USA's "huge stimulus programme", "go big" (Today News, 23.6.21) fueling inflation and fueling the runaway greenhouse effect for earth to follow venus

USA's "huge stimulus programme", "go big" (Radio 4 'Today' News, 23.6.21) fueling inflation and fueling the runaway greenhouse effect for earth to follow venus

Kate Raworth, like many others, has highlighted how economic growth has brought and is worsening the climate, ecological, nature emergency.   In brief, economic growth = living infinitely in a finite world and living unnaturally in a natural world.  Very foolish!  Economic growth has brought so many untold blessings with prosperity for the majority.  However, it is a mixed blessing and we are seeing the downside, the curse of human-induced climate catastrophe unfolding, while we all carry on regardless with business as usual.

Paul and Simon Chief Exec, Paul Robinson (probinson@worcestershire.gov.uk) and the WCC leader, Cllr Simon Geraghty (SGeraghty@worcestershire.gov.uk) are part of the greater West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) that has just seen its fifth anniversary, last week.  The CA is continuing with everything that is bringing us down.  An official £1.3 billion is being spent right now by our leaders on all the wrong priorities: with Metro "bus on rails" trams replacing buses on roads and, replacing trains.  70 years of turning our railways into roads and buildings; now, with the 40th anniversary of Metro, 40 years of roads being turned into railways and railways into tramlines in the Black Country and Birmingham!  This includes our own Worcester, Kiddi, Dudley, Walsall, Lichfield, Derby principal, mainline railway being broken up into heavy rail (HR), light rail Metro (LR), very light rail (VLR) test track and the ultra-light rail, Stourbridge Shuttle extension proposal - all, would you believe, on a mainline railway between Derby and Devon via Dudley!!

Midlands Connect and the Black Country Chamber of Commerce have NOT withdrawn their support for the 87 Km, 8 lane, Western Orbital Motorway to complete the Midlands motorway box.  They started a campaign three or four years ago, according to the 'Express and Star' report I saw at the time.  Yet more of nature turned into concrete, brick and tarmac when we humans are part of nature!

All this work and much more is great for economic growth but disastrous for the future of humanity and all life on earth.  I would like us to question them about these matters and, of course, those of local concern to the Wyre Forest area - housing, open space and active (fossil fuel-free or more human-powered) travel on public rights of way (not just tarmac!).

Skinny Africa; bloated West

A new version of the skewed map of the world
Why economic growth is a dead end, yet it is what almost everyone votes for!  Our 'Christian', white man's slave trade and the European empires scrambling for Africa in the 19th century resulted in Africa being stripped of their people and resources to make us bloated and the Africans as thin as a rake.  Yet, not a hint of guilt or sorrow from us lot.  Just self congratulation at how well we did with coming up with wonderful Wilberforce!

Uncomfortable home truths?

APHORISMS galore:

It is widely considered, it is universal, orthodox thinking, that we can go on expanding our numbers and activities on a planet that is not expanding.

We are living infinitely on a finite planet.

We are living unnaturally on a natural planet.

We are living for economic growth and population growth.

We are living beyond our means, our limits and our boundaries.

We have a live it up today and to hell with tomorrow mentality.

We are living today to come a cropper tomorrow!

What we take today, we don't have tomorrow.

We are liquidising our assets; living off capital as if its income.

Expansion economics from a diminishing capital resource base!

Economic growth is ecological retraction as the chickens eventually come home to roost.

Wealth creation is actually poverty creation.

There's no material gain without pain - eventually!

What goes up must come down - never ending wealth from economic and population growth must be living in cloud cuckoo land.  It must, eventually, lead to economic bust and population crash.

What takes an age for us, goes in the twinkling of an eye in the geological time scale of the earth.

Never before has the poor planet seen such an unnatural explosion of greenhouse gases, as the lot of us burn up the fossil fuels in 300 years that the earth took 300 million years to form.  Thus, the Lady must be right with this:

"We are embarked on a massive experiment with the very life support systems of the earth itself."  Rt Hon Margaret Thatcher (the most honourable thing she ever said!)

Scrappage scheme for planet Earth!

