler to heat water if needed for shower or washing.    I also have a conventional woodstove insert in my fireplace as final backup and which I mostly use on very cold days.

They key to this system is its hybrid nature with multiple energy nodes for flexibility.  The other key is the system is a power collection system with wood biomass and solar but it is also a survival tool with grid down situations.  I use the grid as needed for economic reasons.  Grid power is the cheapest form of power at the moment.  That could change but currently when I consider sunk cost of equipment and labor then just using electric is cheapest.  Electric is also convenient and vital in bad weather when solar is not producing.  It is my hope the grid becomes more renewable based as is happening but slowly.  The real value from my system comes in flexibility and resilience with grid down situations.  I fully use wood and solar to help pay off the initial cost of the system so this is a matter of economics also.  I am a Green who believes renewables and locally sourced biomass is good for lower my planetary footprint.  My house is a split-level brick home with the best insulation I could get.  This was a combination of open cell and closed cell foam.  The windows were the best I could get triple pane Pella’s.  There are lots of windows so if grid goes down in the summer, I have plenty of ventilation. 

This total system is holistic with active demand management.  It is meant for someone who works from home.  In my case I am a permaculture farmer raising cattle and goats on a multispecies management intensive grazing system.  I make my own hay.  I also have a garden, orchard, and grapes.  There are 400 acres dedicated to wildlife that is abundant and would be available in a collapse situation.  I have multiple water sources for water both potable water and irrigating garden and animals.  This system is expensive but less expensive than a system that attempts to go completely off the grid.  Some applications demand off the grid strategies because of cost of getting to the grid.  My thinking is the grid is an asset utilize it as needed.

I have highlighted two different versions of the left’s eco-solutions.  One is the ecomodernism and the other the degrowth movement.  They both claim success as the end game.  REAL Green claims they are both FAKE Green and the reason is the basis of their argument is faulty behavior of being the solution.  REAL Green says failure is the prerequisite of going forth into lifeboat and hospices.  Life boats and hospices are just a catchy term for mitigation and adaptation to the collapse process.  REAL Green says this is the case because honest science says we are in a carbon trap and path dependent in a late stage capitalism.  Path dependency is also present in the competitive cooperative nature of global governance.  Global governance may give lip service to planetary problems but its real driving force is self-preservation individually.  The degree that all sides recognize planetary problems is directly contingent on survivability individually.  This survivability in the path dependence of late stage capitalism is staying economically competitive along with military competitiveness.  This then becomes another path dependency trap that is systematic.  Globalism itself is a trap that includes the carbon trap and the global governance trap of competitive cooperation. 

REAL Green is about acceptance of these traps as existential and beyond transcendence.  This means the only alternatives from the red Left for the obvious failures of capitalism is ecomodernism and a degrowth based socialism that are themselves failures.  REAL Green says starting from the acceptance of failure we move forward with Capitalism, ecomodernism, and degrowth through a timeline of constructive and destructive change.  The destructive change comes from the triage of poor lifestyles and draconian reductions in consumerism staged and staggered.  This then becomes a distilling out the critical elements of capitalism that is present in globalism that produces so much wealth efficiently in the beginning to prepare for the departure.  Comparative advantage, free movement of capital and knowledge, global movement of components and end products, just in time assembly and transport to end use is itself a resource that must be protected in the beginning of the step down of late stage global capitalism to a degrowthed world.  Ecomodernism comes in with the adoption of knowledge, tools, equipment and systems to degrowth with best practices and best hardware.  Renewables, conservation practices, and efficiency strategies come to mind.  Yet, understanding the diminishing returns found in the equation of cost benefit.  Degrowth comes in primarily on the behavioral side with strategies for people to live with less things but more spiritual satisfaction.  Degrowth is the basis because that is what collapse means fundamentally but this degrowth will be proactive and intelligent. 

This whole effort will recognize that the fundamental effects of degrowth will be the introduction of chaos into the equation so there will have to be a resilience to economic abandonment, irrational policy and behavior, and dysfunctional networks.  This means there must be a preparation, departure and journey with failure the ultimate result.  The failure is calculated and adapted to in stepping down behavior.   It is understood and goal based that these failures offer a rebirth.  These will likely be more like a series of rebirths where systematic leveling off of decline occurs with further bifurcations.  How long these declines with hopeful leveling occur  is then the  journey.  The journey is in reality uncharted and can only be theoretical. 

This degrowth process could begin by taking the enormous power of late stage capitalism to power a return to the land of seeds of the rebirth.  This will require a two-tier society of rural back to the land with urban productive elements supplying the necessary resources for this transition.  These back to the land people will have to be given basics rights to education, health, and security so they are not consumed by the competitive forces of capitalism.  These back to the land people will live with seasonality, intermittency, and frugal living.  Much of their enjoyment will be social based with a dramatic decline in modern consumerism.  They will live spartan lives dedicated to permaculture and localism.  The best equipment including renewables would be employed in a spartan and frugal way to allow sustainability and resilience.  This deployment of sustainable locals would be much like the outfitting of fantasy exploration parties to Mars.  This means a social narrative of the critical nature of this project to everyone’s wellbeing.  The upper tier would be like the bees in the hive that produce next year’s brood.  This will mean integrating into planetary cycles of low carbon capture with plants and animals.  During this time industrial agriculture will be reduced in a step down with critical food sources maintained and consumeristic industrial food phased out.  There is no substitute for global monocultures with industrial practices in the beginning.  Food security is vital to the departure.  Once departed then this toxic industrial system can be left to wither and die.

Socialism will be the gate keeper for this decline.  Socialistic principals will have to be used to control this process.  Socialism as used today is a failure because it is just another wealth and power transfer device little different from capitalism.   A new socialism that  is a method of change not an end game to governance must be employed.  The key to this is the wisdom that chooses what technology and consumption is allowed.  The wisdom also recognized path dependency trap and the carbon trap have consequences of pain, suffering, and death.  There will be winners and loser and no way to get around the failure of fairness.  The reality is most everyone will lose something some more than others.  Places will have to be depopulated and industries abandoned.  This will lower production of needed resources and will force hardship on whole classes and segments of the global civilization.  This effort would have to be global or it could not make the preparations for the departure and handle the consequences during the journey.  This is an open door to no return.  Once departed it proceeds into a calculated and prepped for failure of all that comes before it.  It would rely on the principals in nature of succession with extinction with evolution being involved in a rebirth.  It would also be understood that extinction may be the result but this is about a journey not the end.  Nature will decide not man.

This REAL Green global vision is of course a very broad outline of the principals of the path forward in a world of rational behavior engaged in critical wisdom.  This is of course nothing but fiction because man is not completely rational.  Man is on overshoot teetering near thresholds of failure everywhere.  Our footprint is entirely too large with governance, population, and footprints.  REAL Green presented what might work in an alternative world to demonstrate what can work for small communities and with the individual.  When we take the REAL Green solution to the micro, we need to include hybridization and relativity.  This hybridization means utilizing the modern status quo to leave it into the best practices of the old ways augmented and refined by the modern.  This must be done relatively based upon the position of the local in the delocalized greater community.  This means the exiting community and significant others that are locked into the status quo must be adapted to as one attempts to negotiate a departure from a way of life with no future.  This means walking a tight rope.  A persona or a small community will still have to make a living in the status quo. Since all locals are delocalized by globalization products and services will still be needed.  This will put pressure on sustainability and resilience that the REAL Green efforts seeks. 

