Environmentalism 2 GRN

created 3/14

merri ok

SEE 2025 PJT 4 26 ~ GND Dozens of Project 2025 proposals appear to be included in the Trump administration's newest budget | Media Matters for America

920 neglected on new content, as it's sort of abstract, but i map to it as target often

note even LEED a target by GOP

see tag and original node

text lost?

opponents often based on LCV % stat (20%)

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SEE 2025 PJT 4 26 ~ GND Dozens of Project 2025 proposals appear to be included in the Trump administration's newest budget | Media Matters for America

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growth is god term life, capitalism More, up, so de-growth is anathema demon term

Meta AI Excuses 'Degrowth Communism' as Tool to Fight Climate Change - Print Page | Newsbusters

Print Page | Newsbusters

Climate Depot Founder Marc Morano told MRC Free Speech America that he had to “give Meta AI credit. It has a great tone that sounds very unbiased ...

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9 26 DN

The Trump administration is moving to gut a key provision of the Endangered Species Act, according to an internal memo obtained by The New York Times. Under the memo’s reinterpretation, only intentionally harming an animal would break the law. Accidental killings or injuries due to economic activity would not. Andrew Mergen, a law professor at Harvard University, said: “What the administration is proposing to do is take all of the force out of what we have all understood the act to mean: Don’t kill endangered species. What they seem to be saying in this document is, it doesn’t matter if you killed an endangered species if you didn’t mean to.” Twenty-one attorneys general have filed a lawsuit seeking to block implementation of the new Endangered Species Act rules.

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fulcrum legit aug 2024

Project 2025: Department of Interior

Becvar is co-publisher ofThe Fulcrumand executive director of theBridge Alliance Education Fund, the parent organization of The Fulcrum.*

As the political landscape heats up, a critical document known as Project 2025 has surfaced, outlining sweeping proposals for the Department of the Interior, among many other government departments and agencies. Spearheaded by former Trump administration officials and conservative leaders, this comprehensive plan calls for a radical restructuring of the department’s mission and operations.

The document's vision constitutes a significant departure from current policies, emphasizing energy dominance and deregulation, raising questions about the future of public lands and environmental protections.

Former President Donald Trump’s remarks about being a “ dictator on the first day only ” of a potential second term have sparked considerable debate. Despite his claims of unfamiliarity with Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation’s announcement that it was ending that work, the goals articulated in the document align closely with his stated priorities. Trump’s promise to “close the border and drill, drill, drill” mirrors Project 2025’s objectives, suggesting a coordinated effort to reshape the DOI from day one of a new conservative administration.

The chapter on the Department of the Interior, authored primarily by William Perry Pendley, former acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, sets a combative tone. Pendley’s tenure at BLM was marked by aggressive moves to reduce protections for public lands and wildlife, leading to a demoralized agency described by insiders as a “ghost ship.” His role in Project 2025 signals a continuation of these policies, aiming to dismantle what he and his colleagues view as an overreaching administrative state.

Departmental overhaul

The Department of the Interior encompasses nine bureaus, each with distinct missions ranging from managing national parks to overseeing energy resources. Project 2025 proposes several administrative and structural changes. One of the first major proposals is to relocate BLM headquarters back to the American West from Washington, D.C. This move, combined with the implementation of Trump's Schedule F proposal aimed at increasing accountability in hiring and firing federal employees, suggests a significant shift in the DOI's operational dynamics.

Furthermore, placing all BLM law enforcement officers in an exclusively law enforcement chain of command signals a more rigid approach to land management enforcement.

Energy production and resource extraction

The energy section of the chapter was written by Kathleen Sgamma of the Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas industry group; Dan Kish of the Institute for Energy Research, a think tank long skeptical of human-caused climate change; and Katie Tubb of the Heritage Foundation. The authors set the tone of the section, titled “Restoring American Energy Dominance,” with this passage:

“Given the dire adverse national impact of Biden’s war on fossil fuels, no other initiative is as important for the DOI under a conservative President than the restoration of the department’s historic role managing the nation’s vast storehouse of hydrocarbons, much of which is yet to be discovered.”

The energy section calls for rolling back Biden-era executive orders and reinstating Trump-era policies that favor oil and gas development. Specific proposals include expanding onshore and offshore oil and gas lease sales, restarting the federal coal leasing program, and reversing protections for areas like the White River National Forest in Colorado.

This aggressive push toward fossil fuel development raises environmental and economic concerns. Critics argue that such policies could undermine efforts to combat climate change and protect public lands from overexploitation.

Regulatory and policy reforms

Project 2025 also targets regulatory frameworks like the National Environmental Policy Act, seeking to streamline environmental reviews and permitting processes while eliminating climate reviews for federally funded projects. The document proposes reinstating Trump-era limitations on the Endangered Species Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which could lead to reduced protections for vulnerable species.

Further, the project aims to revoke President Joe Biden’s 30-by-30 plan, which aims to conserve 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by 2030, and seeks the repeal of the Antiquities Act of 1906, potentially opening up national monuments to commercial activities.

Implications for Indigenous lands

The document outlines plans to facilitate fossil fuel and mineral development on Indian lands and overhaul the Bureau of Indian Education. These proposals, combined with securing the nation's borders to protect tribal lands, suggest a significant shift in how the federal government interacts with Native American tribes.

A critical examination

Project 2025 presents a vision for the Department of the Interior that aligns closely with the priorities of the Trump administration. While Project 2025 presents a bold vision for the department, its potential impacts on public lands, environmental protections and Indigenous rights demand critical scrutiny. Proponents argue that these changes are necessary for economic growth and national security, but the emphasis on deregulation and resource extraction raises concerns about long-term sustainability and the balance between economic development and conservation. As voters and policymakers consider these proposals, it is essential to weigh the long-term consequences for America's natural heritage and the principles of conservation that have guided the DOI for over a century.

The sweeping changes proposed in Project 2025 underscore a broader ideological battle over the role of government in managing natural resources and protecting the environment. As these plans come under public and political scrutiny, the stakes for America's public lands and natural heritage could not be higher. The next administration's approach to these issues will shape the nation's environmental and energy policies for years to come.

More articles aboutProject 2025

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Project 2025: Department of Interior

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OMFG

AN 525

On April 9, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14270, blandly titled “Zero-Based Regulatory Budgeting to Unleash American Energy.” Behind that bureaucratic name is a sweeping directive: Dismantle a century of environmental protections.

