1. What is the “origin story” of Parents for Climate – when did you begin, why? Parents for Climate began in 2019, sparked by a simple but powerful idea: parents are a force like no other when it comes to protecting the future. A group of six rural and regional mums got together online—frustrated by government inaction and alarmed by worsening climate impacts—to create a home for parent-led climate action. Our tiny organisation wants to empower everyday families to take meaningful steps, speak up, and shift the story about who climate action is for.
2. (How) has the work of Parents for Climate shifted since it began – for what reasons? We’ve grown from a grassroots network into a national movement that’s deeply strategic. At first, we were a small mostly-online community focused on awareness raising and community-building—now, we’re focused on influencing decision-makers and policy, supporting local leadership, and amplifying the voices of parents in public debate. That shift reflects the urgency of the climate crisis, the growing political relevance of parents, and what we’ve learned about where we can make the most impact.
3. What are the things you’ve done that you’re proudest of?
We’re proud to have helped shape public policy—like federal investments in clean energy storage and better school infrastructure. We’ve mobilized thousands of parents in electorates across the country, built powerful coalitions, and held Australia’s biggest energy companies to account for greenwashing. But just as importantly, we’ve helped countless parents move from climate anxiety to climate agency—finding purpose, connection, and hope together.
4. What, besides more money and time, is the main constraint on you being able to do more things (skills gaps, access to other resources etc) and what help are you looking for?
Like many grassroots groups, we’re stretched. We could do more with support in digital campaigning, media and design, and easy to use tools that help us scale. We’d also love more support building bridges into multicultural communities and regional networks. We’re looking for people who want to offer skills, networks, or mentoring—or who can help unlock funding or strategic partnerships.
5. What resources need to be available to concerned parents for when they talk to their kids – of different ages – about what the future holds? Parents need age-appropriate, emotionally intelligent tools that are honest but hopeful. That might be a storybook about nature and courage for young kids, a school project toolkit for tweens, or conversation guides for teens that acknowledge fear but focus on action. Most of all, parents need to feel they’re not alone—and that there’s a community of people out there who are acting for their kids too.
6. Anything else you want to say – shout outs about upcoming events, other groups etc. We’ve just wrapped our biggest ever campaign, Vote Like a Parent. We just forced energy giant EnergyAustralia to admit to the truth behind its marketing claims through legal action. And we’re gearing up for new work focused on clean energy and protecting kids from the impacts of extreme heat and air pollution. A huge shout out to the parent volunteers around the country making this movement what it is. If you’re reading this and want to be part of it—come join us at parentsforclimate.org!
The great Australian cartoonist Jon Kudelka kindly agreed to an interview.
1. Who are you and how did you come to be a cartoonist (where grew up etc).
I grew up in Hobart and after completing an undergraduate degree in molecular biology and chemistry in the early 90s realised that opportunities to do actual research were mostly in the area of weapons research or mining or forestry and decided that it wasn’t for me. I had supported myself through uni illustrating for various clients and decided to give that a go as if it failed I could probably get into teaching.
2. When and how did you first hear about climate change?
I heard about climate change in grade ten which would have been the mid eighties, so only 90 years after Arrhenius published his first paper on the topic, establishing my ability to be right on the ball with important news.
3. Your “scientist tapping the microphone ‘is this thing on'” cartoon from 2013 pops up intermittently in my feed and on sites – any recollection of how it came to be? If you were doing a sequel, what would the scientist be saying now?
The scientist one was done in a tearing hurry as I had taken in far too much work with various papers. I intended to have the sea level rising in each panel but somehow managed to forget it so was kicking myself the next day. If I did a sequel it would probably involve a scientist swearing a great deal.
Also I would probably go with a female scientist because the only people in my uni year who stuck with science turned out to be female. Probably should have done that with the first one but like I said, I was right on deadline and details weren’t a priority.
4. Your Rusted On Bingo is pure genius – what was the motiviation/straw that broke the camel’s back? Presumably you do encounter these responses from people in real life, where the block function is not possible. What do you do then?
I always got a lot more snark from Labor for the mildest criticism whereas the (slightly more) conservative parties were cranky in a more buffoonish manner. I think the trouble was that Labor types wanted to be Tories but didn’t want to be seen as Tories and didn’t react at all well to it. The prevailing attitude was to promise something centrist then roll over at the slightest pushback. I picked this rank cowardice during the run-up to Bill Shorten’s failed campaign against [then Prime Minister Scott] Morrison in 2019 where there were some good ideas that didn’t go far enough and the whole campaign was handed over to risk averse spin doctors. More effort seemed to be put into making excuses (mostly blaming the Greens for not passing Rudd’s CPRS in 2009) rather than actually following through with a consistent platform.
This is not to say that the Coalition weren’t people you’d touch with a barge pole (unless you were trying to push them off a boat) and a lot of the groundwork in ruining the country was done during the John Howard era. In fact I even published a book to that effect. It all got to the point where despite the succession of absolute clowns put forward by the Liberals starting with Tony Abbott, it became clear that Labor’s cowardice from opposition was clearly enabling the Coalition and the two party system was the entire problem. Pointing this out unleashed a deluge of spitefulness from the party faithful to the point where I just made a bingo card based entirely on their excuses for failure.
I was going to leave it at that but they just kept at it to the point where I rejigged the card into a teatowel and put the profits into sponsoring the endangered red handfish which I named “Rusty” which I quite enjoyed. I get a few requests to do another teatowel but have retired from cartooning due to a terminal brain tumour and don’t really have to time, inclination or funds to do another print run. Also the original seems to have held up pretty well.
These days people are generally too scared to make these comments to me in person but back in the day I would be increasingly polite to the point where they became quite cross. This may or may not have been deliberate. Anyway, I probably rambled on a bit there but I am somewhat bewildered as to why anyone would cling to any of the major parties these days but I haven’t really been paying attention since I retired late last year.
5. Who are your favourite cartoonists, living or dead?
6. Anything else you want to say – shout outs to activists, outlets, news of upcoming projects etc etc.
I’ve moved to being a more non-political artist because politics makes me a bit cranky these days as you’ve probably noticed. I recently attended the Takayna artist residency run by the Bob Brown Foundation and they do great work attempting to look after the place because they generally do what they say which would these days seems to be frowned upon by the media and the time-serving careerists who infest the major political parties.
Our only hope for getting the urgent changes needed to give the next generation half a chance after the long period of making the environment much worse in the case of the coalition or arguably slightly less worse under Labor is a minority government with sizeable crossbenches of people who are willing to actually work to make things better in both Houses of Parliament though it’s pretty much at the stage where if this occurred the Liberals and Labor will stop pretending they’re not defending their duopoly and band together to defend their donors.