There is no escape from failure with REAL Green.  This is the prerequisite of honesty and acceptance REAL Green starts with and plans for.  REAL Green is about succession with loss but seeking rebirth.  REAL Green is a green prepping and dooming strategy that is an addon to one’s local and community.  Its primary purpose are ways to give longevity to ones local and significant interpersonal relationships.  REAL Green does this by going local and embracing nature as our ancestors did but taking the best of what modernity has to offer to complement and enhance it.  This is a type of salvage also because so much has been destroyed in the mad rush to modernity.  Both location and lifestyles then become a salvage effort of picking through the clutter to find the best practices and material for the journey into the collapse process.  This means triage or the principals of removing deadwood.  This means downsizing with dignity beating the rush that everyone will be forced into. The dignity comes from meaning that one will find in the preparation, departure, and the journey.  Dignity comes from finding the basics in a greatly reduced life that offer satisfaction and comfort.  This also involves empathy and strategies of compassion because as the status quo deteriorates and fails many will be exposes to hardships and premature death. 

REAL Green is for everyone because the basics are applicable to all.  Advanced REAL Green goes into a kind of eclectic combination of specialization with what one does the best with a backbone of multiple basic skills that is required for a degree of self-sufficing.  In other words one must be good at many things with a few specializations.  REAL Green demands physical fitness and mental conditioning.  One must eliminate poor lifestyles and habits that will distract from this endeavor.  So REAL Green in a sense is a way of life within a way of life.  It becomes in a sense a hobby because the status quo denies many resilient and sustainable activities due to economic comparative advantage.  It is cheaper to get food at Walmart and hardware at Lowes than to do things locally.  Fossil fuels are economic and animal power not as examples.  REAL Green starts with the idea that at some point this will change but currently it is not the case.  Advanced REAL Green then goes to its highest level as a monastery of knowledge and hardware for the journey into the collapse process but also a storehouse of seeds of a rebirth for those who come afterwards.  That is if it is the case that your REAL Green local can be reborn.  It is likely the collapse process will involve a stair step down with thresholds broke into new stasis. 

REAL Green acknowledges all this is relative to the individual, community, and region one is in.  This means REAL Green starts out by determining the potential of ones local and if it has no future then REAL Green determines if it can leave.  If you can then you emigrate while you can to a local that can offer a future.  In effect you become a pilgrim journeying into an unknown land.  This may be location based or career based because the journey is really both of the material and the mental.  REAL Green never takes its eye off of failure and acceptance as the prerequisite.  You may construct a doomstead but that may not save you.  So, if you get to the point of a REAL Green monastery with robust sustainability and resilience you then infect your local as best you can with best practices and wisdom.  This is done because ultimately all REAL Green monasteries rely on community for survival.  REAL Green realizes this thinking must be done subtly and camouflage with status quo ways or you will be disregarded as a nutter.  This means both asymmetric and symmetric strategies.  Since very few have the knowledge and resource to do this it is recognized by REAL Green that you are special but also empowered to be a provider.  REAL Green power comes not from the individual but from nature and the local.  REAL Green is supported by the planet because REAL Green embraces the planet first by adding on those principals of nature as the beacon for the journey.

“Why De growth is Essential: A Rejection of Left Ecomodernists Phillips, Sharzer, Bastini, and Parenti.”

https://tinyurl.com/y5mk7pac     resilience

“The Ecomodernists recognize the seriousness of the global ecological situation, but they argue that the way to solve it is to crank up technical advance and economic growth to enable the building of a vast quantity of resource-intensive devices that will deal with the problems. These are to include nuclear energy, high rise greenhouses, water desalination. Humans will all move into cities allowing nature to regenerate, agriculture will go into those greenhouses, and the Third World will be liberated from poverty. Thus they scorn the De growth movement seeing it as unnecessary, guaranteeing misery for all, and indeed actually ensuring the end of human progress.  By contrast, the recently-emerged De growth movement advances the basic, fifty year old, ”limits to growth” case which has now accumulated a huge supporting literature. Its core point is that there is too much production and consumption going on, that this is the main cause of global problems, that eventually we must have stable or zero-growth economies, and that GDP must be reduced… This is a debate between those who believe that “tech-fixes” can solve the problems without radical change from a system committed to affluence and growth, and those who argue that only radical change to a very different, post consumer-capitalist society can solve the big problems…The core issue here is whether economic growth can be “decoupled” from resource and ecological costs and impacts. That is, can the amount of production, sales and GDP go on increasing while resources availability and ecological damage are kept below unsustainable levels…virtually all of a now huge literature says it can’t… Obviously to deal with this the decoupling would have massive; the Ecomodernists would have to show that by 2050 the resource and environmental impact from the generation of $1 of GDP could be reduced to one-thirtieth of what it is today, even though over past decades no reduction has been achieved. They make no attempt to show that this is possible; their case consists of faith claims about what future technology could do, supported only by pointing to some cases where mostly very small absolute reductions have been achieved. The above arithmetic yields the basic claim underlying the Simpler Way perspective; i.e., that the major global problems now threatening our existence cannot be solved unless we undertake enormous reductions in production, resource use and consumption. This can only be done by transition to mostly local communities which are small, cooperative, highly self-sufficient, driven by needs not market forces …. and by willing acceptance of very frugal lifestyles and systems. This involves scrapping the present taken-for-granted conception of “development” defined in terms of ever-increasing globalisation, complexity, capital-dependence, technical sophistication, and monetary “wealth”. Above all it involves happy acceptance of materially simple lifestyles and systems.”

 “This alternative vision does not involve hardship or deprivation; in fact it would be a liberation to a much higher quality of life for all.  And it does not threaten universities, modern hospitals, high tech R and D or “progress”. It is about ways which provide all that is needed for delightful relaxed, secure, creative, cooperative, peaceful lives via very low resource and environmental costs.  (For the detail see TSW: The Alternative Society.)  The key to these achievements lies in the small scale, proximity and integration of the new economies. A recent study of egg supply illustrates this powerfully. The industrial supermarket supply chain involves vast amounts of transport, agribusiness, chemicals, soil damage, steel, computers, petroleum, electricity , packaging, advertising, and waste, especially wasted nutrients. The village cooperative supply path eliminates almost all of these, e.g., because “wastes” can go straight to gardens, methane digesters and fish ponds. The study found that the dollar and energy costs of an egg delivered by the former path is around 50 to 200 times that by the second  path.  Our limits to growth predicament show that the main goal is not getting rid of capitalism, essential though that is. The goal must be to get those resource and ecological impacts right down. If the eco-socialists only got rid of capitalism but continued to pursue affluence and growth, we would have a more just society…still heading for ecological collapse… They assume that welfare can’t be increased unless there is increase in production of stuff being bought, thus unless there is increase in GDP.  (This is the fundamental vicious error built into conventional development theory and practice; poor countries cannot “develop” unless they enable investors to take out their resources cheaply and thus grow the GDP. See TSW: Third World Development.) This is patently ridiculous. Apart from the medical domain, the factors that would most enable a higher quality of life for most rich world people have nothing to do with monetary wealth or property; they are things like having good family and friends, supportive community, security from unemployment, closeness to nature, socially valued work, and peace of mind. These are easily and automatically provided in a poor Third World village or in an Eco-village, as are the basic simple food producing, housing, water, and energy etc. systems enabling very frugal but perfectly sufficient material living standards.”