Every regulation related to the environment, natural resources, or energy, whether it safeguards air, water, species, or public lands, must be rewritten to serve polluters or vanish by default.

Some will claim this is just about efficiency. But no standard review process sets a mass expiration date for protections, regardless of science, impact, or legal mandate. This is not streamlining. It is a countdown to erasure.

While courts deliberate, rules will expire. Enforcement will be suspended. Polluters will act as if the rules are already gone.

The deadline is September 30, 2026. Any rule not revised and reauthorized by then will expire automatically.

IFrame Content

What will remain will not be protection. It will not be science. It will not be law. It will be a hollow shell, stripped of enforcement and public purpose.

This is not reform. It is demolition. It is sabotage by executive order.

They Said It Couldn’t Happen

To everyone who said, “They’d never go that far,” they just did. And the collapse has already begun.

With Executive Order 14270, Donald Trump issued not a policy revision but a regulatory kill order.

The EO mandates that all regulations under energy-related authority—especially those administered by agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Departments of Interior and Energy—must be reviewed and either revised to align with the administration’s priorities or be automatically terminated by September 30, 2026. While for some agencies the EO does not name specific laws, many foundational protections fall within these agencies’ regulatory domains.

Some may argue this is simply a regulatory reset or a call for modernization. But this is not a review guided by science, need, or public interest. It is a mandate that requires rules to serve industry or disappear by default. There is no neutral path. There is no room for delay. If an agency fails to revise and reauthorize a rule in time, it expires. No matter how vital it is.

Legal experts and environmental attorneys have described similar regulatory strategies by the previous Trump administration as calculated attempts to dismantle environmental protections from within.

Even the rules that survive review will be rewritten, stripped of science and purpose, then repackaged as hollow compliance.

This is not a bureaucratic obstacle. It is a regulatory kill switch.

What that means in practice:

Endangered Species Act—gone.
Migratory Bird Treaty Act—gone.
Marine Mammal Protection Act—gone.
Anadromous Fish Conservation Act—under threat.
Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act—gone.

These aren’t just under review. They are all under attack.

Breadth and Scope of the Loss

The laws everyone recognizes, such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, are just the beginning.

Beneath them lie hundreds of foundational rules that safeguard public health, climate resilience, environmental justice, and disaster readiness. Under Executive Order 14270, they are all at risk.

Supporters may claim the order only targets outdated or burdensome regulations. But the text applies broadly and indiscriminately. It sets no exceptions for essential rules, no protections for high-impact safeguards, and no criteria for public benefit. Unless these rules are rewritten to meet the new standards and reauthorized by September 30, 2026, they will expire. Along with them goes the regulatory backbone of modern environmental protection.

This is not theoretical. These laws will fall unless actively rescued.

Key protections on the chopping block:

Air, Water, and Public Health

• Clean Air Act

• Clean Water Act

• Safe Drinking Water Act

• Toxic Substances Control Act

• Superfund cleanup authority

• Mercury and Air Toxics Standards

Land and Resource Protection

• Resource Conservation and Recovery Act

• Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act

• Wilderness Act

• Antiquities Act

• Wild and Scenic Rivers Act

• Federal Land Policy and Management Act

Energy and Climate

• Energy Policy Act of 2005

• Greenhouse gas endangerment finding

• Energy Star Program

• Oil Pollution Act of 1990

Each of these took years, sometimes decades, of organizing, science, and compromise to create. They were not handed down by elites. They were won by people who refused to accept poisoned air, burning rivers, and dead coastlines.

Now they are being erased in a single executive order. Not one by one. All at once. This is not a rollback. It is erasure.

The Hidden Collapse

Executive Order 14270 does not just target major environmental laws. It dismantles the infrastructure that makes those laws real.

Supporters may argue that the laws remain untouched. But behind every statute, like the Clean Water Act or Endangered Species Act, are thousands of rules, monitoring systems, enforcement protocols, and technical standards. Without them, laws are just words on paper.

Now, all of that must be rewritten to serve polluters. If not, it disappears permanently.

Thousands of environmental regulations administered by agencies such as the EPA and the Department of the Interior could be subject to review and potential termination under Executive Order 14270.

Here is what that collapse looks like:

Public Health Protections

• Air monitoring rules vanish. No alerts for lead, benzene, or ozone.

• Radiation limits are lifted. Safety near nuclear sites erodes.

• Vehicle emissions testing ends. Smog returns to U.S. cities.

Water, Waste, and Pollution

• Stormwater runoff restrictions disappear. Waste floods rivers.

• Hazardous waste transport rules vanish. Disposal turns chaotic.

• Drilling oversight ends. Protected lands are opened to industry.

Climate and Disaster Response

• Energy efficiency rules are revoked. Electric bills rise.

• Fire mitigation programs are defunded. Wildfires grow deadlier.

• Fisheries protections vanish. Coastal economies are destabilized.

This is not just about forests or fish. It is about tap water, asthma medication, grocery prices, and cancer risks.

Betsy Southerland, former EPA director of science and technology for water, has warned that deregulatory approaches of this kind could lead to systemic breakdowns in public health protections.

This order does not trim fat. It guts the public architecture that keeps America safe, functional, and future-ready.

The Economic and Societal Cost

The damage from Executive Order 14270 will not stop with wildlife or wilderness. It will hammer the economy; threaten public health; and unravel industries that depend on clean air, safe water, and protected landscapes.

Some defenders will argue that environmental regulations stifle business, raise costs, or limit innovation. But environmental law in America was not born from ideology. It was forged in crisis, created to prevent economic collapse, mass illness, and ecological ruin. Many of these statutes were passed with overwhelming bipartisan support because Americans knew the cost of doing nothing was greater.

The Clean Air Act passed under former President Richard Nixon. The 1972 Clean Water Act was called “the most comprehensive and expensive environmental legislation in the nation’s history.” These laws did not just protect nature. They helped build the modern economy.

Many of the protections now targeted form the backbone of multibillion-dollar industries:

Wildlife and National Identity

• The Endangered Species Act saved the bald eagle, peregrine falcon, and California condor.

• The Migratory Bird Treaty Act protects ecosystems and supports rural economies across the country.

• The Marine Mammal Protection Act helped build a coastal tourism sector that generates billions.