We can scrap, use and waste resources until we are blue in the face. We humans are the king pins on this planet and we can do what the hell we like because we are in control. We can rip through our remaining oil and gas and coal reserves, regardless 'cos we must have unlimited growth and expansion to allow for our love of living way beyond our means, our limits and our boundaries.

We are entitled to have as many babies as we like and to consume just as much as we like, with no holds barred. How dare these greens tell us that living infinitely on a finite planet is not a good idea. Of course we are not part of nature or part of the web of life, as these greens tell us. We are the top dogs on the planet and what we say goes. We can live unnaturally on a natural earth. Our science and technology and new inventions will save us from our excesses.

Carry on regardless, scrapping perfectly good cars. Waste is what we do. Unstoppable growth of people and the products they want is what we do and nothing can possibly stop us. Over-consumption and over-population does not matter and, anyway, is none of my responsibility. I'm going to continue to live it up today and to hell with tomorrow. Scrap the lot of 'em - ten years or ten months old - build in obsolescence and, build bigger, newer and faster - and, ever more humans on planet earth, for good measure. It won't run out of precious resources or habitable land - will it?!

We're not disrupting life-support systems. Are we?

We're not scrapping life on earth. Are we? Only cars, after all.

Open letter on living it up for ever and a day!

WARNING! This is my green propaganda, green economics coming out as I
munch my lunch!

Thanks for the thoughts, Colin, from Newsnight.

I have not heard that speculators and the work of OPEC are responsible for
the 12p/litre price difference between petrol and diesel. I have heard
that it is due to the greater demand for diesel than petrol and greater
difficulties in processing diesel compared with petrol. As regards oil in
general, experts on Radio 4 news programmes have mentioned speculators as
being partly to blame, as well as supply/demand problems.

Far safer to take home the message of rising prices that the more we
conserve the stuff through keeping to speed limits, cycling and
driving/flying less, the more we will keep prices down and preserve the
planet's wealth.

Far more sensible to assume that we may be approaching peak oil plateau and
take the green message that money and energy do not grow on trees, more
seriously. The problem is that none of us want to change our lifestyles
and patterns of behaviour until we are forced to! I certainly don't want
to give up my Scottish car camping holidays in Scotland in April and May
every year. But, as you so rightly put it at Llanrug, fuel rationing must
be introduced for the good of all of us and future generations.

I am now writing about fuel rationing being more important than congestion
charging and, rationing as an essential part of making all life last that
little bit longer.

All the best

Tim

PS The first law of capitalism and of conventional economic wisdom is that
we must rip into all finite resources as if they are infinite.
The second law is that you live only for the present and pay no regard over
our future prospects.
The third law is that you don't cost in anything like the full or complete
or external costs of our exploitation of our one off cornucopia of
resources.

It is a live now pay later economics where the message of ever rising
prices for food, fuel and everything else has no bearing on our over
consumption, over population, over reaching of ourselves. We just carry on
over doing it without any acknowledgement that the complacent and careless, "You've never
had it so good" bonanza may have something to do with it!

Our leaders and the people are all in denial, I think!

Necessity is the mother of invention

One member of the group at my 60th birthday weekend (photos opposite), came up with this saying to explain that we have nothing to worry about over our limited reserves of fossil fuels. Science and technology will come to our rescue as oil, gas and coal finally become too expensive to be worth exploiting. There will be hydrogen and nuclear to save us. But, hydrogen has to be made and that uses energy. Nuclear fission uses finite resources, too so cannot be the ultimate solution - unless, after all these decades of trying, nuclear fusion is perfected.

It seems that oil is more important as a chemical building block for our five hundred everyday objects around the home and office and in town and country. It is needed for even carpets! I don't think we should be burning, very wastefully, the oil - or gas, for that matter - to turn into electricity. For every $100 barrel of oil that is turned into electricity, two barrels go up the chimney of the power station! Even oil man and Texan, George W Bush admits that Western societies are addicted to oil but does nothing to even slow the rising and prodigious burning of the stuff. The President might well have said, "We need oil to survive as a nation, just like fish need water for their survival."