I have repeatedly covered this topic in REAL Green.  A carbon neutral world by 2050 is a complete pipe dream.  It is more than that it is a dangerous way of misleading people into believing they can have their cake and eat it.  This means people think we can continue to live as we do and even progress technologically and go carbon neutral.  This is what I call FAKE Green.  This is the platform extremist liberals are pushing.  This along with socialism is going to solve our problems.  What a joke that is, a pipe dream of industrial build out to be carbon neutral and it will all be paid for by wealth transfer and money printing.  Where do extremist liberals get educated?  This is a position many in the best of academia and the scientific community are embracing.  This FAKE Green position is science denial almost as bad as science denying conservatives take.  Both sides are a joke.  One side just disregards the science or deny it.  One side embraces the science and then denies the reality of the solutions.

Very few are REAL Green.  REAL Green says acknowledges failure as the starting point.  The very beginning of the science, behavior, and the consequences is failure.  The Kübler-Ross stages then kick in for those who have been deceived either by disregard, science denial and or solutions/consequences denial.  This pretty much covers most of the human population.  Doomers and preppers are considered fringe.  Does that give you an idea of just how bad it is going to get at some point when holistic results of net energy depletion strike?  This net energy decline will be from declining net energy of fossil fuels that meets the physically impossible task of energy transition to renewables while maintaining the growth paradigm?  This is the nature of the carbon trap and path dependency.  We have the physical trap and the behavioral trap.  REAL Green says this means failure is assured.  REAL Green has solutions for this macro condition that will never be embraced but should be considered to understand the best it can get.

REAL Green solutions are a hybrid world with lots of triage, salvage, and relocalization.  The cost is still staggering but the difference is behavior starts from failure and proceeds to life boats and hospices.  Life boats and hospices is another description of degrowth, mitigation, and adaptation.  This will involve economic abandonment and that means dysfunctional networks and irrational policy will be inevitable even with the best of intentions.  This is because we will have to embrace the chaos of decline that is often swift and unpredictable.  We will need to accept pain, suffering and death that declining affluence will ensure.  This means a mammoth educational effort would be needed to prepare a mass of dellusionals people smart and challenged for an equivalent of an asteroid of damage to this late stage civilization.

The way REAL Green would approach this is first the behavior would be embraced.  We then would have a hybrid world of new and old ways.  Deadwood would be cleared out to make room for a new way.  This would also be a hybrid of capitalism with socialism as the gate keeper.  In fact, we might have to get even more authoritarian but since this is REAL Green fantasy for demonstration anyway let’s keep it to enlightened tough love socialism.  The reason you still need capitalism is the productive elements of the global economy of just-in-time, free capital/knowledge flows, comparative advantage specialization, and global transport would be needed to produce the tools to go back to the old ways and maintain the sinking ship.  The best of the new ways with all that knowledge must be maintained.  The Infrastructure fabric that keeps all of us fed, warm, and productive is in place an cannot be discarded without great loss and or cascading failure.

REAL Green is about managed failure or in medical terms terminal illness maintenance.  Triage of the worst of the current system with consumerism and modern high energy leisure being eliminated as an example of draconian moves.  Population would be managed in a draconian way.  A two-tier society of a greatly reduced core that controls, manufactures, and delivers tools for a relocalization of most of the rest is a must.  This means people would be taken back to the land and made to again inhabit it in seasonality, intermittency, and low net energy living.  This means back to animals, small farms, and biomass collection revolving around the natural planetary carbon, nitrogen, and hydrological cycles. Unfortunately, this now must occur on a planet in decline and localized failure of a succession process of extinction and pollution.  For those who can manage it would be permaculture and knowledge driven.  For those who can’t it is subsistence living on the margins.  Ideally REAL Greens says the upper tier of the status quo would protect and support these nodes of return for reasons of survival.  The upper tier would understand it is going down and it will want a place to go.  The collapse process requires that seeds of rebirth must be planted and nurtured and the top tier living in the status quo has this as its primary function.  This relocalization then would be the upper tiers main focus of effort and policy.

The best of the old ways would be combined with the new knowledge and technology to make again inhabiting locals in low energy living more bearable.  This means renewables “lite”.  It means maintaining some basics of lighting, food preservation, and climate control.  It means a new education revolving around relocalization into food production, animal husbandry, and home economics.  These things were once part of the normal fabric and now they would have to be rebirthed in a massive education effort.  The upper tier would begin a decommissioning process.  Here salvage strategies would be employed to save those items with high embedded potential for use in a post collapse world.  Valuable resources collected to be used later.  Many industries and ways of life would be shuttered immediately and others maintained as long as possible.  In the military this is called a managed retreat.  All this would have to proceed in as slow and deliberate of a pace as can be managed that pushes the edge of the systematic conditions as long as possible.  The survival of any system is dependent on the degree and duration of the impulse of change.  This means we would have to understand at some point the system even with managed degrowth, deliberate adaptation of the fabric of civilization and the reprograming of human behavior will surely fail.  So, what we would do is open a door of no return into managed collapse with life boats with every one understanding pain suffering and death is ahead.  That is the hospice part.

Of course, this is a REAL Green vision of the impossible for the world but not for the individual and the local.  This is where the above can work.  When I say work, I mean until civilization collapses in from above but you will have beaten the rush to hopefully be ahead of the curve.  You will have taken the ingredients of mitigation and adaptation and through the use of the status quo built up the equivalent of a modern-day monastery of preparation.  You will have done the Kubler Roth with adapted behavior and attitudes of survival.  Denial of death can then be negotiated.  Few can face death daily but many can face the acceptance of it in regards to one’s overall situation similar to terminal illness.  You will of course face collapse like everyone else but you will have in place tools and strategies to negotiate the day to day of collapse.  We have no idea how things are going to come apart.  We do know there are now locations that will come apart quickly and others will have reliance.  Science and intuition tell us this.  If possible, get out of these places.  There will be nothing worse than being caught up in forced migrations.  Of course, those places that do have good strategies will be where these migrants go so part of your strategy must include negotiating hostile and more likely needy people.  You will have to have security strategies and procedures in place.  You will also need to be able to help some but not all.  Most people will have to be denied help.  A good strategy is taking in those with skills and resources and tell the rest to head down the road.  The hostile ones you may have to fight and you may lose.

REAL Green start with the understanding of failure and realizes these are the best of days now and it will only get worse so you begin a deliberate and focused effort to change now.  Yet, you do this in a relative way so you do not fail in the status quo that is providing the means to change.  You leverage the status quo with localism.  You will have to maintain your status quo living as you try to leave delocalization of the failing global system.  You will likely at some point do this in increasing pain, suffering and death.  A situation of increasing deprivations is assured to you think about this daily in preparation.  A good strategy is fasting to feel hunger as an example.  You will try to get ahead of the collapse process intelligently.  Of course, the degrees of adaptation will have to be relative in context of family, friends, and community who may still be in denial and disregard to this systematic process of failure.  This means your efforts will be hampered by external forces of irrationality and denial of change by social convention.  Very few will have the ingredients to make a bold transition.  For most the best that can be done is behavioral changes and the husbandry of basics.  Most have the money and time to take care of the basics.  Those who can should and must get bold because they will be the storehouse of knowledge with tools to establish a return to localism.  At some point when the walls come crashing down it will be resilient and sustainable locals that will pick up the pieces of a reboot of some kind of civilization.