Dave Vetter writes extremely well about climate change and the messiness of it all. He has a very much worth-your-time set of essays about climate disinformation, a judiciously active social media presence (first on the site that Shall Not Be Named) and latterly on Bluesky. He kindly agreed to an interview…
Who are you – i.e. roughly when were you born, where did you grow up, what did you do after leaving school?
I was born in Edinburgh at some point in the (cough) 1970s, but grew up in Cardiff, where it rained so hard for so long that I ran away to East Asia. I spent a few years as a teacher in Hong Kong, until I realised I couldn’t have a job that didn’t revolve around writing. At that point I returned to the UK and took up an MA in international journalism. Since then I’ve had just about every print media role you can think of, and the entire time print media has been in its death throes. That’s quite a concerning correlation, when I think about it.
When and how did you first hear about climate change – do you remember what you thought?
I first heard about climate change in the 1980s, when I was in primary school. Our teachers did a good job of scaring us into being little activists. That’s never really gone away. I also understood from a young age that climate change is indivisible from human injustice, probably thanks to my dad [the epidemiologist Norman J. Vetter]. I get annoyed when people talk about “saving the planet”. We’re saving ourselves! Shoutout to Dana Fisher, there.
You write for Forbes – how did that gig come about?
I began writing for Forbes when I returned to the UK in 2019. I’d been in media and publishing for about 12 years by that point, but wanted to focus solely on climate. At that point I had the means, motive and opportunity to completely reconfigure my career in a media industry that I felt was becoming increasingly frivolous – so I went for it.
You’re pretty prolific on social media – what do you get out of it (positive and negative) and what would you like to see “climate people” doing more of – or less of – on Bluesky etc?
Yes, I post too much. It’s probably a net harm to me in all sorts of ways, but I generally try to highlight issues that I feel need attention, and I try to do so in a responsible way without being boring about it. I’m perpetually conflicted about how useful any of this is; I, like many of us, am just figuring it out as we go along.
What other projects are you involved in?
I’m trying to juggle a dozen projects while treading water. My approach is far too headless chicken. And to pay the bills I ghostwrite and do copyediting.
On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is everything is gonna be peachy keen through to 10 is “Mad Max scenarios look like The Sound of Music before the Nazis turn up”, where do you think we will be in 2050? From a self-centred, short-termist, northern European perspective, I’m hopeful that European agriculture doesn’t collapse. There are indications that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation might be more robust than we thought, which might be a reprieve, though we absolutely shouldn’t be banking on this.
The one thing we can be sure of is we’re heading into a less safe, less stable future. I’m sorry to say that that means most of us are going to be struggling a lot more, while a few very wealthy fraudsters will continue to grab what they can. To sustain ourselves I think we’re going to need to rediscover the meaning of community, and what’s actually important, rather than what we’ve been inculcated to believe is important.
Bonus – anything else you’d like to say.
Something I really appreciate about All Our Yesterdays is that, via history, it emphasises aspects of the climate crisis that are overlooked – namely the cultural and the social aspects, which is where I believe all the most important fights are being fought. People always claim the biggest hurdle to climate action is politics, but they’re wrong: it’s culture. Andrew Breitbart, the most appalling figure, was right when he said politics is downstream from culture. Liberal politicians almost universally do not understand this, which is a big reason why we’re facing the crises we’re facing.
Last Tuesday and Wednesday the Royal Courts of Justice heard an appeal in a case about whether the Government broke the law in approving a power-station-with-carbon-capture-and-storage project. The heart of the matter is the amount of emissions that will still be released. The appeal has been brought by environmental consultant Dr Andrew Boswell. Here he talks to AOY. The transcript has been very lightly edited for clarity. Next week, a detailed account of the numbers behind the appeal.
And so first question is, for people who are not familiar with yourself, your life in a couple of 100 words
Andrew Boswell 0:49
My life in a couple of hundred words? Well, currently, what I’ve been doing the last few years is challenging government decisions on projects which have an impact on the climate change, basically when they have a significant impact. Whether, basically whether the government is making a decision to approve these projects in a lawful way. So it’s largely looking at things like Environmental Impact Assessments and whether they are actually working out right, secondly, then whether they they [the government of the day] make a decision which is right with the law,
marc hudson 1:34
And why did you decide that this was a good use of your time and expertise, as opposed to other forms of environmental activism that in theory, you could be doing?
Andrew Boswell 1:47
Yeah, well, I saw a particular niche for myself, both as a scientist, so I could sort of review environmental impact assessments on the technical side, but also a realisation that the legal system wasn’t actually securing the Climate Change Act [of 2008] and our climate targets. I mean, I personally think we need much more radical carbon budgets and targets along the lines of Kevin Anderson might say; reductions of several percent a year, lots of percent a year, to meet the temperature targets. But we’re stuck with what we have under the Climate Change Act. And what we have is that not even those targets are being secured in planning decisions and by the planning system and by the legal system. So I set out to really sort of highlight that,
marc hudson 2:46
And we’ll talk briefly in general terms about the case that was being heard yesterday and today. But could you give us an example of a case where you forced the government to obey the laws, which, ironically, you know, it should be doing under the 2008 Climate Act.
Andrew Boswell 3:07
Well, the case today is a case in point. We don’t know the outcome of it, But my work is not just going into the courts, it’s actually going through the whole planning examination. And what did happen in that case is that initially the upstream emissions from the natural gas, which is largely methane emissions, were not initially put into the environmental impact assessment. So they [BP and Equinor] weren’t even trying to declare them. Then what happened was they did declare them, because I called that out in the planning examination. But then they actually went and miscalculated the whole thing. And what they did was they double-counted the carbon capture emissions. So effectively, they sort of said, “Oh, the carbon capture emissions, 180% of the carbon which would be going up the smoke stack” rather than 90% which is what they’re saying they capture. They effectively calculated 180% which then they were able to hide the methane emissions under.
So there’s a lot of deception going on. And over the course of six months, exchange of letters with the department and the government, eventually the government agreed with me that they had double counted. It’s notable to say that BP and Equinor when they had the facts laid out very simply before then, still denied that’s what they were doing.
Just to elaborate on that, do you understand that it actually took me three days to find the double-counting error because it was distributed around about half a dozen documents. And I actually had to create spreadsheets to understand what all the spreadsheets and the documents were doing; how the numbers interrelated. When I found the double-counting error, I thought, “no, they can’t really be doing that.” But eventually I convinced myself they were. And then I managed to lay it out in one half page spreadsheet, which actually went into the decision letter with the Secretary of State. And the Secretary of State, saying yes, they agreed with me that there was a double- counting error, but there was a long road to get to that simple explanation.