• Fish conservation laws sustain sport fishing, a major driver in many regional economies.

Outdoor Economies

• Outdoor recreation supports $887 billion in consumer spending and 7.6 million jobs.

• Hiking, hunting, wildlife viewing, and camping all depend on healthy ecosystems.

• Without habitat protections, what is Yellowstone without wolves, or the coast without whales?

The law may speak of species and land. But the stakes are money, jobs, health, and identity.

This executive order guts the systems that protect them all.

The Human Toll and Environmental Injustice

The collapse will not hit everyone equally. It never does.

When environmental protections vanish, the first to suffer are the poor, the marginalized, and the politically powerless.

Some may argue that environmental burdens are shared evenly across society. But the data and history say otherwise. Environmental harm follows lines of poverty, race, and neglect. It hits those with the fewest resources, the least political power, and the highest exposure to toxins.

Without the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act, vulnerable communities will lose safeguards against dumping, runoff, and lead contamination. New water crises will erupt in towns already on the edge.

Without the Clean Air Act, toxic smog will return to cities, especially in low-income and minority neighborhoods shaped by redlining and industrial zoning.

Without the National Environmental Policy Act, communities will have no voice in what gets built near their homes: pipelines, refineries, highways, landfills.

Without Superfund enforcement, the most toxic sites in America will be left to rot. Poison will seep into soil, water, and lives.

This is not theory. It is already happening:

In Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, petrochemical plants poison Black neighborhoods. Cancer rates there are 50 times the national average.

• In West Virginia, abandoned coal towns face toxic water and respiratory illness.

• In Alaska and the Southwest, Indigenous communities still live beside Cold War-era uranium waste.

• Along the Pacific coast, salmon vanish and fishing economies unravel.

These are not isolated stories. They are previews.

The burden will fall hardest on those without lawyers, lobbyists, or local health departments—families already excluded from public hearings, ignored by regulators, and left behind by politics.

Executive Order 14270 turns temporary harm into permanent abandonment.

This is not just inequality. It is environmental apartheid..

Regulatory Collapse Is Guaranteed

This is not hypothetical. It is structural failure, built into the design.

Executive Order 14270 sets an impossible mandate: Every environmental regulation must be reviewed, revised, and reauthorized by September 30, 2026. If not, it will expire automatically.

Some will claim that with enough willpower and coordination, agencies can meet the deadline. But that is a myth. There are not enough staff. There is not enough time. And there is no intention to make it work. The order was built to break the system, not to improve it.

Environmental watchdogs and legal analysts suggest that only a small percentage of rules could realistically be reviewed and reissued before the deadline.

This is not deregulation. It is planned demolition.

Here is what that guarantees:

Legal protections for ecosystems will collapse.

• Clean air and water rules will disappear.

• Ecotourism and outdoor recreation will suffer.

• Climate policy will be paralyzed.

• Inequality will worsen as states scramble to fill the void.

• Courts will be overwhelmed by lawsuits and confusion.

• Irreversible environmental damage will be locked in for generations.

Even if a future administration tries to reverse the damage, it could take years or even decades to rebuild what was destroyed.

Some things will not survive that long: species, coastlines, forests, ecosystems.

This is not a policy failure. It is policy used as a weapon.

The extinction of environmental protections is not a side effect. It is the goal.

Can This EO Actually Be Enforced?

Technically, yes. Executive Order 14270 can be enforced. But legally and practically, it is a minefield for all concerned.

Agencies can initiate rule reviews and assign expiration dates, especially when leadership supports the administration’s anti-regulatory agenda. But that does not make it lawful.

Under the Administrative Procedure Act, agencies must follow strict procedures before repealing or replacing rules. They must issue public notices, allow comment periods, hold hearings, and provide justifications. They cannot simply say, “The president told us to.”

Some defenders may argue the president has broad authority to manage agencies. But the law is clear: Regulatory repeal must follow legal process. Many of the protections targeted by this order were enacted by Congress. Agencies do not have the authority to let them quietly expire or gut them without breaking the law.

That is why lawsuits are already being filed. Legal challenges will come from environmental groups, state attorneys general, and public interest organizations.

But here is the catch: the damage will not wait.

While courts deliberate, rules will expire. Enforcement will be suspended. Polluters will act as if the rules are already gone.

Even if a judge rules against the administration, the harm will be done:

Toxic waste released.

• Forests cleared.

• Communities exposed.

And if the White House refuses to comply? There is no enforcement arm of the Administrative Procedure Act. No agency exists to compel federal departments to enforce their own rules.

The only option is to sue, repeatedly, rule by rule, across jurisdictions.

As one Earthjustice attorney put it, “The law doesn’t enforce itself. And this administration knows it.”

Litigation takes money, time, expertise, and legal standing. These are resources many frontline communities do not have.

Environmental lawyers and watchdogs saw this coming. They are already planning for fights across dozens of fronts: air quality, pipelines, species protection, data suppression, and executive action.

But how many lawsuits will it take? 10? 50? 100?

Each one will be slow. Expensive. Uncertain.

This is not incompetence. It is sabotage, carried out with full intent.

And What About the Planet

This executive order is not just a domestic disaster.It is a climate change nuclear bomb.

Executive Order 14270 erases the foundation of nearly every federal climate policy:

It nullifies the greenhouse gas endangerment finding, the legal trigger for regulating carbon emissions.

• It dismantles efficiency standards for appliances, buildings, and vehicles.

• It undermines the Energy Star Program and other clean energy incentives.

• It guts methane rules, fuel economy standards, and oil spill safeguards.

Some will argue that climate progress can continue without federal policy, through state action or private innovation. But without national coordination, incentives, and legal authority, that progress will slow, fragmented, and ultimately fall short. Federal policy drives investment, enforces accountability, and sets the global tone.

With these tools gone, the United States cannot meet its climate goals. Not nationally. Not globally.

We will miss our Paris agreement targets. We will exceed the 1.5°C warming threshold. And we will pull other nations backward with us.

The damage is not just about emissions. It is about lost leadership. Lost credibility. And a green light to polluters everywhere.

This is not a pause. It is a reversal.

Climate collapse is no longer a distant danger. It is a scheduled event, signed into law by the president.

The Heart of It

This executive order does not repeal environmental laws. It kills the systems that make those laws work.

The Clean Air Act will still exist. But if EPA regulations expire, there will be no enforcement.