REAL Green acknowledges this might mean a bottleneck or extinction but it is also about a process that is a journey.  For sanity REAL Green orientates its higher power to understand life is now a journey not a destination so meaning and happiness come from the journey to pain suffering and death.  That might sound like an incongruous juxtaposition and it is because the paradox of this new life means finding success must mean embracing failure.  REAL Green does this individually and in small groups because the top is hopelessly flawed and must by planetary definition fail.  In fact, the health of the planet requires modern man will die as we know him  and be rebirthed to a smaller scale.  Again, it must be remembered this may be extinction but because extinction is a process this is about the journey not the destination.

“Getting Real About Green Energy”

https://tinyurl.com/y3jyobya     peak prosperity

“An honest analysis of what it can’t promise…I want to be optimistic about the future. I really do.  But there’s virtually no chance of the world transitioning gently to an alternative energy-powered future.  These Are The ‘Good Old Days’…Math    So, what would it take to replace those 12,000 Mtoe with alternative fuels by 2050?  Pilke answers that for us:  Another useful number to know is that there are 11,051 days left until January 1, 2050.  To achieve net-zero carbon dioxide emissions globally by 2050 thus requires the deployment of >1 Mtoe of carbon-free energy consumption (~12,000 Mtoe/11,051 days) every day, starting tomorrow and continuing for the next 30+ years.  Achieving net-zero also requires the corresponding equivalent decommissioning of more than 1 Mtoe of energy consumption from fossil fuels every single day…Human Behavior     One huge reason that an easy, seamless transition to alternative energy won’t happen is because our biological wiring is terrible at responding to such big, complex, long-range predicaments…Each country is currently struggling with its own brew domestic social and political problems (of their own making, I should add). They have neither the appetite or ability to take on the much more challenging task of a 30-year global energy infrastructure re-build.   Making this energy transition will require an enormous diversion of effort – away from this and towards that.  It will be hard.  It will take a lot of political capital and expert leadership.  Huge pain and suffering will result as entire industries are shut down and new ones are started up.  Just drive through any former mill or mining region and you can still see the bitter remnants of its abandoned industries.  Some have not yet recovered, even hundreds of years after the initial loss…Time, Scale and Cost     Similar supply constraints arise if we calculate out the amount of resources required to build the amount of wind towers or solar panels that could replace these nuclear plants.  The costs are staggering, the global resources too limited.  There aren’t enough new hydro dam sites to even make a dent.  Also complicating things, each of these so-called alternative energy systems requires a huge amount of fossil fuels to mine, manufacture, install and maintain. The world has yet to see a single windmill or solar panel that was mined, manufactured and installed without using fossil energy…Conclusion     Given the math, human tendencies, and the issues pertaining to time, scale and cost, the current green energy movement currently is little more than hot air. It’s just not going to happen in time.  We’re nowhere close to being able to build out the massive energy projects required. The equivalent of 3 nuclear plants every two days for the next 30 years? That’s a total pipe dream.  We lack the political will, the cultural readiness, the proper narrative. Even the appropriate resources.  Beyond those concerns, nearly everything about how we heat, move, cool and manufacture the components of our modern lives will have to be refashioned (and possibly jettisoned) as part of that project.  Such an ambitious undertaking has no historical analog.  It’s a ridiculously complex set of problems (which have solutions) and predicaments (which don’t).  It’s exactly the sort of situation that politicians will avoid as long as possible, after which it will be too late to do very much about it.  Which means you need to adjust your expectations and investment of your money and energy, accordingly. The entire world — which is utterly dependent on infinite growth — is only years away from grasping the impossibility of that approach.  When it does, everything will change. Quickly.”

REAL Green first acknowledges we are “path dependent” – where we came from and how we got here puts strict limits on what is now possible for us to do.”  This means first we come to terms with failure.  Future actions will spring from the crisis of existential failure.  If we do not accept failure then we continue to embrace failed strategies.  Some of this will work but significant amounts of effort will be stranded in the collapse process.  This represents huge amounts of resources soft and hard that cannot be wasted at this point. 

The below article of capitalism and socialism in theory sounds great but the reality of it is also failure.  The failure is just a different set of circumstances with different argument of stake holder.  Socialism will kill growth because it will attempt to change the basics of global productivity from a system that is hyper productive.  Socialism will interject control that wills stifle wealth at the same time it will demand more wealth to develop grandiose solutions.  It is a trap and socialism cannot get out of a trap just like capitalism can’t.  REAL Green proposes first behavior conditions of acceptance of failure.  It then concentrates on life boats and hospices which mean adaptation and mitigation strategies.  This can best be approached by a two-tier system based upon a reduced hyper productive core of globalism.  The reduction comes from eliminating the parasitic elements of finance.  It will come from greatly reducing consumerism, travel, and “modern” leisure.  This strategy will crash the economy if taken to extremes but accepting the end of growth with managed decline would be the intent.  The first step would be getting people back to the land into local simplicity, food seasonality, and intermittency.  This would revolve around restricted travel and local based consumption.  Triage and hybridization are the key here.  Until we can get a momentum going for a return to localism the capitalistic core would have to remain.  Too much has been delocalized and much must be reintroduced. 

A cooperative socialistic trend would be needed to educate and then begin the process of triaging out the destructive elements of capitalism.  Note that removing the destructive elements of capitalism will not save us or the climate.  Socialism will fail also but there are many useful socialistic strategies that can power overall policy.  In this case the socialistic element is the gate keeper for the decline process.  Socialism has a significant application at the local level.  This two-tier world will apply to both the developing world by keeping subsistence people where they are at.  Sustainable development would be eliminated and replaced by maintiang the status quo of poverty and subsistence living.  In the rich world those moving back to the land will become poorer.  Overall the rich developed nations would be downsized economically. 

It should be the intent to promise these “back to the land people” the basics of health, education, and food security but there is no guarantee because this is process of change is without a clear blueprint with known result.  This collapse process will involve irrationality, abandonment, dysfunction which cannot be forecast well enough to make guarantees.  In the rich core where knowledge and the powerful elements of comparative advantage, global transport, free movement of capital/knowledge, and JIT production will have to be maintained to provide the resources to allow this second tier to transition.  Hubs of control and knowledge hosting must be maintained.  This means a transition starts at the bottom and works its way up not the other way around like what is being proposed by socialistic academics today. 

This involves allowing capitalism to do what it does best and using socialism to guide capitalism into decline and construct livable local based communities that will be low carbon and anchored in intermittency of small-scale renewables, seasonality of food, locally based transport. Animal power and a close cycle of permaculture farming would be transitioned to as a goal.  This would continue along with industrial agriculture because there is no alternative for food security.  Some monocultural systems may be maintained and others phased out but the process will be very careful to avoid destroying food security.  Renewables will attempt to cover power basics like lights, refrigeration, and in some cases climate control.  Digitally locals will focus on education, knowledge maintenance, and accounting. 