But even when I laid that out in front of BP and Equinor they still went on denying to the government that they ever made a double-counting error
marc hudson 5:51
On a recent Zoom call… I saw you lay out some of the details of this case. And you also said something that I think was very interesting and important that I would like you to expand on, which is that… you saw a case for CCS, for some purposes, eg, some industrial processes, cement, as opposed to what we’re getting, which is the energy production.
And I suppose my question is, how are we going to get or how could we get the CCS infrastructure and the CCS expertise and the CCS business models for the capture of emissions from, say, cement and ceramics and some chemical processes without the big oil companies having been able to develop it for power generation. Is that even possible, do you think that?
Andrew Boswell 7:12
Yeah, this is why I said that there is a case that it could be used for cement. But I didn’t say it was a proven case. And I think this is what needs to happen. And part of the problem in the UK is that they tried to do various what you might call stand-alone CCS projects, and those all failed. And one of the reasons they failed was we can’t get to all infrastructure to join up for one project – you can’t justify a storage site. And I get that, and that is a real issue. But then the response to that was, “well, okay, we’ll build this cluster model.” And each cluster basically starts off by having something driven by natural gas. It’s either blue hydrogen or it’s gas fired power, as in the Net Zero Teesside. So what you get is to start the thing up, and that’s the thing which is then going to sort of pump the CO2 down under the sea. You lock into natural gas.
But not only do you lock in, you front load all the emissions in this cluster model, because the big emissions come from the gas-fired power station, the natural gas supply and the methane in supply chain. You lock all those in; your cement plant might come along 10 years later, by which time you’ve done huge damage with the methane emissions in the first place.
So the question – and I think what your question is – is given that, can you now go back to actually a model where you could develop CCS for things like cement and lime, but you don’t rely on this cluster model, and you don’t rely on having a gas-fired power station to pump the stuff under the sea. And that’s why I think the case is not proven. We need to understand whether that can be done or not. And I don’t have a view on that, but I think what I think does need to be solved is the power to pump the stuff under the sea is one thing, and that could be done by renewables. The power for the Net Zero Teesside of it was about 50 megawatts to sort of power the pump pipeline.
But there’s also issues about whether you need a constant sea of supply to the storage site. And there’s a lot of issues about developing that particular storage site actually off Net Zero Teesside, where they’re sort of saying it needs to have a constant supply at a certain rate. I think that’s when you start to hit problems, which have tried to overcome with the cluster model. But by trying to do that, they then really hit the greenhouse gas problem. So,
marc hudson 10:06
Sorry, when you said the greenhouse gas problem, you mean the volume?,
Andrew Boswell 10:10
Well, the greenhouse gas volume meaning that the emissions, which they can’t capture. Because all the methane emissions in the supply chain are uncatchable. And also the diesel from the shipping, if it’s LNG, and all the rest of it emissions from all that stuff is uncatchable. So it’s not carbon capture at all. There’s lots of emissions going out in the process which are not capturable at all.
marc hudson 10:36
I’m conscious of you wanting to have your meal and so forth. So two more questions. One is, if someone’s listening to this, if the transcript is suitably audible, or they’re reading it, and they think “I want to support Andrew Boswell’s work,” what do they do?
Andrew Boswell 10:54
Well, my work is sort of pro bono as such. I work basically pro bono, a sort of retired person with an interest. There have been times where when the case is coming up, we’ve needed to have financial support or something for the case, through crowd funders. So basically, it’s sort of “look out for things like that” at the moment. But to support my work more widely, in some non-financial way, I would say, just look out for what I’m doing. Because, you know, the campaign against CCS has really taken off.
At this moment, because I just finished a big legal case, I’m not quite sure what happens next. But we’re continuing the campaign to try to stop the government investing in all this.
And on the back of the [February 2025] Public Accounts Committee report, which is worth talking about because it’s highlighted several things. It highlighted that CCS is a very high-risk in trying to achieve net zero. The government it’s saying it’s harder to transition to net zero [without CCS]. The Public Accounts Committee have said that it’s very high risk in doing that. And they’re also saying it’s very high cost. We know the subsidies are now up to 60 billion pounds, the subsidies they’ve allocated to this
marc hudson 12:28
Sorry six billion or sixty billion?
Andrew Boswell 12:32
Sixty, Six zero, yeah, yeah. I can send you over a web page.
It’s all on one page, the DESNZ subsidies. And if you add up the ones which have got CCS in them, they’re already 60 billion, and you haven’t got blue hydrogen in there yet.
So it’s very costly. And the third point was they said, basically, the science isn’t fully determined yet, and there’s new science on the methane and so on. And the government need to take note of that. So we’re sort of coming in on the back of that, whether you know, in the budget or whatever the CCS could be cut in the budget.
marc hudson 13:14
In the seventh carbon budget?
Andrew Boswell 13:16
No, the national Treasury budget – so Rachel Reeve’s spending review in June, and her statement on March 26th leading up to it. There’s talk that she may cut CCS. The talk is that she may put it into the defence budget. I personally think it should be redirected to insulation and genuine green energy, because climate change is our biggest security risk.
And that’s not to underrate what’s happening. We’re going through a sort of process of the whole world order is changing. America is switching sides, and all the rest of it. And I understand we, you know, we have to consider our defence very seriously as well. But I don’t think we should just simply take green budgets and cut them. But where they’re bad, green budgets going for CCS – which isn’t going to help all the reasons in the Public Accounts Committee – we should redirect them to the stuff which will help insulation and genuinely green energy… So renewables and storage solutions…
marc hudson 14:25
Large scale batteries, etc, etc. Final question, anything else you’d like to say? Anything you thought, “Oh, he’s going to ask me this, and here’s my answer,”
Andrew Boswell 14:33
No, I think that’s that’s probably really good. Thank you.
Climate scientist Professor Kevin Anderson has said that the much-vaunted Climate Change Committee has “systematically undermined the 2008 Climate Change Act – an Act that, in my view, was far ahead of its time.”
“It is not an independent committee. It was set up by government to give advice to government, and it is paid by government. Nothing in that implies independence. Through private discussion with a very senior CCC member, I was left in no doubt that the CCC chooses to push government as hard as they think government is prepared to be pushed – and that any harder, and their advice will be ignored and the Committee sidelined.”
The interview covered a range of topics, and is being released in installments. Part one, on the physical impacts we can expect is here. Part two, on “Team Mann vs Team Hansen” and the speed of recent warming is here. Part three on Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ support for a third runway at Heathrow, aviation in general and the quality of advice being offered is here. The interview was conducted by Dr Marc Hudson, who has interviewed Professor Anderson on several occasions over the past 15 years. Dr Hudson runs All Our Yesterdays, an “on this day” website about climate politics, technology, protest that covered events from 1661 to the present day.
The transcript of the relevant portion of the interview can be found below.