The Endangered Species Act will remain on paper. But without specific protections and triggers, no species will be protected.

This is the method: Dismantle implementation. Remove enforcement. Let the law collapse from the inside out.

It is a bureaucratic kill switch, designed to erase a century of environmental progress without ever repealing a statute.

Legal on paper. Lethal in practice.

Once the rules disappear, the laws become theater:

No enforcement.

• No funding.

• No consequences.

They will still be on the books, but they will no longer matter.

Empty laws. Empty air. Empty rivers. Empty promises.

How We Fight, and Why We Must

There is no silver-bullet lawsuit. No single agency. No shortcut.

This executive order will not be stopped by one clever court challenge. It will take dozens, perhaps hundreds, of battles—rule by rule, agency by agency, ecosystem by ecosystem.

Some will ask, why not file one big lawsuit to stop it all? Because Executive Order 14270 does not repeal a single law. It sets a countdown clock for thousands of regulations to vanish unless reauthorized. That makes it nearly lawsuit-proof by design. Each rule must be challenged individually, and only after harm has occurred. Courts cannot force agencies to act unless Congress explicitly mandates it. And even then, litigation takes time. By the time a ruling arrives, the damage may already be done. The law does not enforce itself. And this executive order exploits that fact.

There is no cavalry. Only us.

So we fight, everywhere:

File lawsuits, fast and often: Legal action is the first and last line of defense. Every expired rule must be challenged. Every unlawful revision must be contested. Rapid-response legal teams must be ready to sue the EPA, Department of the Interior, and Department of Energy across multiple jurisdictions. Delay means destruction.
Support legal and watchdog organizations: Groups like Earthjustice, Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Center for Biological Diversity are already fighting. But they are underfunded and overwhelmed. They need staff, experts, and resources. Every donation matters. Every volunteer strengthens the line.
Pressure elected officials at every level: Demand public hearings. Demand oversight. Call your governor. Write your city council. Make it politically toxic to support this executive order.
Act locally: States and cities can pass their own clean air and water laws. They can fund conservation, restrict drilling, and sue federal agencies. Join local groups. Attend zoning meetings. Run for water boards and planning commissions. Build resistance into local government.
Refuse to normalize this: Speak out. Disrupt. Document. This is not politics as usual. Say so. Organize protests. Submit op-eds. Flood comment periods. Call out silence. Expose polluters. Make the truth visible.
Demand media coverage: Executive Order 14270 should be a daily headline. If it is not, make it one. Share stories. Elevate frontline voices. Hold media outlets accountable. If national media fails, local and independent voices must rise.

This is a regulatory blitz.And resistance must be relentless.

The strategy is simple: flood the system, fracture it, and exhaust the opposition.

While we scramble to save species, lands, and laws, they bulldoze everything else.

This is not a warning. It is a dispatch from the front lines.

They are not debating whether to dismantle environmental protections. They are dismantling them, right now.

If you ever said, “They would never go that far,” They just did.

This is not just bad policy. It is a deliberate attempt to cripple the government’s ability to protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, the climate we depend on, and the living world we love.

It is not a mistake. It is the plan.

The question is no longer what they will do. The question is what we will do about it.

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3 22

gop troll caucus LCV avg = 5%

an 4 22

former Ohio State Treasurer Josh Mandel and his allies suffered a major disappointment when former President Donald Trump endorsed “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance in Ohio’s 2022 GOP U.S. Senate primary. Mandel and Vance have been fighting an ugly, mudslinging battle to show who is the most MAGA, and Mandel views Vance as a pretender. But Mandel hasn’t given up on trying to “own the liberals.” And on April 22, Mandel — a climate change denier — decided to thumb his nose at environmentalists by posting, “Let’s celebrate Earth Day by building more pipelines.”

This wasn’t the first time Mandel has made a ridiculous comment about the environment. On Valentine’ Day, he tweeted, “Climate change isn’t a threat to our national security, Joe Biden’s open borders are.”

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rep jim banks

indiana, District 3Phone: 202-225-4436

2020 Score Lifetime Score

5% 2%

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what fresh hell?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-epa-chiefs-vision-would-create-an-apocalyptic-devastated-planet-critics-warn/

environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler is under fire for a Thursday speech laying out a vision for the agency that critics warn would unleash untold environmental devastation should it come to pass.

Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, delivered the remarks at the Nixon Library in southern California to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the EPA. The agency was established under the Nixon administration.

Wheeler also framed as positive steps the administration’s environmental protection rollbacks and attacks on science. The EPA chief said that “members of former administrations and progressives in Congress have elevated single issue advocacy—in many cases focused just on climate change—to virtue-signal to foreign capitals, over the interests of communities within their own country.”

“Communities that deal with the worst pollution in this country—and tend to be low-income and minority—face multiple environmental problems that need solving,” Wheeler said. He suggested President Donald Trump’s “opportunity zones” plan—recognized by expertsas a giveaway to the rich—as a remedy to environmental injustice.

wheeler declared it “very disappointing to see governors on the East Coast, such as [New York] Governor Cuomo, unilaterally block pipelines that would take natural gas from Pennsylvania to New York and New England.”

“We helped President Trump successfully implement the new NEPA regulations with the goal of reviewing federal permits within two years,” Wheeler said of the administration’s attack on the bedrock environmental law.

He also touted “a proposed rule that would remove onerous and expensive regulation of gene-edited plant protectants” and the administration’s “science transparency rules,” referring to what its critics call a “secret science rule” to limit scientific evidence the EPA will consider in its work.

Mustafa Santiago Ali, a former EPA official who helped found the agency’s environmental justice office, took issue with Wheeler’s plans for environmental justice.

“Every one of the actions the Trump administration has taken, either by weakening or rolling back basic air and water protections, has put #environmentaljustice communities in greater harm,” he tweeted Thursday. “No one believes a Trump second term would value Black and Brown lives!” he added.

Brett Hartl, government affairs director at conservation group Center for Biological Diversity, rebuffed Wheeler’s claimthat the Trump administration has been a champion of EPA’s mission.

“Wheeler and the Trump administration have done grave and lasting damage to the EPA by elevating polluters and their profits above all else, and no slick speech can change that fact,” said Hartl. He further accused Wheeler of being “ignorant of the immense environmental progress made over the last 50 years because Congress and President Nixon recognized when they established the EPA that no one has a right to pollute our air, water, or land.”