As you see REAL Green focuses first on the behavior narrative then moves to the bricks and mortar of a hybrid of socialism and capitalism.  It is again seeking hybridization strategies with the traditional old ways of home economics that were local and low carbon.  There is then the application of modern knowledge and superior technology to tweak these traditional ways.  Finally, it goes hybrid with a core that is hyper productive and energy intensive as is the status quo currently to support a segment going local and low carbon based.  All this is allowed and maintained with trust and confidence that this is the only way to negotiate the carbon trap and the path dependence. 

REAL Green recognizes that the above grandiose strategy is theoretical and unworkable because of the carbon trap we are in and path dependency of globalism and nationalism.  What REAL Green says is do it relatively at the local and individual level with strategies.  Maybe regions that have the right combinations can take it further.  At the global level the basics of what will work and what is fantasy can be exposed.  Neither Capitalism nor socialism will work as a transition. There is no transition or transcendence.   The status quo will fail as with a REAL Green adaptation.  The key is to choose pathways less bad and to develop these instead of claiming solutions to leave the trap.  It is likely the top is lost because of lack of trust and lack of conviction.  This top is “path trapped” by a multitude of conflicting currents that revolve around competitive cooperation effects of a global village.  It may be the case the top could acknowledge the benefits of localization instead of the push for globalism and sustainable development.  Not all sustainable development is bad what is bad is the coopting of development by market-based capitalism in delocalization.  So sustainable development is in effect and as applied a delocalization process not a localizing one. 

REAL Green says the process will have to start at the bottom by individuals and communities who see the benefits of staying ahead of the collapse curve as best as possible.  Not all individuals or locals can even attempt this because many are by their very nature cannot be reformed.  Some locations will not survive energy depletion nor climate destabilization.  We should not throw good money after bad.  If your local cannot be self-supporting with a minimum of decoupling from the global then it is one of those locals that have been lost to deglobalization and should be abandoned by those seeking relocalization and local sustainability.  Let’s be clear no local is really sustainable anymore as was once possible so relatively speaking all locals have been compromised without support from the global in some respect.  This includes the exposure to competitive forces of market-based capitalism that can immediately gut a local of its ability to support itself.  In this respect if the top could limit and downsize these destructive forces on locals that may have the right stuff this might be the best it gets from the point of view of the top. 

At the individual level it is all about behavior modifications and the hybrid is using the status quo to leave it.  It is about triaging out as best one can the destructive elements of the global.  This means a very difficult needle threading of the necessary economic with that which is sustainable and resilient.  REAL Green says some amount of unsustainability and non-resilient behavior and infrastructure is inevitable.  REAL green says it is about a journey not a refuge.  REAL Green acknowledges there are no refuges and the end will visit all in some respect.  What REAL Green says is an individual and a small community can lower the damage and create the seeds for a reboot.  If you or your community can at a minimum treat this as a hobby or a spiritual exercise like one does with bowling and church then some headway can be made.  REAL Green is not a cult it is a add on like a browser.  This has to have a start and there has to be an element of education and the trial and error of experience.   This is about embracing chaos and then managing it in a way that acknowledges the messy and relativity of that turbulent process.  Salvage the best hardware and practices from modernity and triage the worst of the lifestyles and hardware.

“path dependence” – where we came from and how we got here puts strict limits on what is now possible for us to do. “

“The carbon trap by Paul Chefurka”

https://tinyurl.com/y7fwoscp     energy skeptic

“Whether we realize it or not, everyone living on planet Earth today is caught in what I have come to call the “carbon trap”. The nature of the trap is simple, and can be described in one sentence:  Our continued existence depends on the very thing that is killing us – the combustion of our planet’s ancient stocks of carbon.  This unfortunate situation was not intentional, and is no one’s fault.  The trap was constructed well outside of our conscious view or understanding.  Its design came from our evolved desires for status, material comfort and security.  We recognized its seductive promise long before we knew enough science to discover its hidden hook.  It was built with the best of intentions by well-meaning scientists and engineers, whose knowledge of the consequences was both incomplete and clouded by their own evolved desire for a better life.  Most of us, even those who are aware of our predicament, distract ourselves by creating and admiring elaborate and luxurious appointments for our carbon-clad prison.  Many who can see the bars spend their time dreaming of ways to slip through them into the world outside – a world of natural freedom that they can see but never reach.  Those who are fully aware of the trap also understand that we now need it to survive; that leaving it (if that were even possible) would be as fatal as staying inside. We are victims of what complex systems scientists call “path dependence” – where we came from and how we got here puts strict limits on what is now possible for us to do.  One of the things we can’t do is simply open the door and leave. Even the fact that our carbon-barred prison is now on fire can’t change the cold equations. We are condemned to wait here until the walls burn down, when a few soot-blackened survivors may stumble out into the blasted and barren landscape left behind by our self-absorbed construction project.  This is why I believe that the one quality most needed in the world today is compassion.”

“THERE IS NO THIRD WAY  Socialism is the only realistic solution to climate change”

https://tinyurl.com/y69qkgm2     climate and capitalism

“Capitalism will not and cannot prevent climate disaster. A socialist response at governmental and societal level is an historic necessity.  A lot has been written, including by myself, on why capitalism, by its very nature, cannot tackle or stop climate change. The purpose of this article is not to repeat those arguments but to make the positive case for socialism as necessary to deal with this existential crisis for humanity.  By socialism I mean simply the combination of two things: public ownership and democratic control of production and society…Only through socialism will it be possible to generate both the political will at the top and the genuine popular support and collaboration to achieve the immense coordinated transformation of the national and international economy necessary in the current emergency. Only public ownership and democratic planning can coordinate the establishment and expansion of free public transport, the urgent transition to renewal energy, the mass retrofitting of homes and a vast program of aforestation and rewilding…This cannot be challenged or dealt with without socialist redistribution of wealth and socialist planning internationally. Only socialist internationalism based on the common interests of the world’s working people could achieve such international cooperation; any capitalist option, no matter how ‘green’ its intentions, would degenerate into national and international rivalries which would destroy any coherent international planning…But under capitalism stagnation or, even more so, de-growth is an immediate crisis, a recession when it is short and a ‘great depression’ when it is extended, spelling mass unemployment, poverty and austerity (with the risk of fascism thrown in). This is because capitalism has a drive to growth built into its very fabric. Achieving a non-growth economy (measured in terms of GDP) or, should it prove essential, a de-growth in certain areas would also only be possible on the basis of socialist planning combined with the popular consent that would come from mass involvement in the democratic planning process.”

For those who can there is the REAL Green opportunity.  It requires going renewable and permaculture locally.  It embraces conservation and demand management.  It does not try to completely exit the status quo but instead use the status quo to leave it.  Most of us are stuck in the status quo that gives us survival.  Very few can go offline and truly green.  Some may be able to by withdrawing to the woods but even this does not enhance the local and what about your significant others that are still status quo?  REAL Green is more for people who have the funds to set up a farmstead or who can convert what they have to REAL Green.  Instead of going off to the decadent life beachside in South Florida retire on a farm and practice permaculture farming revolving around prep efforts for when or if SHTF.  Lower your footprint but in relative sacrifice based upon your significant others and what is happening in your local. 