You are free (and of course encouraged) to use this material for commercial or non-commercial purposes. Please cite both the source (i.e. that the interview was conducted by Marc Hudson, and the URL of this page
I think it’s a very alternate universe when you get the gig [as Ed Miliband’s SPAD] over Chris Stark. So what will Chris Stark say, or has he said, and he should be saying what you’ve just said. So, what’s going on there? How come the politicians are not even getting the sort of scientific advice that they should? And this leads into your and my concern about the cognitive, intellectual corruption of academia, which, with a few honorable exceptions, has “not covered itself in glory.” To throw in as many cliches as I could.
Kevin Anderson 20:15
Well, obviously, Chris Stark was previously the CEO of the Government’s Climate Change, Committee. But he’s now gone on to become Ed Miliband’s advisor on climate change issues, particularly on decarbonising power.
My problem with the Climate Change Committee is that it has systematically undermined the 2008 Climate Change Act – an Act that, in my view, was far ahead of its time. This would have been much less an issue if the academic and expert community had not run scared of countering the CCC’s preference for what they deemed to be politically acceptable rather than what is scientifically necessary to deliver on our climate commitments.
The CCC is not an independent committee. It was set up by government to give advice to government, and it is paid by government. Nothing in that implies independence. Through private discussion with a very senior CCC member, I was left in no doubt that the CCC chooses to push government as hard as they think government is prepared to be pushed – and that any harder, and their advice will be ignored and the Committee sidelined.
I see that as a perfectly reasonable position to take if you then don’t claim to be an independent committee. But it also then requires the academic community to hold the CCC to account – based on the science, our analysis and the climate commitments our governments repeatedly sign up to. But that hasn’t happened – quite the opposite.
Set against a weak academia and a similarly weak funding agency, the UKRI – or as it was called previously the research councils, – the CCC have effectively dictated the research agenda. When the CCC has said jump we’ve asked how high – rather than why!.
First our research had to fit with a 60% reduction in emissions by 2050, then it was 80% by 2050, then carbon budgets were introduced, but quickly shifted to a Net Zero 2050 framework. In effect, the boundaries of analysis have been dictated by the CCC, as if the committee is some form of Oracle. This was bad enough. But with Chris Stark becoming the CEO, he was such a highly effective leader of a government committee, a real smooth operator, that a weak academia was left even more in thrall of the CCC. So, whilst we might endeavour to do objective research on cutting emissions, it is inevitably set within the CCC’s deeply political boundary – one that is far removed anything aligned with our Paris temperature and equity commitments
I realise very few if any academics will agree with me here, at least in public, though it’s a different story in private, but I see the CCC as having fundamentally misinformed and let down, not just the UK policy makers and the public, but of course, the people who already are and will be impacted by climate change. But this failure has been actively facilitated by the supine academic community that has not stood up for academic integrity, simply bending to will of the CCC; just look at the ubiquitous ‘net zero 2050’ framing of our research, language and publications; barely a whimper of dissent. It’s the old cliché, bad things happen whilst good people stay quiet. Sadly, and very specifically on mitigation (so not on climate science), I see cowardice rather than academic integrity as the collective hallmark of our contribution thus far.
Climate scientist Professor Kevin Anderson has said Chancellor Rachel Reeves support fora third runway at Heathrow airport is based on “the usual techno babble. You know, ‘sustainable aviation fuel and electric planes.’ These cannot deliver on scale and in timeline for the current aviation, let alone the growth in aviation.”
In an interview conducted before making a presentation at a January 30th public meeting in Glossop, England, Anderson went on to condemn the advice being given to Reeves, and her stance on climate change.
Either she was sufficiently ignorant to not be aware of this, and given she’s had lots of guidance and expertise and all the research expertise that she needs to lay her hands on to understand it, that is concerning. Or she’s been dishonest, but under both those, I think she’s not fit for office, if that’s what she thinks is appropriate. So either she can’t understand the issues well, I’m sorry, you need to get a handle on issues, or you’re not being honest with the population, and I think as an electorate, we should have, we expect should expect – this may be naive – I expect honesty and integrity. I don’t have to agree with them – to expect honesty, integrity of our elected officials. She seems, at the moment, I can see no other way but to say she’s failed on one of those which means she is not fit for purpose.
The interview covered a range of topics, and isl being released in installments. Part one, on the physical impacts we can expect is here. Part two, on “Team Mann vs Team Hansen” and the speed of recent warming is here. . It was conducted by Dr Marc Hudson, who has interviewed Professor Anderson on several occasions over the past 15 years. Dr Hudson runs All Our Yesterdays, an “on this day” website about climate politics, technology, protest that covered events from 1661 to the present day.
The transcript of the relevant portion of the interview can be found below.
You are free (and of course encouraged) to use this material for commercial or non-commercial purposes. Please cite both the source (i.e. that the interview was conducted by Marc Hudson), and the URL of this page.
Stay tuned for Monday’s blog post – is Kevin on the Climate Change Committee and its influence on government and academia.
Which brings us to yesterday, the Labour Chancellor, who, two years ago, said that she was going to be the first green – small g green – Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, came out and said that she favored Heathrow airport expansion, and the BBC coverage was helpfully saying things like, “Can sustainable aviation fuel and electric planes make Heathrow’s third runway green?” And my simple response was, “FFS, no.” But we come to you, Kevin for more than “FFS, no.”
So, can sustainable, aviation fuels and electric planes make Heathrow’s third runway green?
Kevin Anderson 14:15
Well, on the question “Can the third runway be made green through technology”. – here I go back to both Mann and Hansen, and their respective timelines to deliver on Paris. And the answer is a categorical no.
But the answer is a categorical no for the existing aviation demand as well.
So it’s not just about any new aviation promoted and facilitated by the third runway. If you focus on the UK, aviation is quickly returning to about 10% of our national emissions. And as we try to cut the emissions from other sectors, then this proportion is only set to increase. The Government’s own Climate Change Committee envisages almost no change in aviation emissions out to 2050, and possibly beyond. Such an industry, at existing levels of emissions, is completely incompatible with our Paris commitments. The third runway is just a reinforcing nail in the Parisian coffin.
My concern with what Rachel Reeves, our Chancellor, has said, is that she’s simply parroting the techno babble that dominates so much of the climate debate. You know, “sustainable aviation fuel – SAF – and electric planes” These cannot deliver on scale and in a 1.5-2°C timeline for current aviation levels, let alone any growth in the sector. They are simply used as a ruse to allow business as usual to continue. Perhaps she was so ignorant of the technology limits and timeline constraints, that she was easily taken in by the techno-nonsense promoted by the industry and its paid-up shills – though if that was the case, it is concerning, as she has access to a wealth of expertise to truly understand the issues. Or, alternatively, she was simply been dishonest and deliberately misleading in claiming aviation growth can be aligned with our climate commitments. Either way, I’m left questioning whether she is fit for office; too unthinking to understand the issues or being dishonest with the public. It may be naive – but I expect honesty and intelligence from our elected officials – and on Heathrow and aviation our Chancellor failed on at least one of these.