“If Wheeler’s vision becomes real in the decades ahead,” warned Hartl, “our children and grandchildren would inherit nothing less than an apocalyptic, devastated planet.”

Hartl continued: “Instead of following the proud bipartisan traditions of the EPA, Wheeler has decimated protections for our nations wetlands and rivers, rolled back protections for toxic pollutants spewed into the air, rubberstamped pesticides that cause brain damage in children, and utterly ignored the climate crisis. He is a horror-show, through and through.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/earth-day-under-trump-nearly-50-years-later-nixons-environmental-movement-is-under-attack/

Current talk of the Green New Deal or the GOP alternative Green Real Deal notwithstanding, the political contrast between the first Earth Day in 1970 and this year’s Earth Day is stark. While some still debate Nixon’s environmental record, there is no ambiguity in president Trump’s. He is sounding the retreat, not leading the charge.

When the first Earth Day was proclaimed in April of 1970, Nixon was working on the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, and before the year was over, Nixon would sign the landmark Clean Air Act of 1970 into law. The Trump administration’s environmental outlook, however, is the mirror image opposite of Nixon’s.

Last month, the UN’s sixth Global Environment Outlook report, or GEO-6 for short, warned that environmental degradation is “endangering the ecological foundations of society,” and called for “bold, urgent, sustainable and inclusive action.”

At the White House, GEO-6 was dead on arrival, as the Trump administration was busy unveiling a budget proposal that would slash funds for fighting climate change and other environmental hazards.

GEO-6 identified “population, economic development, and climate change” as the principal “drivers” of environmental degradation. But instead of hitting the brake on those three drivers, the White House is hitting the accelerator.

World population, currently 7.7 billion, is projected to rise to 8.6 billion by 2030 and nearly 10 billion by mid-century. Noting that “long-term sustainability is incompatible with growing populations,” the GEO-6 report urges expanding access to contraception in the developing world, where 97 percent of the projected growth is expected to occur. But the president’s budget would cut U.S. support for international family planning assistance by more than half.

Gender inequality is a principal driver of high birth rates and rapid population growth in developing countries. Recognizing this, GEO-6 urges support for foreign assistance programs that advance the health and education of girls. But the president’s budget would cut State Department and USAID funding by 24 percent, almost certainly requiring major cuts in funding for girls’ health and education.

The GEO-6 report stresses the need to “decouple growth from negative environmental impacts.” But the Trump administration has slashed dozens of environmental regulations affecting air, land, and water resources, and it now wants to cut EPA funding by 31 percent.GEO-6 warns anthropogenic climate change, already well under way, will “amplify existing risks and create new risks for natural and human systems,” and it argues that world leaders must commit to bringing net greenhouse gases emissions to zero by mid-century. But Trump’s repudiation of the Paris Climate Accord and his deregulation of coal-fired plants are aimed at burning more coal.

Some world leaders are publicly supportive of environmental objectives, but fail to walk the walk. President Trump, on the other hand, doesn’t even talk the talk. His blithe dismissals of climate change and other environmental threats set him apart, starkly and tragically, from other world leaders.

So far, Congress has rejected Trump’s call for draconian cuts in EPA funding, but it has done nothing to stop Trump’s derailing of Obama administration plans for reining in greenhouse gases, including the phase out of coal-fired power plants.

We urgently need to change course. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned in releasing the GEO-6 report, we need “a significant shift in trajectory.” That will likely require change on the scale of the proposed Green New Deal, an approach that was rejected last month by Republicans and a handful of Democrats in the Senate.

There are, however, reasons for hope. A small but growing number of Republicans in Congress are acknowledging the reality of anthropogenic climate change, including Rep. Matt Gaetz, (FL-01). He recently unveiled his Green Real Deal proposal, and while it stops far short of what needs to be done, it’s a sign of a warming political climate. After Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg made an emotional appeal to the UN in December, student-led climate change protests have proliferated. A new global movement may be in the making.

The way forward on climate change does not require economic hardship. Just as the U.S. prospered while slashing automobile emissions and setting wastewater standards, we can also prosper while spurring swift reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by phasing in a substantial and economically efficient carbon tax. At the same time, we can slow population growth by improving access to family planning services at home and abroad. Doing these things today would improve the odds of brighter Earth Days ahead.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Robert Walker is the president of the Population Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit committed to ensuring that humanity is able to live in harmony with nature.

hhmn ru w s

NICOLE SEYMOUR – There is bad news about the global climate every day. We’re burning more fossil fuels instead of less, the predictions are more dire than scientists thought, and the impacts are shattering: deadly wildfires, super-storms and unseasonal hurricanes, horrendous heat waves.

Glaciers are melting, whole species are disappearing, and there are seemingly insurmountable political obstacles to doing anything about it. We have resorted to turning on one another and laying blame for using too much plastic, or too much water, or eating meat, and so on.

It appears as though our human brains are not quite capable of tackling such a massive existential crisis. Showcasing the doom and gloom doesn’t seem to work. In fact it may be having the opposite effect, causing us to retreat.

Now, a new book aims to convince us that art, creativity, and even irreverence are necessary to move forward on climate change and that environmentalists need to shed their reputation of being killjoys.

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https://www.alternet.org/heres-dire-climate-change-report-trump-white-house-didnt-want-you-see

[another art'l on blk friday release AN]

in a move environmentalists and journalists denounced as a blatant effort to bury facts that conflict with the president's denialism and pro-fossil fuel agenda, the Trump administration used the Friday after Thanksgiving to quietly release Volume II of the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), which warned "Earth's climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization" and concluded that "greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are the only factors that can account" for planet-threatening warming.

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—Wenonah Hauter, Food & Water Watch

"The decision to release this damning report when families are beginning to celebrate the holidays and newsrooms are short-staffed is a brazen attempt to bury the truth from the public that we must act now to move off fossil fuels and stabilize the climate," Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, said in a statement.

"Releasing this report when no one is looking, tweeting his annual nonsense about global warming and cold weather, and announcing that he'll use the upcoming U.N. climate meetings as a fossil fuel tradeshow, Trump is doubling down on his climate denial for the holidays—as many families are still reeling from unnatural climate disasters across the country," Hauter continued. "The science is way past in on climate change... We must prepare for our climate future in spite of Trump."