It is obvious nobody is going to make a dent in climate change.  The greenest thing you can do is get out of the automobile culture as much as possible.  This is a central theme of REAL Green with lowering your footprint.  Don’t drive, fly, or train in discretionary leisure.  If you have to travel to do something to support you REAL Green effort then combine trips.  Wait to travel until you can make a full day of it doing multiple required tasks.  We are all aware most can’t remain totally local as in within walking distance.  This is especially true in the developed western countries.  The local part of REAL Green is the most effective green effort. 

The other part of REAL Green is gathering and harvesting solar energy.  The important point here is understanding most are not going to make a living doing this.  Small scale permaculture does not pay.  Solar systems are not cost effective in the status quo.  What REAL Green says is if you can decouple from industrial agriculture by producing in a garden, orchard, vines DO IT.  If you have pasture raise animals.  I promote a polyculture of pasture so I reduce the need to mow and use chemicals.  Goats eat brush and weeds as well as grass.  Cows like grass.  This leaves plenty of other things in the fields for wildlife if you keep stocking rates low.  Do permaculture as organic as you can.  Contribute to the local and focus on the seasonality of life by canning and freezing what you produce. 

Gather solar energy by embrace intermittency through your solar system.  I use a hybrid system where my home is also attached to the grid but I practice demand management.  I gather as much solar energy as I can.  I space heat and heat water with wood in the winter.  I heat water in the summer with solar water heating tubes.  The wood I harvest is sustainable whereby I harvest dead or dying trees.  I also practice forest management by culling trees as needed to improve the forest.  Wood is not cheap.  It requires a lot of labor and the equipment is expensive.  Electric heat is by far cheaper but cheaper is not the point of REAL Green.  Cheaper is a status quo effort. 

The other efforts REAL Green engages in is efficiency and conservation.  My home that I refurbished was done with efficiency in mind.  I maximized insulation and the windows are the best thermal windows I could get.  I can heat with multiple systems.  Excess solar energy in the winter is even utilized with small ceramic low watt heaters.  My wood boiler does both forced air and water heat to radiators.  My solar system can run the small pumps in the wood boiler.  I also have a fireplace wood stove insert I use when it is really cold.  With conservation I make sure as little food is wasted as possible.  Dogs and chickens eat what we don’t.  I have 300 acres I manage in natural grasses and woody draws.  I promote wildlife in these areas.  I have 15 bee hives on my place.  I let others use the farm to raise bees.  I buy their honey.  If SHTF I will have honey.

What I am doing is not making a dent in climate change and I still have a dirty footprint but it is less dirty and it is focused on making my local more sustainable and resilient.  If 50% of those who could did this it would make an important impact locally.  Globally we are screwed but locally you can make a difference.  Move somewhere where you can make a local impact and the rest falls in place.  Many locals can go significantly REAL Green and it is the compounding of efforts that make a difference. 

An excellent point of REAL Green is prep.  Your REAL Green effort is a natural prep activity.  You also combine the basics of prep like long shelf life food, guns and ammo, and water strategies.  You collect tools of all kinds that have post collapse relevance.  You have some gold and cash stashed.  You also have plans and attitudes you live daily.  You know your neighbors and your family knows how to regroup if they are away from the homestead. 

REAL Green is not a solution to climate change and if SHTF your REAL Green doomstead may not last but a few months.  This is not the point of REAL Green.  The point is relative effort in a world in destructive change.  REAL Green is about negotiating this decline and yielding to the greater powers.  Most modern dangers will be found when you leave your local.  You can increase your security by just going local.  Stay under the radar screen of the status quo.  Collapse in place with dignity.  The dignity comes with meaning you will find by doing less status quo.  This does not mean you don’t utilize the status quo.  You invest whatever you can in the finer aspects of the status quo that have long term relevance.  Buy quality tools and machines that have a future post collapse.  Start a library with real books that can be utilized if the internet ever goes unstable. 

This may be a doomer lifestyle but you are not living like a doomer.  You are living 2 generations ago in a hybridization of the modern.  You utilize the modern as needed to leave it.  You do this by triaging out what does not fit the wisdom of REAL Green.  REAL Green is not a cult or religion it is meant to be added on to your current higher power as a plug-in to the planet with its systems and its web of life.  REAL Green is humble and does not attempt to profit off others.  Its attempt is to enrich the local.  If you are blessed with REAL Green attributes you do not feel superior instead you feel compelled to help others.  REAL Green is other orientated.

“Doing Your Part To Stop Climate Change Now Requires Planting 30,000 New Trees, Getting 40,000 Cars Off The Road, Reviving 20 Square Miles Of Coral Reef. By yourself.”

Try REAL Green

The negative interest rate phenomenon is part of the path dependency and trap discussion I had yesterday in regards to REAL Green.  It is at the very top of what drives global economics of life.  It is not like the carbon trap we are in but of course they are both related.  The net energy decline of the carbon trap along with climate destabilization, environmental decline, adverse demographics changes, and social decay are fundamental forces now of late stage Capitalism decline.  It represents an end game of globalism but it is unclear what kind of end and when it will collapse the status quo.  It represents stagnation which is an economic decline force.  Lower economic activity combined with higher prices IOW the worst of deflation and inflation.  It also represents more income inequality and concentration of wealth which means destruction of the middle economic layer of productivity and consumption. 

Negative rates and stagnation will push socialistic tendencies of money creation for government stimulus if hyperinflation does not get us.  This will not be normal socialism because the pie is shrinking.  It will be further corrupt wealth redistribution.  Real Socialism only works when times are improving and all parties can be lifted.  This will lift a few who are connected and the privileged who are close to the money creation.  Both late stage capitalism and socialism in the decline phase lead to authoritarianism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and of the economy. It is likely we will see the worst of both in this end game phase.  Is that not what we are seeing now?  Both will find coercive and corrupt tools to force their change.  

We are path dependent now with global finance which will end globalism.   We will go this way because there is no choice.  The conditions that got us to and through the 08 crisis now define where we can go.  We will never go back to the previous time of economic fundamentals with increasing freedom.  To trash the situation more, we have authoritarianism combining with high tech.  We have corruption of the rule of law, cold civil wars in leadership, military buildups, MSM corruption, and economic nationalism in trade.  None of that is good.  Technological advancements is stalling with diminishing returns.  There is one area of good and that is the recognition that the whole narrative of better is flawed and wrong but even this partial good is wrong because the solutions that science and academia are pushing are delusional.  They want to think we are not path dependent and the carbon trap can be broken out of.  This is of course the lie of FAKE Green liberalism of a clean future of affluence and social justice.  We then have the delusionals who think space is the next frontier. 

