Ben's Blog

The Paris Climate Agreement is a suicide pact.

We’ve been fighting climate collapse for over 30 years now. Maybe it is time to admit defeat. Despite all our efforts we have completely and utterly failed to reduce our emissions by 1 single gram! In fact, since 1990 our emissions have skyrocketed by 60%. We have spewed out more emissions in the last 30 years than all of the rest of history put together. Well done team!

We can’t just blame the polluters. Fossil fuels are selling as fast as they can be extracted because there is an insatiable demand for them. We are fuelling that demand. You can’t condemn drug dealers whilst demanding they sell you more drugs!

IT’S THE ECONOMY STUPID! *¹

It is time you were told the truth. There is no transition to renewable energy! The reason the Australian government continues to groom and enable the mining, selling and burning of our fossil fuels is because they know there is no transition. Since 1990 renewable energy has increased 1000 fold, but its share of global energy use barely moved. Meanwhile, global emissions have risen 10% every single year since then, with the notable exception of 2020. How can that be?

The problem is economic growth. The mantra of the modern world!

Since 1990 the economy has increased a staggering 2 &1/2 fold.

Renewable energy cannot keep up with that insatiable demand, let alone make a dint in fossil fuel use. We are chasing our tails, and we will never catch up.

All the fossil fuel producers in the world know this.

All the bankers know this.

All the governments know this.

The only people that don’t know this are the mug punters.(that’s us)

So I will explain it to you. It is not sophisticated mathematics.

It is simple arithmetic. It is not secret knowledge, all the figures are freely available at ‘The World in Data.’

Global Energy Use 2023

Fossil fuels 83%

Renewables 17%

The global economy is $100 trillion or 100 billion, billion dollars!

Economic growth is about 4% per anum on average.

So, if the economy is 100 trillion this year, next year it will be 104.

An increase of 4%

Just to break even, clean energy must replace 4% of our fossil fuel energy. If clean energy generates 17% of global energy this year, next year it must generate 20%, so clean energy production must go up by 18% because it is only 17% of our global energy consumption.

Are you getting your head around this mind-boggling array of data?

It gets worse! To reach zero by 2050, we must also reduce our emissions by at least 4% every single year from now until then.*²

So clean energy must replace yet another 4% of fossil fuel energy on top of the first 4%.

that means another 18% jump in clean energy production in just one single year.

So clean energy production must increase by 18% + 18%,  just to keep our target in sight. That makes 36% doesn’t it?

Last year, after a herculean effort, green energy production increased an unprecedented 10%, leaving  a shortfall of 26%. So that 26% must be added on to this year’s target, bringing it up to 62%. A massive jump in production!

If we fall short again this year, and that is a ‘la-down-misère,’ *³  next year we must produce a further 26%, bringing our target up to 88%. Every year our impossible goal gets even more impossible.

The expression ‘pushing sit uphill with a pointy stick’ comes to mind.

Is there anybody out there who believes this is even remotely possible? If there is, lock them up in the lunatic asylum!

Then of course, we must take in some other salient factors.

Clean energy replaces coal in the electricity supply, that is the low hanging fruit. But electricity is only about 40% of our energy consumption. There is also gas and oil. Both of those are much harder to replace, and no one is even talking about replacing them. Gas is now our fastest growing source of emissions.

Then there is concrete and agriculture and tree clearing and soil degradation AND all the new emissions created by the positive feed-back loops of climate change itself. These will increase every year as we pass the tipping points, and they will increase exponentially.

On the up side, we have halved our emissions intensity since 1990, from 700gms per dollar, to 350grams per dollar. That is a massive reduction. Well done team! But alas, at the same time our actual emissions have increased a massive 60%. You are all fired!

So as you can see, there is only one way out of this predicament, down! We must reduce the size of the economy until it matches our output of clean energy. At the same time we must ween ourselves off almost everything that causes emissions. No carbon offsets, no ‘net emissions’, that is a scam, just plain Zero Emissions! At the same time we must plant a shit-load of trees*⁴, and do absolutely everything we can possibly think of to suck green house gasses out of the sky.

So how can we make this happen?  Do not despair, I have a plan!

First we must tell the entire world the truth, and hope they listen.

Then we must convince every government in the world to turn around ‘that mighty ship of state’ and concentrate all their energies on reducing the economy instead of increasing it, a herculean task. Another daunting task. Some might say an impossible task, me included.

We must accept the sad fact that climate collapse, followed by the collapse of civilization, is inevitable.*⁵ The very first nation that manages to reduce  economic growth, will go bankrupt. That is how the system works. We are trapped in a system that cannot function unless it is growing bigger and bigger all the time – the strategy of the Cancer cell.   A system that is no longer fit-for-purpose. A system that is leading to the downfall of civilization as we know it. The system that is causing the problem cannot solve the problem at the same time it is causing it. We all know this deep down inside, but we are hamstrung by mass inertia on a global scale. We are all suffering from “Life is Beautiful’ Syndrome.*⁶ So we take the cool-aid and shuffle meekly towards mass suicide, with out so much as a whimper, like Jews to Auswitch!*⁷

                                                                                Ben Laycock 11/11/23

*1 “It’s the economy, stupid” is a phrase that was coined by James Carville in 1992. Carville was a strategist in Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign against incumbent George Bush senior. His phrase was directed at the campaign’s workers and intended as one of three messages for them to focus on. Ironically 1992 was also the year of the very first gabfest on climate, the Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero. If Bill Clinton had of gone to that gathering and said those very same words, “It’s the economy, stupid!” we might not be starring down the barrel of climate collapse today, but he did not.

*2 We have managed to reduce our emissions by the required 4% only once this century, in 2020, at the cost of over 3 million covid deaths and 100 million people plunged back into extreme poverty. There has to be a better way.

 *3 An open or lay down misère is a 500 bid where  the player is so sure of losing every trick that they undertake to do so with their cards placed face-up on the table. Consequently, ‘lay down misère’ is Australian gambling slang for an absolute certainty.

*4 Trees don’t just soak up CO², they cool the earth at the same time, by creating shade and evaporation, which also helps make micro-climates that bring rain. Trees are cool!

*5  But it is still vitally important to do everything we can to reduce global heating so that it does not become runaway global heating. We must keep our global temperature low enough to avoid melting the permafrost.

Since 1750 we have pumped 1.5 trillion (1.5 billion, billion) tons of CO2 into the sky. (The U.S. has contributed 1/4 of that)

If the permafrost melts, another 1.5trillion tons will be released into the sky, increasing global temperatures by around 8 degrees. Making the earth as hot as it was 55million years ago. Unfit for human habitation.

https://www.intelligentliving.co/rapidly-thawing-permafrost-could-double-greenhouse-gas-emissions/

*6 ‘Life is Beautiful’ is a film where a father and child are sent to Auchwitz, but right up to the vvery last moment the father convinces his child they are off to the circus.

*7 Not including Mordecai Anielewicz and the fearless resistance fighters of the Warsaw ghetto. We could do with a few more of them. 

Ben Laycock  11/11/23

Further reading… Gem Bendall–Break Together  

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Don’t Drink the Kool-aid!