From deadly wildfires to catastrophic hurricanes and other extreme weather events, the "impacts of global climate change are already being felt in the United States and are projected to intensify in the future," notes the congressionally mandated report—the first of its kind released since President Donald Trump took office in 2017.

Authored by officials from over a dozen federal agencies, the report warns that in the absence of aggressive action to quickly slash carbon emissions, the climate crisis will continue to have increasingly devastating effects on the environment, wildlife, and human health.

"It is very likely that some impacts, such as the effects of ice sheet disintegration on sea level rise and coastal development, will be irreversible for many thousands of years, and others, such as species extinction, will be permanent," the report warns.

Using the hashtag #ClimateFriday, environmentalists worked to overcome the Trump administration's attempt to hide the NCA4 amid the chaos of the holidays by highlighting the report's findings and stressing its dire implications if ambitious and global climate action is not taken.

"This report makes it clear that climate change is not some problem in the distant future," Brenda Ekwurzel, the director of climate science at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), said in a statement. "It's happening right now in every part of the country."

The Washington Post summarized the report's key findings with regard to major regions of the U.S.:

Already, western mountain ranges are retaining much less snow throughout the year, threatening water supplies below them. Coral reefs in the Caribbean, Hawaii, Florida, and the U.S.'s Pacific territories are experiencing severe bleaching events. Wildfires are devouring ever larger areas during longer fire seasons. And the country's sole Arctic state, Alaska, is seeing a staggering rate of warming that has utterly upended its ecosystems, from once ice-clogged coastlines to increasingly thawing permafrost tundras.

The federal report comes as climate activists and progressives like Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) are pushing for the Democratic Party to combat the Trump administration's fossil fuel agenda with ambitious climate action centered around a Green New Deal.

"It's not enough to think it's 'important.' We must make it urgent," Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter. "That's why we need a Select Committee on a Green New Deal, and why fossil fuel-funded officials shouldn’t be writing climate change policy."

"Climate change is spawning more extreme weather, causing irreparable harm to communities, costing billions of dollars a year, and leading to countless deaths. We can stop climate destruction, but only if we act quickly to end the use of fossil fuels and transition to 100 percent clean renewable energy," concluded Hauter of Food & Water Watch. "This transition is not only possible, but necessary for the health and prosperity of people and the planet."

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https://www.alternet.org/capitalisms-final-solution-nothing-less-complete-ecological-collapse

no lnx

Capitalism’s Final Solution Is Nothing Less than Complete Ecological Collapse

This is the nightmare logic of scarcity capitalism.

By Ed Simon / History News Network October 12, 2018, 1:58 AM GMT

Four centuries ago, somebody starving in the drought afflicted Elbe region in what is today the Czech Republic, anonymously chiseled onto the stone of the receding river bank a warning. Here, along the river where one day American and Soviet troops would meet on their duel approach to Berlin, a graffito made by unknown hand marks 1616 as the oldest year recorded on one particular “Hunger Stone”, and on that surface there is a memento mori which reads “Wenn du mich sicht, dann weine.” This summer, among the hottest recorded, and the Elbe once again receded to the point where observers could read that ominous missive: “If you see me, weep.”

Something to tattoo on the brain with the Monday release of the United Nations Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change. Authored by 91 scientists, representing 40 countries and based on over 6,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies, the conclusions of the commission are horrifying. According to Coral Davenport at the New York Times the climatologists discovered that if “greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit” by 2040, radically earlier than had been thought, meaning that most readers of this article will bear witness to “inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty.”

A child born today will have just turned the drinking age in a world where close to all of the coral reefs will be extinct and where massive storms like Hurricane Florence or Hurricane Maria, which has nearly destroyed a Puerto Rico abandoned by the government of the United States, will be common. Where the social, cultural, and economic affects of climate change will be recorded not on revealed hunger stones, but in pandemics, wars, famines, and genocides exacerbated by the effects of higher temperatures. Brandon Miller and Jay Croft at CNN write that we’ll see in starker detail the horrific results of industrial man-made global warming earlier than in two decades, with the report concluding that humanity has “only till 2030 to stem catastrophic climate change.”

Alterations to human behavior which might hasten the worst effects of climate change are technically possible, though the study’s authors doubt such change is politically feasible, as it would require direct action on the part of the industrial economies of the world, something with “no documented historic precedent.” Myles Allen of Oxford University explained that “we need to reverse emissions trends and turn the world economy on a dime” if we’re to stave off an ecological apocalypse which we now understand isn’t centuries in the future, but rather mere decades, if not years.

We already see the effects in the increasing ferocity of storms, the droughts that mark not just the developing world, but increasingly North America and Europe, and in the wildfires, which have burnt their way across the west. As the world’s temperature rises we see an equivalent political slow burn, nations increasingly moving toward the delusional reactionary nationalisms as a means of punishing refugee populations often affected either directly by climate change or by the civil strife made possible by it, for as Mark Fishcetti describes the Syrian civil war in Scientific American, “Human-induced drying in many societies can push tensions over a threshold that provokes violent conflict” – a reality that if the Trump administration pretends to deny, has long been acknowledged by the Pentagon.

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Climate change has resulted in civilizational catastrophe before. Historian John Kelly notes in The Great Mortality, his book on the Black Death of fourteenth-century Europe, that pestilence was furthered by “climactic and ecological instability,” the bubonic plague encouraged by weakened immune systems brought on by drought and famine. Polymathic anthropologist Jared Diamond has considered how climate change brought collapse in cultures as varied as the Anasazi and Maya or the medieval Norse settlements of Greenland, writing that the “collapse of industrial civilization… could assume various forms, such as the worldwide spread of diseases or else of wars, triggered ultimately by scarcity of environmental resources.” Arguably the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia and the Indus River Valley were felled by climate change, and one wonders if the peasants of Sumer were as despondent as that German speaker on the Elbe who asked future generations to weep, or if they were rather as myopic as we are, saying of such changes that “This too shall pass” while what expires is civilization itself?

Humans are unable to imagine the actual passing of their way of life. A sense that history changes has been novel for most cultures, even apocalyptic minded ones, as medieval paintings which depict Christ as a Flemish peasant or ancient Judeans as Florentine nobleman can attest. The idea that the past was radically different from the present and that tomorrow will be distant from today is an innovation of Renaissance humanism and then modernity. Rather, it’s always been easier to imagine that your world will literally pass into oblivion than that the values your civilization holds dear might disappear (or need to disappear). During those lean times on the Indus River, on the Euphrates, or the Elbe, women and men may have dreamt of the end of days, but they couldn’t have quite dreamt of us. The myths that structured their world precluded it.