We are in an end game and the critical element for you the individual is where you are at and what you do.  There will be destructive forces that will upend life for many in the near term and all of us longer term.  Now is the time to prepare and clean out the deadwood of the unnecessary.  You will need to be lean and mean for what is coming or go delusional sheeple.  That choice should be a no brainer but the reality is people are generally paralyzed with path dependence and traps at their local level.  It is hard to know even where to begin to prepare and also how to.  The first step should be behavioral with acceptance of failure of the social narrative but also the failure of the solution narrative of FAKE Greens liberals and the capitalist.  REAL Green starts from failure and gets to work.  Leverage what is left of the status quo to position yourself while you dance along the cliff of collapse in the status quo.  The behavior of acceptance of failure will guide you from the seductive lies.  Acceptance with a rebirth will require you go through the other 4 steps  of the Kübler-Ross model  https://tinyurl.com/yyhbgcsg  https://tinyurl.com/y37cphpc.  Start now and beat the rush. ��THGt

“We Finally Understand How Destructive Negative Interest Rates Actually Are”

https://tinyurl.com/y6swxwq9     zero hedge

“We are slowly starting to understand how destructive negative interest rates actually are. Central banks control short-term interest rates in an economy by setting the rate banks receive on their deposits, that is, on the reserves they hold at the central bank. A new development is the control central banks now exert over long-term rates through their asset purchase, or “QE” programs…Negative interest rates foster the phenomenon of zombie corporations in two ways. First, credit is extremely cheap and in some cases you are even paid to take it (if banks acquiesce to the negative interest rates set by the central bank). Second, because negative interest rates weaken banks by destroying operating margins, they will try to avoid capital losses by extending credit to ailing or even insolvent borrowers.  Moreover, negative interest rates kill the incentives to invest in productivity-enhancing technologies by supporting industry leaders, which usually pay lower premiums for loans. As very low or negative rates naturally favour dominant firms, competition is strangled, leading to a fall in overall investment. As a result, productivity growth starts to stall leading to stagnation in the overall economy. This crucial but perverse mechanism has yet to be broadly understood.  The backward economic logic of negative interest rates also corrupts the role of time-preference… it is likely to be much more damaging in the economic interactions of everyday life. This is because negative interest rates fly in the face of both economic logic and our innate human sense of rightness. If we must pay to deposit money and to lend, but receive money if we borrow, our economic thinking corrupts. If such perversion continues long enough, it is likely to have far-reaching social and economic ramifications, which we can only guess at the moment.” yes��TR` t

What we have today is FAKE Greenism.  FAKE Green believe growth and increasingly complicated tech will decarbonize the economy “AND GET THIS” make us wealthier.  This is a fairytale narrative that is needed because there will be no support for a REAL Greenism of degrowth and less affluence.  Even more, REAL Greenism say degrowth and less affluence will not save us.  Our fate is sealed and consequences are to be paid for.  REAL Green does not say tech is not part of our solution tool box.  What REAL Green says is let’s start from the beginning and acknowledge an unavoidable collapse process.  So, the starting point is behavior not tech.  The wise application of tech behavior tested is what should drive tech not profit and efficiency.  Collapse is coming and nature is showing us why and how.  We have time to live.  The sky is not falling tonight for most of us.  During this time we can adapt and mitigate the coming trial by fire. 

REAL Green goes further and says this honesty and proactivity cannot be adapted to at the top because of systematic drag of entrenched behavior.  If we go the REAL Green route of acknowledging a collapse process and embrace degrowth and lower affluence it is not clear if our globalistic system that is based on hyper growth can manage this forced degrowth.  This includes green and wise degrowth.  This house of cards may just collapse without explanation.  This is the real danger with honesty and degrowth.  Further dangers are human nature.  How do you harness fear and anxiety of a people who have been conditioned to growth and improving living conditions and most recently, lied to that everything will be fixed?  Human nature can ruin this whole project too without any rationality. 

This is where REAL Green goes local and individual.  REAL Green individual follows the bigger picture but only to adapt his life and his local to a coming collapse process.  He leverages the status quo of growth to degrowth with dignity.  The degrowth with dignity is an orderly process with meaning.  REAL Green acknowledges a collapse process and acknowledges civilization is hopelessly trapped and unable to change its trajectory.  There will be no 100% renewable world with social justice.  There will be no space travel and asteroid mining.  There will be increasingly failed states and regions trying to adapt to failure.  Pain, suffering and death will increasingly be common place instead of happy faces we constantly see on TV.

REAL Green gets with the picture by triage and hybridization.  Remove items and lifestyles that will impede your survival.  Embrace the old ways with new knowledge.   Use the best tech that is tested for REAL Green localization to find a better way.  Be skeptical of complicated high tech.  If tech scales to the local and has robust durability then it is likely a good fit for REAL Green.  What we see now is aggressive tech with constantly tweaking efficiency without reality testing and cost accounting.  The old ways of harvesting solar energy locally with animals can be adapted to include renewables gathering solar energy.  All of this embracing intermittency, seasonality, and increasingly climate instability.  Demand management and adapted behavior will drive a new kind of efficiency that really is what humans used to do.  Animal power has a place in all this.  Growing our own food and dwelling in a local instead of a culture of travel is the REAL Green way out of the rat race. 

To achieve this, REAL Green says embrace these changes relatively based upon who you are, where you live and the degree of understanding of your significant others.  Do not alienate your family, friends, and community but challenge them and reach out to them.  Bend the rules and step on some feet but don’t burn the house down.  Remember REAL Green acknowledges a collapse process.  REAL Green engages in prep but not the mentality that prep will save you.  REAL Green prep is about getting lean and mean.  It is about being able to sprint and do long distance but it also acknowledges you can’t out run collapse.  REAL Green is seeking to yield to greater forces and attempts to slide under the radar screen as a motive.  It is ready to apply maximum force because REAL Green understands survival will be tested and death will be close at some point.  Start the process of engaging in activities that expose you to pain and suffering but at the same time enjoy life.  That may sound like an incongruous juxtaposition but it is really just more of a paradox.  Embracing pain and suffering will allow you to enjoy life.   Add REAL Green on to your existing higher power program.  All REAL Green is trying to do is localize and prepare for a paradigm shift.  It is an add-on not a system.  REAL Green is not trying to start a new religion.  REAL Green is about meaning and harnessing the truth. ����������������>a+T

I would caution anyone who thinks we can solve the worlds problems on the backs of the rich.  First there is not enough rich to matter.  They may be energy hogs but there are so few rich in relation to the rest of the economy that their extra energy use is not that great.  Their wealth is significantly digital and therefor ephemeral.  In a collapse situation much of their wealth would vanish.  Much of their toys would not operate.  We also have to consider the economic impact of rich in the overall economy.  If you want to have more equitable economics with less of a footprint you must be very careful how you impact the economy.  A drastic change could actually make the economy overall less affluent.  It is true many rich are part of the parasitic class of FIRE and sports and celebs.  Yet, many rich are very successful and have taken risks and should be rewarded. 

As the modern economy concentrates knowledge there is going to be divergence.  This is another macro area that should be addressed.  We have regions that have wealth concentrating and this becomes unfair at a certain point.  Limitarianism is a new branch of thinking on redistribution.  This subject is important going forward both from a social standpoint both within an economy and globally.  It also should be addressed at the individual level.  Individually we should have an upper limit of wealth accumulation.  The problem with this will be loopholes and corruption but this is always the case.  No way to get around the ingenuity of human nature.  The wealthy can hire an army of consultants so this should be limited.  The very wealthy especially those who gain wealth in the financial side of the economy need to be limited.  Sports and the entertainment industry likewise need to be limited.  These are industries that do not contribute to sustainability or resilience after a point.

 On the regional level there needs to be limits but this is harder to control.  A wealthy region is generally a productive region.  The problem becomes once this region entrenches its wealth and privilege.  Redistribution and limits are needed but harder to assess.  This is currently being done at the federal level but increasingly it is falling short because of the nature of the modern economy.  Money concentrates and with-it power and privilege so we are seeing entrenchment as affluence stalls.  At the international level redistribution is even becoming harder especially as limits are reached to affluence.  Affluence is under pressure everywhere.  In a time of a shrinking economic pie less redistribution will be possible.  Poor nations are getting poorer for many reasons’ redistribution will not solve.  Overpopulation is overshoot making policies difficult to implement unless the underlying problem is addressed. 