But of course, she is being supported by Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, and other short-term and sycophantic MPs who claim to have discovered new information that allows them to reconcile growth in a hugely high carbon sector with our climate commitments. Flying pigs perhaps … but not ‘sustainable aviation’ aligned with Paris!
Playing into their unscrupulous hands is the ruse of “net zero 2050”. This dodgy framing allows almost anything to be tolerated – as it simply hands the burden across the generations to our children. They, and their children are assumed to find ways to remove our carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in years and decades from now – so we can carry on with our lies and delusion. It is this scam that is locked into the Government’s Climate Change Committee’s UK ‘net zero 2050’ model, and indeed, many of the big international models about how fast we need to eliminate emissions. They have chosen to bequeath our children a legacy of deliberate failure, expecting future generations to deploy a planetary-scale carbon sucking machines, and all to keep today’s policies politically acceptable.
marc hudson 17:30
So does the net in net zero imply Negative Emissions Technology? See what I did there? Yeah,
Kevin Anderson 17:35
Yeah the net in net zero does imply that.
Unfortunately we use the ‘net’ term in two ways. In net zero, the net really refers to ensuring that at some point in the future whatever we are still emitting will be compensated be sucking an equivalent quantity of emissions out of the atmosphere. For example the Government’s Climate Change Committee (the CCC) assumes the UK will still emit around 30 million tonnes of fossil-fuel based CO2 in 2050 – mostly from aviation; – that’s more emissions per UK person in 2050 than the typical Kenyan emits today. To make this nonsense stack up, the CCC rely on the deployment of so-called negative emission technologies. Today this term (often shortened to NETs … hence the confusion with Net zero) just trips off our tongue as if these technologies were tried and tested at scale .
But as of today, they remain at such a small level that relative to our Paris commitments they’re little more than a unicorn story. Ok, a few very small and pilot schemes are operating, most as part of bioethanol production, but they are still capturing and storing less than one million tonnes of carbon dioxide each years, at the same time as we’re emitting around 38 billion tonnes of fossil fuel CO2, and another 3 or so billion from deforestation, agriculture, etc. Yet many ‘experts’, journalists and even some policymakers talk about NETs as if they are working at scale and are an unavoidable and major part of the future. However, in numerical reality today, they remain nothing more than a deliberate distraction from the urgent need to cut emissions now, and are certainly not a meaningful technology. Perhaps this will change … but almost two decades of enthusiastic inclusion of ‘negative emission technologies’ in models needs to be contrasted with how today NETs capture around 0.002% of all our carbon dioxide emissions – in other words, almost nothing. Set that against the four years of current global emissions before we blow through the carbon budget for 50:50 chance of not exceeding 1.5°C – if we haven’t already.
It is this untested and highly speculative future tech, at scale, that our Chancellor and a gaggle of sycophantic ministers and MPs are betting the house on – and all because of their dogmatic obsession with a failing growth growth growth model. The physics will continue, regardless of any political machinations. The climate impacts are already being felt across poorer low-emitting and climate vulnerable communities, mostly a long way from here and typically comprising people of colour. The Chancellor and others would prefer to sacrifice them, seeing their livelihoods and even their lives ripped apart, rather than make challenging decisions back in the UK – colonialism is alive and thriving in the UK parliament, and particularly on the Government’s front bench.
But let’s be clear, not only is the Government treating such communities as an annoying fly to be swatted, but they are showing similar levels of disdain for the wellbeing of our own UK children
Climate scientist Professor Kevin Anderson has said that the impacts of climate change that scientists had previously thought would only happen at higher global temperatures in fact “look set to be significantly worse at lower temperatures than previously thought.”
“some of the others such as the risk of rapid dieback in the Amazon, or indeed in the Congo, where we have very little detailed information. If some of the tipping point issues play out in the way that some analysis suggests they could significantly accelerate the rate of the impacts that we anticipate from the standard headline framing of the IPCC.
“Another major tipping point issue relates to the ongoing weakening and even potential collapse of AMOC – which in the UK some may think of as the “Gulf Stream”, but that’s just one small part of it. AMOC is a much more global driver of weather and indeed climate. It’s a thermal conveyor belt moving heat from the Southern oceans to the North, and moving the cooler waters of North back southwards…. and if climate change continues unchecked there is a very real risk that AMOC will be significantly weakened if not collapse. Much of the world, would in various serious ways be impacted, from changes in Monsoon rainfall, and hence food production, through to dire weather implications for much of Europe.
The interview covered a range of topics, and will be released . It was conducted by Dr Marc Hudson, who has interviewed Professor Anderson on several occasions over the past 15 years. Dr Hudson runs All Our Yesterdays, an “on this day” website about climate politics, technology, protest that covered events from 1661 to the present day.
The transcript of the relevant portion of the interview can be found below.
You are free (and of course encouraged) to use this material for commercial or non-commercial purposes. Please cite both the source (i.e. that the interview was conducted by Marc Hudson, and the URL of this post.
Tomorrow’s interview excerpt – is Kevin on “Team Mann” or “Team Hansen”?
TRANSCRIPT
Let’s start with developments since last we interviewed, which I think is quite a long time ago. We had the Paris Agreement, and everyone held hands and said, “We’re aiming for two degrees”. And then they were forced to say, “well, 1.5” because otherwise the poor nations weren’t going to stay on board. You, at the time, said that this was a farce, as did James Hansen, whom I trust, and we’ll talk about later. As did I, you know? So the three titans of climate climate commentary said this.
[Laughter]
Then, you know, the pandemic happened. So the COP got canceled for the first time, and then they all met in Glasgow and cried in order to “”keep 1.5 alive.” Now that was four years ago. There about and here we are with the US saying it’s going to pull out of the Paris Agreement again, with a 3.6 PPM increase in concentrations last year, which is a new record. I think so. It might be that the sinks are failing as much as
the El Nino,as well
yep. So where are we going to be gazing into your crystal ball – not with the politics, because no one can tell what the politics are going to be – where do you think we will be first with atmospheric concentrations? Do you see three PPM as kind of what we should expect as a ‘new normal’, and where will we perhaps be with impacts five years from now? The conch is being handed over.
Kevin Anderson 3:07
In terms of ppmv. What I’ve read on various scientific forums since the report came out from Richard Betts and colleagues at the UK’s Met Office just a couple of weeks ago, [BBC, Guardian] is that the increase in the amount of carbon dioxide build up in the atmosphere will likely not remain at 3ppmv per year, but will likely fall again to more typical annual levels of increase. That said, the total concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will continue its relentless rise until we stop emitting.