Lest we be too arrogant, ours is not so different a perspective, for as the literary theorist Frederic Jameson famously noted, it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Similar for the hungry penitent in the temple to all the gods of Sumer, or to the starving medieval pilgrim who could envision the return of Christ, but not that he might look different from those who populated his world. Limited perspective is the wage of any totalizing ideology, and all eras are structured by such paradigms. As a priest in Moloch’s temple or a monk in a medieval monastery had their religions, so have we ours, but the cracked gods of our world differ in one important respect – only capitalism’s Mammon has the capability of bringing about the apocalypse.

Only capitalism was able to inaugurate a new geological epoch in the Anthropocene; unique is our dominant ideology’s status in being able to obliterate all of humanity. IPCC Co-Chair Debra Roberts said that the report is a “line in the sand and what it says to our species is that this is the moment and we must act now,” but what should disturb us most is the authors’ accurate alarm at the lack of political will to avert catastrophe. In the United States the coal, oil, and gas industries’ obfuscate, high percentages of Americans believe the lie that climate change is a hoax (while record heat affects the Midwest this October), and the Trump administration trashes the Paris Accords.

Noam Chomsky has said that the Republican “party is dedicated to racing as rapidly as possible to destruction of organized human life. There is no historical precedent for such a stand,” with modern fascism directly correlated to the increasing chaos of climate change itself.Roy Scranton in We’re Doomed. Now What? writes that as the “gap between the future we’re entering and the future we once imagined grows ever wider, nihilism takes root in the shadow of our fear…. [Y]ou can see it in the pull to nationalism, sectarianism, war, and racial hatred. We see it in the election of Donald Trump.”

What must be reckoned with is how this situation was directly engendered by industrial capitalism, and in particular by the partisans of its most extreme ideological manifestations of libertarianism and neoliberalism who have provided cover for policies that have enflamed the crisis.Past centuries were circumscribed by their worldviews, be it medieval Catholicism, or classical Roman Augustan paganism, or the varied gods of Sumer in ancient Mesopotamia. Even the most visionary of individual perspectives must be limited by a culture’s dominant way of thinking, but while our adherence to the market is as all-encompassing as a Babylonian’s loyalty to Marduk, it is only our dark religion which actually threatens Armageddon.

Unfettered, unregulated, capricious, vampiric capitalism has brought us to the brink, and the mass inability to comprehend this fact evidences how ingrained said ideology is. Our blinders are such that human tragedy that is attributable directly to our economic system is often naturalized as simply being “The way that things are,” thus precluding even the possibility of different ways of arranging our world.Death due to differing ideologies is always interpreted as conscious and preventable, but capitalist tragedy is simply understood as how life operates.

Consideration of those who have died because of capitalism (and those who will, which may yet include us all) doesn’t require a cover-up. So inured are we to seeing capitalism as its own imposed ideology that we fail to understand its death toll. Franco-Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorovwrote that “remembrance of our own woes prevents us from seeing the suffering of others,” and while true, the converse is also accurate. While admitting that capitalism provided for unprecedented class mobility and technological innovation, an honest consideration of its death toll in any hypothetical Black Book of Capitalism would have to include not just the obvious fatalities of those who died in industrial accidents or whose lives were shortened by their labor, but indeed the victims of colonialism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and of fascismo corporativo, which is simply capitalism driven to its horrifying end

Invisibility of such atrocities through normalization is a species of what the philosopher Louis Althusser termed “interpellation,” that is to say that we’re all molded subjects of the ideology that governs our world so that we mostly hold uncritical assumptions about capitalism’s normativity. Writer William T. Vollmann addresses future generations in his new tome on climate change Carbon Ideologies, explaining that “We all lived for money, and that is what we died for.” As 2040 approaches our ignorance is a form of collective suicide.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post writes that future “Historians will look in absolute astonishment” that not only did our governments and corporate elite fail to halt climate change, but that our policy makers “actually pushed in the wrong direction.” That’s assuming that there will even be any historians left after the climate change horseman of pestilence, famine, war, and death gallop across the scorched and burning world, their riders named “Deregulation,” “Bottom Line,” “Market,” and “Profit.”

An August environmental impact statement prepared by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concedes that far from being a “Chinese hoax” as Trump has alleged, the average temperature will rise seven degrees by century’s end. Quite a wide gulf between what the Trump administration knows to be true and what his deluded believers will swallow. Juliet Eilperin, Brady Dennis, and Chris Mooney at the Washington Post write that the Trump “administration did not offer this dire forecast … as part of an effort to combat climate change,” for their “analysis assumes the planet’s fate is already sealed.” Why prevent collapse when Trump concludes that there is still so much money to be made in not averting disaster?

This is the nightmare logic of scarcity capitalism, the macabre calculus which is content to let millions of people starve in the third world and that will ultimately exterminate refugees who dare to escape a parched landscape, all so that the economic status quo can be maintained before the process kills us all. The puritanism of corporate eco-individualism which configures environmental protection as simply a matter of driving a Prius or taking short showers is moral contrition or personal branding rather than policy, a quasi-theological sacrifice before the altar of the dying Earth. What’s actually required is a massive, international, eco-socialist mobilization of governments and industries that are responsible for this calamity. Because right now capitalism’s final solution is nothing less than complete ecological collapse. In his 1888 autobiographical Ecce Homo, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche eerily predicted that the 20th century would witness “wars as have never happened on earth.” With chaos brought about by the scarcity resulting from climate change, we may reevaluate how prescient Nietzsche was about the last century, realizing that he was perhaps actually off by a hundred years.

Ed Simon is the editor-at-large for The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books. A frequent contributor at several sites, his collection America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post Religion will be released by Zero Books in November 2018.

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What Will It Really Take to Avoid Collapse?

By Jeremy Lent

For a moment, the most important news in the entire world flashed across the media like a shooting star in the night sky. Then it was gone. Last month, more than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries issued a dire warningto humanity. Because of our overconsumption of the world's resources, they declared, we are facing "widespread misery and catastrophic biodiversity loss." They warned that time is running out: "Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory."