This is where some REAL Green might be of use.  REAL Green is local based and decline based.  A macro REAL Green look at the systematics of the global economy calls for a holistic approach to Limitarianism and planetary health.  Let’s Place an upper limit on wealth but lets also move more people local with less affluence.  These people moved to the less affluence of localism must be protected from the competitive condition of the wealthy and privileged individuals, regions, and nations.  This needs to be incorporated with intermittency of renewables.  Take people to localism.  Give them security of medical and income.  Provide them with energy but require them to live with intermittency.  Have them focus on low carbon solar energy harvesting and gathering.  Gardening and more animal husbandry is needed.  More animal power which is plenty fine for a localized life. 

While I call this less affluence in reality that is only in relation to a modern definition.  The reality is spiritually and materially affluence can be relatively greater if we consider health and wellbeing.  Consumerism and leisure can be adapted locally and with less of a footprint to offer more spiritual satisfaction.  On the other end of the equation is the relatively richer individuals, regions, and nations.  If we are going to maintain a modern way of life and attempt to avoid a cascading collapse then we will need a modern knowledge and producer class.  There are aspects of production that are only efficient at the global level.  Higher Knowledge can only be maintained with affluence and concentration of wealth and energy.  The key is determining what and where.  So, going forward REAL Green says we need a two-tier society.  One that goes into a localism of less but with ample material and spiritual satisfaction protected from the competitive destructive nature of market-based capitalism.  We then need a highly educated and productive class who produce those items that can only be produced at this level.  These products and people are essential for maintaining modernity. 

REAL Green acknowledges this is likely beyond our human capacity especially since market-based capitalism with its individualistic liberal democracy is not up to the task of controlling people.  Yet, it is still important we offer this theoretical solution as a benchmark for current policies.  Let’s be clear on what will work and what won’t.  Unfortunately, we have control that is becoming more nefarious and Orwellian.  This combined localism/globalism requires sacrifice at both ends but what we see now is nobody wants to sacrifice.  REAL Green then says go local anyway and harness this global engine to improve your local.  The fact that our current arrangement can’t change means it is now the case more than ever to find a strong local and invest in it.  Leverage the power of globalism for your local.  Use it to leave it.

 “For the Sake of Life on Earth, We Must Put a Limit on Wealth”

https://tinyurl.com/y469yp9f     resiliance

“A series of research papers shows that income is by far the most important determinant of environmental impact. It doesn’t matter how green you think you are; if you have surplus money, you spend it. The only form of consumption that’s clearly and positively correlated with good environmental intentions is diet: people who see themselves as green tend to eat less meat and more organic vegetables. But attitudes have little bearing on the amount of transport fuel, home energy and other materials you consume. Money conquers all…There’s a name for this approach, coined by the Belgian philosopher Ingrid Robeyns: limitarianism. Robeyns argues that there should be an upper limit to the amount of income and wealth a person can amass. Just as we recognize a poverty line, below which no one should fall, we should recognize a riches line, above which no one should rise. This call for a levelling down is perhaps the most blasphemous idea in contemporary discourse.  But her arguments are sound. Surplus money allows some people to exercise inordinate power over others: in the workplace; in politics; and above all in the capture, use and destruction of the planet’s natural wealth. If everyone is to flourish, we cannot afford the rich. Nor can we afford our own aspirations, which the culture of wealth maximization encourages.  The grim truth is that the rich are able to live as they do only because others are poor: there is neither the physical nor ecological space for everyone to pursue private luxury. Instead we should strive for private sufficiency, public luxury. Life on Earth depends on moderation.”

Technocratic optimism is much like bible thumping in that it is seeking immortality.  True spirituality is a letting go into a higher power that is much greater.  Instead of a human centric formula true spirituality is above and beyond humans.  We are but part and expression of this whole.  We can only approach what that is because the part can never know the whole.  Instead modern humans want to be the part and the whole and know it all.  Science is corrupted by this lack of wisdom as is spirituality.  This corruption means we actually need to be less intelligent but wiser. 

Wisdom is knowing what intelligence to embrace and what not to embrace.  A specialized scientist is not much use except in a world of specialized science.  Scientific specialization is a luxury not a force of nature.  True sapience starts with the sustainability that produces a survival resilience of community and place.  This does not mean a whole scale rejection of our accumulated knowledge.   Nor does this mean the society of the technocratic or numerous religions including the pseudo religion of modern consumerism needs to be rejected.  It should be understood that this is the natural evolution of a species like ours when it reaches the point of imbalance or overshoot. 

This is the new ecosystem you must inhabit.  This new ecosystem is not scaled properly in relation to the planet so as with any imbalanced force in nature balance will force a restoration maybe not in human timescales but planetary ones.  Nothing defining can be done about this condition at the level of the human collective.  There are far too many belief systems and communities vying for a place at the table.  It is better to embrace this new ecosystem at the individual level and more importantly at the level of small community where adaptability can be attempted.  For most of human history until the recent time where we embrace agriculture and the empire impulse man has been tribal and in small communities.  Individually we can embrace this human background and still live amount the giants so to speak.  The giants are the forces of delocalization that has globalized this earth and changed the planets beyond its balance. 

It is not just the case that humans are out of balance and scale but also now this condition of a dominant species has destabilized the planet in regards to habitability for the web of life.  Planetary systems, ecosystems, and even geology are now adapted in an Anthropocene.  In this greater condition an individual and local can decline in place while still embracing this force of life.  If you think you can decouple from this greater force you will see yourself consumed by competitive forces.  Survival is precarious anytime but particularly if one is delusional of what can and can’t be.  You adapt to what you have even if it does not seem right.  Many of us feel a deep sadness for what humans have done.  We struggle to find meaning in all this imbalance.

The meaning comes from embracing decline that is evident in honest science.  This embrace includes giving into the power of those greater forces.  You will have to give to Caesar what is his.  Paradoxically this requires an embrace of less intelligence along with physical consumption.  Chose the intelligence you pursue wisely.  Limits apply to intelligence as they do to  our physical habitation.   Do this in a relative way that acknowledges a new human ecosystem of imbalance and decay.  The relativity means balancing growth and decline.  You will be building up into decline.  We have been killing ourselves slowly through the destruction of the habitability of the planet.  Eventually thresholds will be crossed and are being crossed.  The planet has its own timeline above and beyond the web of life.  This is at a different time scale but we are still part of it.  An asteroid might hit in 10 years destroying habitability this means ultimately there is human acquiesce to the planet.  Something we pretend we can transcend by the technocratic.

Wisdom of the moment in your local seems the best place to find meaning.  It has been what humans have done most of their history.  We have already lost our innocence of harmony but this does not mean we can’t make the journey back to what was once truly human taking with us the best of our modern experiences.  We have learned many things through science that can assist us in this journey.  Re-localize with meaning while inhabiting this globalized world.  It essentially comes down to behavior.  You are not going to tech your way out of this condition.  Limits and diminishing returns are now an dominant force preventing traditional growth.  Embrace less with more wisdom not the randomness of more intelligence with less wisdom.