Our one off, never to be repeated, geological inheritance that took 300 million years to form is being foolishly blown in the Western and Christian and white man's thoughtless dash to blow the lot in just 300 years! What is the matter with the white races with their many centuries of the Judeo-Christian traditions and beliefs at their heart that see them as the peak of creation with the right to exploit this inheritance? This bonanza has gone to our heads and we've been unable to cope with this cornucopia of riches. These nations, alone, are responsible. Now, many other countries are wanting to do the same to even more quickly exhaust the remaining reserves!

The double whammy is that as we all burn the oil and gas and burn down the tropical rain forests, we also screw up, good and proper the climates of the world - to nicely further worsen our long term prospects! And, then, there are going to be 50% more of us on this tiny planet to do yet more of this stupid burning and consuming. The lot of us are the horror species not the human species on this earth, I think!

And, to think that the discovery of first coal (in about 1750) and then oil, followed by gas is an invention! Not even we humans in our arrogance and supreme intelligence can invent something so versatile, invaluable and precious as oil, gas and coal. How can we humans invent more oil when it took Nature 300 million years? Yet, on that evening, I alone was appalled by the complacency that was shown in using that saying to lull everyone into a false sense of security over our prodigality and greed in running through the black gold in the twinkling of an eye - relative to the geological time scale.

Our misguided faith in science and technology to bale us out of our folly and our reliance on the 'solution' of economic expansion from a diminishing capital resource base is like the 'Any Questions' questioner who said, "Our behaviour is like the smoker who keeps smoking confident in the knowledge there will be a cure for cancer - to allow him to keep smoking!"

Inertia, apathy, in denial ...

... and carry on regardless with your fingers crossed!

"Humankind is having a negative impact on almost every aspect of the earth's environment and is heading towards catastrophe unless urgent action is taken. The Global Environment Outlook has been compiled by hundreds of scientists from around the world. It concludes we are living way beyond our environmental means and if this continues the survival of humankind could be in doubt." Radio 4, 6pm News, 25 October 2007

Has anyone done anything like my quality of life improvements, below to acknowledge the above realities?

1. Driving a smaller car than you could afford or, limiting yourself to one car per couple or family or, making the motor last longer by repair rather than replacing.
2. Reducing your hypermobility when it comes to both work and holidays. My holidays are in a 12 year old car that doubles up as my superb hotel on wheels. When it's my five star hotel it is zero fossil fuel use 'cos the central heating comes from my layers of clothing and down filled sleeping bag!
3. For work, when I thought for so long that, as an essential car user, I could not possibly do without the motor, I have proved that my HPV (human powered vehicle) is just as good, with little or no loss of productivity - and 20p/mile danger money, on official council council business, from all you cycle blind drivers!
4. Banning the tumble drier and using the fresh air or the warmth of the house.
5. Giving up the dish washer for manual washing up - that I have now returned to!
6. Walking or cycling short distances instead of jumping in the carbon polluter.
7. Only boiling the water needed at any one time.
8. Reducing the time when the shower is burning up the energy and the planet's wealth.
9. Spending less - especially at Christmas!
10. Forgoing electric heating, for gas; forget the plane and use the train.
11. Condoms to cut your family size and to cut catastrophic climate change, instead of blaming immigration! 3m growth in UK population with zero migration or, 10m growth with immigration over 25 years, said the statisticians this week. Source: Evan Davis on 'Today', 26 Oct 2007
12. Back all that up by refusing to vote for the political parties that still peddle their live it up now and pay later economics; and, that so love engaging in war fighting on foreign (was Communist but is now Muslim) soil.

Here, we have eleven 'do something' actions; and, one occasional vote (or abstention) to change the politicians and to be part of the solution. Best not to wait for the politicians to act but, to be your own politician and to act yourself!

From alpha to omega for the meaning of life!

Live more simply so that future generations - and poorer nations - can simply live!

Live so that others may live (all religious faiths and political parties could try non-violence as an alternative to their present aggression).

Try leaving the planet in as good a heart as when you were born into it.

Retrench your lifestyle to postpone ecocide!

Economic and population growth means ecological disaster is, in effect, what the UN report, at the top, has stated this week.