This is not the first such notice. Twenty-five years ago, in 1992, 1,700 scientists (including the majority of living Nobel laureates) sent a similarly worded warning to governmental leaders around the world. In ringing tones, they called for a recognition of the Earth's fragility and a new ethic arising from the realization that "we all have but one lifeboat."

This second warning contains a series of charts showing how utterly the world's leaders ignored what they were told 25 years earlier. Whether it's CO2 emissions, temperature change, ocean dead zones, freshwater resources, vertebrate species or total forest cover, the grim charts virtually all point in the same dismal direction, indicating continued momentum toward doomsday. The chart for marine catch shows something even scarier: In 1996, the catch peaked at 130 million tonnes and in spite of massively increased industrial fishing, it's been declining ever since—a harbinger of the kind of overshoot that unsustainable exploitation threatens across the board.

Charts from "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice"

Along with their warning, the scientists list a dozen or so examples of the kind of actions that could turn humanity's trajectory around. These include indisputably necessary strategies such as halting the conversion of native habitats into farmland; restoring and rewilding ecologies; phasing out fossil fuel subsidies; and promoting dietary shifts toward plant-based foods. With the future of humanity at stake, why aren't we already doing these things? What will it really take for our civilization to change course and save itself from destruction?

Ignoring Climate Breakdown

We can begin to answer that simply by looking at the media's reception to this warning. With 15,000 scientists—including Jane Goodall, E. O. Wilson and James Hansen—declaring a potential catastrophe at hand, you might think this would make headlines everywhere. Think again. While it led to a few short articles in select publications around the world, with the one commendable exception of CNN, it was virtually ignored by American mainstream media.

This should hardly come as a surprise. In fact, global climate breakdown—perhaps the greatest existential threat faced by our civilization—is barely considered newsworthy on American television. In 2016, the hottest year on record, when the Paris agreement was signed and presidential candidates held widely differing opinions on climate change, the entire year's climate coverage by all network news services in the U.S. amounted to less than an hour: a paltry 50 minutes, representing a 66 percent drop from the previous year.

How could that be? One reason is that, as a result of decades of massive industry consolidation, the U.S. media is controlled by a few large corporations. Like all shareholder-owned companies, their overriding concern is making profits, in this case from advertising dollars. The news services, once considered a hallowed responsibility administered for the public good, have been reduced to just another profit center—and it was decided that climate change news isn't good for advertising revenue, especially since a big chunk of that comes from the fossil fuel and agribusiness companies responsible for much of the problem.

The Largest Ponzi Scheme in History

Which leads us to some of the underlying structural changes that need to occur if human civilization is to avoid collapse. The fundamental problem is brutally simple: Our world system is based on the premise of perpetual growth in consumption, which puts it on a collision course with the natural world. Either the global system has to be restructured, or we are headed for a catastrophe of immense proportions that has never been experienced in human history. However, the transnational corporations largely responsible for driving this trajectory are structurally designed to prevent the global changes that need to take place.

Something that is only dimly understood outside financial circles is that the vast bulk of the wealth enjoyed by the global elite is based on a fabrication: a belief in the future growth in earnings that corporations will deliver. For example, the current P/E ratio of the S&P; 500 is about 23, which means that investors are valuing companies at 23 times their earnings for this year. Another way of looking at it is that less than 5 percent of the wealth enjoyed by investors relates to current activity; the rest is based on the dream of future growth.

Historically, investors have been richly rewarded for this dream. The world's economic output is roughly 20 times greater than it was in 1950, and market valuations have increased accordingly. But this is the same growth that is driving our civilization to collapse. Today's market values are based on a belief that the world's economic output will triple from its current level by 2060. That implies three times as much pillaging of the world's resources than the rate that has led to the scientists' dire warning to humanity. Something has to give.

Like any Ponzi scheme, this global growth frenzy is based on maintaining the illusion for as long as possible. Once it becomes clear that this rate of growth is truly unsustainable, the whole house of cards will come tumbling down. We saw in the 2008 financial meltdown a relatively tame dress rehearsal for what a full-scale financial collapse would look like.

This is what the global power brokers don't want anyone to think about. It's ultimately why the media obsesseswith Donald Trump's latest tweets rather than the devastation caused by climate breakdown-induced hurricanes. Like passengers moving deckchairs on the Titanic, much of the world's population has been hypnotized by a daily onslaught of celebrity spats and political feuds—anything to avoid the realization that we are all heading for collapse in order to keep the affluent in luxury. It is a testament to their success so far that, in the words of Slavoj Žižek, it is "easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."

Imagining the End of Capitalism

However, the only thing that will truly avert collapse will be a radical restructuring of the economic system that is driving us ever more rapidly to that precipice. This will only come about when enough of us are ready to jettison the consumer values that pervasive mainstream culture foists on us. In their place, we need to find other sources for meaning in our lives: growing the quality of our experiences rather than our consumption, building our communities together and reconnecting with the natural world.

On that basis, we'll be better equipped to join in the struggle to save humanity—and the rest of the Earth—from the plundering envisaged by the perpetual growth frenzy of global corporate capitalism. There are plenty of alternative paths available to us—we just don't hear about them because they never get the media's attention. Most Americans, for example, are completely unaware that the little country of Costa Rica, with a GDP per capita less than one-fifth of the U.S., boasts a higher average life expectancy and scores far higher in levels of wellbeing—while producing 99 percent of its electricity from renewable sources.

There is valuable work being done around the world in visualizing a future based on different principles than the current Ponzi scheme. Well-developed plans to avert climate breakdown include a state-by-state and nation-by-nation pathway to reach 100 percent renewable energy by 2050, and a Climate Mobilization Victory Plan to restructure the U.S. economy in a manner similar to what FDR accomplished after Pearl Harbor.

There are radically different ways for a society to function effectively that could apply to nations around the world if given half a chance. A flourishing future might involve more cooperative ventures, protection and expansion of the commons, and enhanced global governance with strict penalties for those who destroy ecological wellbeing. Collapse isn't the only future in store for humanity—it's merely the one we're headed for unless and until we change course. Since the mainstream media isn't going to get the word out, it has to be up to each of us who cares about the future of the human race. So, let's get to it.

Jeremy Lent is author of "The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning," which investigates how different cultures have made sense of the universe and how their underlying values have changed the course of history. He is founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering a sustainable worldview.