So whilst the annual rise will likely not be as high next year, or the year after that, there is a concern that as we continue to increase the concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, and therefore the temperature keeps rising, that some of the natural buffering will begin to be lost. Thus far, roughly half of all carbon emissions we put into the atmosphere every year are taken up by a mixture of the oceans and by the land, that is the buffering – its huge service that’s been provided by nature, but as the temperature continues to rise so that buffering may be weakened. If that happens, then more of the carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere each year will remain there and we will start to see a higher annual rise in ppmv each year – that is more rapidly rising concentrations of carbon dioxide
But at the moment, the expectation is that last year was a little bit of an anomaly because of El Nino. But I wouldn’t be too hopeful that we won’t be back up to those sorts of levels within some reasonably short period of time.
4 mins 47
So impacts Physical impacts?
Physical impact? Well, yes, physical impact, if we could isolate them so easily! The physical impacts are damning between 1.5 and two degrees centigrade. This is one of the reasons that 1.5 came out in Paris as we were starting to get a better handle on the rising scale of impacts as the temperature rises. In contrast to the simplistic expectation that policy follows evidence, for 1.5°C, it’s been since Paris, where we’ve really started to understand the difference between 1.5 and 2°C. My take from reading the work of impacts experts is that the impacts look set to be significantly worse at lower temperatures than previously thought. So what we used to think were perhaps the basket of impacts at 2°C and now more likely to occur at just 1.5°C … though this shift is not all neat and linear. Put simply, we expect to see more floods, droughts, heat waves, fires, etc … with these playing out in terms of food and water insecurity – driven in part by devasting reductions in insects/pollinators, … this may then lead to internal and external migration – all set against a potential backdrop of other tensions. In an increasingly fractious world rapidly rising climate impacts are only really set to make things worse.
In addition to this perhaps more conservative view of rising temperatures and impacts, there is increasing concern related to bigger ‘tipping point’ changes – with rapid and accelerating impacts
AMOC?
Well, I was going to come to AMOC – that is one of them, yes. I was also thinking about some of the others such as the risk of rapid dieback in the Amazon, or indeed in the Congo, where we have very little detailed information. If some of the tipping point issues play out in the way that some analysis suggests they could significantly accelerate the rate of the impacts that we anticipate from the standard headline framing of the IPCC.
Another major tipping point issue relates to the ongoing weakening and even potential collapse of AMOC – which in the UK some may think of as the “Gulf Stream”, but that’s just one small part of it. AMOC is a much more global driver of weather and indeed climate. It’s a thermal conveyor belt moving heat from the Southern oceans to the North, and moving the cooler waters of North back southwards.
marc hudson 6:32
Wait, are you saying the United Kingdom is not the center of the world?
Kevin Anderson 6:35
Well, to some people it may well be. But if you stand back and look at the planet from outer space. I think you probably would see the UK as a small full stop on the left side of Europe. As for AMOC, it is the thermal conveyor belt moving heat from the Southern oceans to the North, and moving the cooler waters of North back southwards. It’s a fundamental mechanism of the global weather system, and if climate change continues unchecked there is a very real risk that AMOC will be significantly weakened if not collapse. Much of the world, would in various serious ways be impacted, from changes in Monsoon rainfall, and hence food production, through to dire weather implications for much of Europe.
marc hudson 7:07
You used the word “dire” in another interview. Do you mean sort of
Catastrophic
Sort of Mad Max ends up looking like the Sound of Music?
Kevin Anderson 7:18
Well Mad Max in reverse … if AMOC collapses or significantly weakens, then Europe could be a lot colder.
This illustrates one of the key challenges of rapid climate change. For example, here in Europe it could get a lot warmer or perhaps, if we lose AMOC, it could get dangerously cold. But wherever in the world, a major weakening or collapse of AMOC will create hazardous instabilities. Such a rapid shift would be catastrophic for human systems and ecosystems.
Now, if you went back 10 years, I think most people say that there’s a very, very low chance of this, the collapse or major weakening of AMOC, happening. If you look at the outputs of those working on AMOC now, it’s clear that there’s a much higher chance of it occurring that we thought previously. There’s a very real chance of major changes in AMOC happening within the next few years and out towards the end of the century. In other words during the lifetime of people listening to this, or the children of those people. That is really damning.
Climate scientist Professor Kevin Anderson has said that the impacts of climate change that scientists had previously thought would only happen at higher global temperatures in fact “look set to be significantly worse at lower temperatures than previously thought
I was also thinking about some of the others such as the risk of rapid dieback in the Amazon, or indeed in the Congo, where we have very little detailed information. If some of the tipping point issues play out in the way that some analysis suggests they could significantly accelerate the rate of the impacts that we anticipate from the standard headline framing of the IPCC.
Another major tipping point issue relates to the ongoing weakening and even potential collapse of AMOC – which in the UK some may think of as the “Gulf Stream”, but that’s just one small part of it. AMOC is a much more global driver of weather and indeed climate. It’s a thermal conveyor belt moving heat from the Southern oceans to the North, and moving the cooler waters of North back southwards.
The interview covered a range of topics, and will be released . It was conducted by Dr Marc Hudson, who has interviewed Professor Anderson on several occasions over the past 15 years. Dr Hudson runs All Our Yesterdays, an “on this day” website about climate politics, technology, protest that covered events from 1661 to the present day.
The transcript of the relevant portion of the interview can be found below.
You are free (and of course encouraged) to use this material for commercial or non-commercial purposes. Please cite both the source (i.e. that the interview was conducted by Marc Hudson, and the URL of this page
Tomorrow’s blog post – is Kevin on “Team Mann” or “Team Hansen”?
Let’s start with developments since last we interviewed, which I think is quite a long time ago. We had the Paris Agreement, and everyone held hands and said, “We’re aiming for two degrees”. And then they were forced to say, “well, 1.5” because otherwise the poor nations weren’t going to stay on board. You, at the time, said that this was a farce, as did James Hansen, whom I trust, and we’ll talk about later. As did I, you know? So the three titans of climate climate commentary said this.
[Laughter]
Then, you know, the pandemic happened. So the COP got canceled for the first time, and then they all met in Glasgow and cried in order to “”keep 1.5 alive.” Now that was four years ago. There about and here we are with the US saying it’s going to pull out of the Paris Agreement again, with a 3.6 PPM increase in concentrations last year, which is a new record. I think so. It might be that the sinks are failing as much as
the El Nino,as well
yep. So where are we going to be gazing into your crystal ball – not with the politics, because no one can tell what the politics are going to be – where do you think we will be first with atmospheric concentrations? Do you see three PPM as kind of what we should expect as a ‘new normal’, and where will we perhaps be with impacts five years from now? The conch is being handed over.
Kevin Anderson 3:07
In terms of ppmv. What I’ve read on various scientific forums since the report came out from Richard Betts and colleagues at the UK’s Met Office just a couple of weeks ago, [BBC, Guardian] is that the increase in the amount of carbon dioxide build up in the atmosphere will likely not remain at 3ppmv per year, but will likely fall again to more typical annual levels of increase. That said, the total concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will continue its relentless rise until we stop emitting.
So whilst the annual rise will likely not be as high next year, or the year after that, there is a concern that as we continue to increase the concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, and therefore the temperature keeps rising, that some of the natural buffering will begin to be lost. Thus far, roughly half of all carbon emissions we put into the atmosphere every year are taken up by a mixture of the oceans and by the land, that is the buffering – its huge service that’s been provided by nature, but as the temperature continues to rise so that buffering may be weakened. If that happens, then more of the carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere each year will remain there and we will start to see a higher annual rise in ppmv each year – that is more rapidly rising concentrations of carbon dioxide
But at the moment, the expectation is that last year was a little bit of an anomaly because of El Nino. But I wouldn’t be too hopeful that we won’t be back up to those sorts of levels within some reasonably short period of time.
4 mins 47
So impacts Physical impacts?
Physical impact? Well, yes, physical impact, if we could isolate them so easily! The physical impacts are damning between 1.5 and two degrees centigrade. This is one of the reasons that 1.5 came out in Paris as we were starting to get a better handle on the rising scale of impacts as the temperature rises. In contrast to the simplistic expectation that policy follows evidence, for 1.5°C, it’s been since Paris, where we’ve really started to understand the difference between 1.5 and 2°C. My take from reading the work of impacts experts is that the impacts look set to be significantly worse at lower temperatures than previously thought. So what we used to think were perhaps the basket of impacts at 2°C and now more likely to occur at just 1.5°C … though this shift is not all neat and linear. Put simply, we expect to see more floods, droughts, heat waves, fires, etc … with these playing out in terms of food and water insecurity – driven in part by devasting reductions in insects/pollinators, … this may then lead to internal and external migration – all set against a potential backdrop of other tensions. In an increasingly fractious world rapidly rising climate impacts are only really set to make things worse.
In addition to this perhaps more conservative view of rising temperatures and impacts, there is increasing concern related to bigger ‘tipping point’ changes – with rapid and accelerating impacts
AMOC?
Well, I was going to come to AMOC – that is one of them, yes. I was also thinking about some of the others such as the risk of rapid dieback in the Amazon, or indeed in the Congo, where we have very little detailed information. If some of the tipping point issues play out in the way that some analysis suggests they could significantly accelerate the rate of the impacts that we anticipate from the standard headline framing of the IPCC.
Another major tipping point issue relates to the ongoing weakening and even potential collapse of AMOC – which in the UK some may think of as the “Gulf Stream”, but that’s just one small part of it. AMOC is a much more global driver of weather and indeed climate. It’s a thermal conveyor belt moving heat from the Southern oceans to the North, and moving the cooler waters of North back southwards.
marc hudson 6:32
Wait, are you saying the United Kingdom is not the center of the world?
Kevin Anderson 6:35
Well, to some people it may well be. But if you stand back and look at the planet from outer space. I think you probably would see the UK as a small full stop on the left side of Europe. As for AMOC, it is the thermal conveyor belt moving heat from the Southern oceans to the North, and moving the cooler waters of North back southwards. It’s a fundamental mechanism of the global weather system, and if climate change continues unchecked there is a very real risk that AMOC will be significantly weakened if not collapse. Much of the world, would in various serious ways be impacted, from changes in Monsoon rainfall, and hence food production, through to dire weather implications for much of Europe.
marc hudson 7:07
You used the word “dire” in another interview. Do you mean sort of
Catastrophic
Sort of Mad Max ends up looking like the Sound of Music?
Kevin Anderson 7:18
Well Mad Max in reverse … if AMOC collapses or significantly weakens, then Europe could be a lot colder.
This illustrates one of the key challenges of rapid climate change. For example, here in Europe it could get a lot warmer or perhaps, if we lose AMOC, it could get dangerously cold. But wherever in the world, a major weakening or collapse of AMOC will create hazardous instabilities. Such a rapid shift would be catastrophic for human systems and ecosystems.
Now, if you went back 10 years, I think most people say that there’s a very, very low chance of this, the collapse or major weakening of AMOC, happening. If you look at the outputs of those working on AMOC now, it’s clear that there’s a much higher chance of it occurring that we thought previously. There’s a very real chance of major changes in AMOC happening within the next few years and out towards the end of the century. In other words during the lifetime of people listening to this, or the children of those people. That is really damning.
The American author and activist, Bill McKibben has kindly agreed to answer a few questions from All Our Yesterdays. His 1989 book The End of Nature – about the implications of global warming – was groundbreaking, and whose activism since has included 350.org and now Third Act.
1. According to Wikipedia (!) you were born in Palo Alto and then moved to Lexington Massachusetts. There’s a question I ask almost everyone – according to some intriguing research, one thing that applies to many strong advocates of environmental action is that they spent a lot of time in “nature” in unstructured play before the age of 11. Does that apply to you?
To some degree. My father had grown up out west and was a devoted hiker, and we spent a couple of weeks each summer on vacation somewhere fairly wild. But I was a product of suburbia, and my real immersion in the natural world came later, as a young adult, when I moved to a remote part of the Adirondack mountains [You can read more about McKibben’s upbringing in his recent memoir – the Flag, The Cross and the Station Wagon]
2. Can you remember when and how you first heard about the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? (Presumably it was in the late 1970s? So I am assuming things like Gus Speth at the Carter-era Council on Environmental Quality, or Worldwatch Institute or so on).
It was in the mid-1980s–but I think it’s worth reminding ourselves that really no one had heard much about it outside of closed scientific circles until Hansen’s 1988 testimony. That’s really when the clock started ticking
3. The “End of Nature” was one of the first books to really grapple with what carbon dioxide build-up would mean for societies and people relationships with nature, beyond being an explanation of the science. When was the last time you re-read it, and what did you think?
I’ve reread pieces of it from time to time, most recently this year while writing Here Comes the Sun, which is a kind of bookend to The End of Nature. It seems to me to still be strong–obviously the work of a young man, but there’s not much I’d change. I wish I’d been wrong.
4. Your next book The Age of Missing Information tried to help people understand what I call the datasmog. That datasmog seems to have gotten much worse. You have to be 40, really, to have any memory of the world before the Internet, and 25 to remember the world before smart phones. Does that have implications for how younger people relate to the natural world, to political processes? What do older activists not understand about this change, in your opinion?
I think it’s pretty clear the world is mostly mediated now, for most people most of the time. We just stare down at the thing in our palms. And if it was providing us with intelligence and wisdom that would be one thing, but it clearly mostly is not
5. All Our Yesterdays is devoted to getting people to realise just how long the scientists have been warning and the media too. What lessons do you think have been unlearned or under-learned from the 36 years since your first piece on the topic, in December 1988.
That while it’s important to win the argument, you also have to win the fight–which is about money and power, not reason and data and evidence
6. Pivoting to “now” – there were successful campaigns to stop specific disastrous pipelines and so on, and during the Biden administration there was, along with a lot that was terrible and inadequate, some things that might give a squinting optimist cause for hope (Climate Corps.)
Well, now what?!
I keep track as best I can on my free newsletter, The Crucial Years. We’re in the midst of two great trends–the very rapid warming of the earth, and the very rapid fall in the price of clean energy. It’s hard to know which will prove stronger; we need to do all we can to make the latter force as powerful as it can be, even amidst the oil-soaked Trump presidency
7. Anything else you’d like to say. (plugs for new books, projects, groups, general thoughts)
Please save September 20 and 21 on your calendars. We’re calling that weekend SunDay and will soon announce big plans to make it a festive moment of celebration of the possibility for running the earth in far more benign ways.
[When more information about that weekend are available, AOY will add a link, and post]
Here’s something from McKibben’s
.
So in about six weeks we’re going to formally announce plans for a big global day of action—we’re calling it Sun Day. It will happen on the weekend of the autumnal equinox, September 20 and 21. It will be a celebration of the fact that we can now run this world without fossil fuels: imagine EV and e-bike parades, green lights in the window of every solar-powered home, big concerts and rallies, joyful ceremonies as new solar farms and wind turbines go on line. It’s going to happen around the world. It’s going to demand justice—above all, that we figure out how to finance this revolution around the world, so the people who need it most can take full part. And it’s going to be beautiful.
This may not look, at first glance, like ‘resistance’ or ‘opposition.’ But in fact this is precisely what the fossil fuel industry fears most: the truth that their product isn’t needed. That it’s dirty, that it’s expensive, and that there’s a better way—Big Oil’s executives know that at the cellular level, which is precisely why they spent so much money electing Trump. Solar panels are to the fossil fuel industry what water was to the Wicked Witch.
Help!
Do you have ideas (and ideally contacts) for people AOY should interview? There’s absolutely nothing automatically wrong with white middle-aged men (speaking as one), but it turns out they are only one sliver of a vibrant broad climate movement. So please, if you know people from all the other demographics who might respond positively to an interview request, let me know.
Professor Eliot Jacobson (bio here) runs climatecasino.net and is a prolific user of social media (Twitter and BlueSky) to communicate the true depths of our climate predicament. He kindly agreed to an email interview, printed in full below.
1. Do you remember when and how you first heard about “the greenhouse effect” and what your initial response was? It was in College in about 1976 when I was taking freshman physics. At the time I learned that we were about 1/2° Fahrenheit above pre-industrial with predictions of going 1° above by the turn of the century. My response at the time was that of course it was real but that it was not yet of great significance. Nevertheless, I was an environmentalist at the time and by 1977 I was attending Earth Day. It’s been on my mind ever since, especially since Reagan took office in 1981.
2. When and “why” (e.g. was there a particular impetus) did you decide to devote serious time to educating other people about climate change? I’ve always done this as an academic. I try and find things that are true and publish them for free so that everyone can see the information and do their best with it. My philosophy has always been that knowledge serves the greatest good in the public domain. Publish research in journals – free. And when I was in the casino industry, my motto was always to give it away for free. So that’s what I did in retirement when I first came upon climate data in about 2019, I just did what I always do, think about ways to present the information that sheds some new light and give it away. It was just a continuation of what I’ve always done, only the topic was new.
3. What posts/activities have you been proudest of? If you were to ask my wife her reaction to this question, she would tell you that I strongly dislike the word “pride.” I am not proud of anything. I consider that to be purely self-serving and not at all what I am after in my life. However, I do have goals. For example, one of my goals was to appear on mainstream media and give an honest opinion about the future of civilization in a way that hasn’t been said before. I’ve now been on CNN international 4 times and have been able to do just that.
4. You write “However, my intention is to continue writing about the fall of global industrial civilization and the sad times that lie ahead. I hope to educate as well as to move people towards positive action within themselves and in the world. Yes, I support action, not complacency. I don’t expect to make a difference with those who deny science. Banging my head against a wall is not an activity I find worthwhile. For those who have at least one toe in the real world, I hope what I post here makes a difference.”
What do you think have been some of the most effective positive actions over the last few years, either in the usa or globally? I have no interest in trying to maintain civilization or prolong it through green energy, solar, wind, electric vehicles, or any other mechanism that keeps civilization growing for just a few more years. At this point in the story, there is no such thing as sustainable. Humans are a cancer on this beautiful planet, and the most positive action will come when we stop ransacking it for just a few more years of growth. Positive action means doing everything we can to maintain what we can of the planet for whatever comes after humans. For me personally this means feeding critters, walking instead of using any vehicle of any type, volunteering for non-profits whose mission is consistent with this view, and sharing information to help others make decisions along the same lines.
BirthStrike is “Birthstrike is choosing to forgo having children to protect them from worsening social, economic and environmental conditions.” Here’s their answers to some questions..
a) What was the genesis (!) for the birth of Birth Strike? Was it a gradual realisation or a bolt from the blue?
The BirthStrike movement was founded in 2018 by Blythe Pepino, a British musician and activist, in response to the climate crisis and its goal was to raise awareness of the climate crisis and demand political action.
In 2020, BirthStrike for Climate disbanded and became a support group on Slack called “Grieving Parenthood in the Climate Crisis: Channeling Loss into Climate Justice.” They were not connected to antinatalism (we are), nor did they try to persuade people not to have children (we are).It was a brief movement that I have splintered off into a full-on Revolutionary strategy.
b) What sort of pushback have you had that you respect? (Life is too short for giving oxygen to idiots)
It’s not ethical to bring children into climate change, period. If there is a good argument for having children, especially under current conditions, I haven’t heard it.
c) What do you say to people who say “but my child might well be the one to come up with “The Solution?”
“Why didn’t you come up with a solution? What kind of loser forces children into existence to solve humanity’s problems instead of taking personal accountability for themself? You’re too narcissistic to adopt but too lazy to do anything with your own life, so you create another wage slave? Shame on you!”
d) What does “success” look like for BSM?
A mass movement where workers are intentionally withholding procreation to
e) How can people who want to support it get involved/support it?
Join the website mailing list or the FB group. Confront and argue with educated breeders about their narcissistic decision and poor parenting in general.
