Questioning and Skepticism

Trees are without a doubt the best carbon capture technology in the world. When they perform photosynthesis, they pull carbon dioxide out of the air, bind it up in sugar, and release oxygen. Trees use sugar to build wood, branches, and roots. Wood is an incredible carbon sink because it is mostly made of carbon (about 50%), it lasts for years as a standing tree, and takes years to break down after the tree dies. While trees mainly store carbon, they do release some carbon, such as when their leaves decompose, or their roots burn sugar to capture nutrients and water. Forests are an important carbon sink, since both trees and soils are able to store large amounts of carbon for a long time. However, carbon management is not just about deciding which trees to cut, but also where harvesting and planting occurs on the landscape. The Boreal Forest in Canada is the largest intact forest left on Earth.

The carbon that is sequestered in forests comes in many forms. For example, forest soils contain plant roots, leaf litter, and other dissolved organic material. The amount of carbon stored in forest soils is variable, and how much carbon soil can sequester is dependent on many local factors like geology, soil type, and vegetation. In some forests, like in Canada by the tundra, the soil holds more carbon than the trees, but in other forests, like the rainforest, the soil holds relatively little carbon and the trees store more carbon. This is because some soil types, like clay soils, can bind up a large amount of carbon, whereas sandy soils are not able to bind much carbon. Soils with more organic material (bits of wood, decaying leaves, or dead creatures) can store more carbon because organic material easily binds loose carbon molecules and the organic material itself is stored as carbon.

Forests in temperate climates, such as North America, offer an ideal middle-of-the-road solution. The trees grow relatively quickly and many species are long-lived. A recent NASA study estimates that tropical forests annually absorb 1.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide out of a total global absorption of 2.5 billion metric tons. Researchers say that this is more than the amount absorbed by the boreal forest in Canada, Siberia and other northern regions. Forests capture and store enormous amounts of carbon, preventing it from escaping into the atmosphere and intensifying climate change. The Boreal Forest in Canada alone holds about 12 percent of the world’s land-based carbon reserves. Most forests store carbon in living plants, but the boreal in Canada holds up to 95 percent of its carbon riches in soil, peatlands and permafrost – features that can accumulate and hold carbon over the course of thousands of years.¹

Why is the Boreal Forest so important? This Boreal Forest is the largest intact forest left on Earth. It holds 25% of the world’s wetlands. It captures massive amounts of carbon, preventing the equivalent of up to 36 years’ worth of global carbon emissions from escaping into the atmosphere and intensifying climate change. Canada’s boreal forest (over 270 million hectares) stores carbon, purifies the air and water, and regulates the climate. Because a large portion of the world’s boreal zone lies in Canada (28% or 552 million hectares), thus this country’s boreal forest affects the health of the environment worldwide. Most of the carbon in the boreal forest is stored in the soil – in the deep layer of organic material that has fallen off of trees and plants over thousands of years. The Boreal Forest serves as a giant shield in the fight against climate change.

About 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity is on lands managed by Indigenous Peoples. A University of British Columbia study looked at land and species data from Canada, Australia and Brazil and found that the number of birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles were highest on lands managed by Indigenous communities. In Canada, Indigenous Nations are already leading the biggest, most ambitious plans for sustaining healthy lands and waters. Three Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCA) created in the Northwest Territories since 2018 total over 50,000 sq km combined – about the size of Costa Rica. Scores of Indigenous Nations are in the process of creating additional IPCAs. Taken together, these proposed areas could conserve over 500,000 sq km. Harvesting is considered sustainable when decisions are based on silvicultural knowledge and follow a long-term management plan.

Ensuring Canada’s forests are a force for climate good is going to require a comprehensive, sophisticated, and sustained approach to fires and forest management. In spite of this vast potential, however, Canada’s forests have actually been a net source of carbon emissions for the better part of two decades, releasing into the air more carbon than they absorb, according to Natural Resources Canada data. In 2018, emissions from wildfires in B.C. alone were three times greater than the entire province’s annual carbon output. Currently, most fire management strategies do not include a focus on limiting carbon emissions from burning forests, which is by far the largest source of carbon emissions from Canadian forests in recent years. With hotter, drier summers increasingly the norm as climate change accelerates, minimizing as much as possible the number and severity of boreal forest fires becomes increasingly important, and will mean investing more in monitoring and fire suppression to limit fire size.

The amount of carbon released into the atmosphere from harvesting activity is small when compared to the amount released by forest fires through combustion and insect infestations that kill trees and cause premature decomposition. On average, areas affected by forest fires, for example, are 2.5 times larger than areas harvested, according to NRCan, representing a significant amount of carbon that goes up in smoke. The good news is that improved forest management can be a cost-effective way to meet climate targets. For example, a fire management regime in boreal forests that reduces the size of fires and their emissions could cost as little as $12 US per ton of carbon output avoided, according to Carly Phillips, the lead author of the Science Advances study. That is less per ton than generating electricity using solar panels or deploying other emissions-abatement technologies like carbon capture, utilization, and storage.

When a tree is harvested and milled into lumber, a small amount of that carbon escapes, but most of it remains trapped within the cellular structure of the wood, effectively prolonging the effect of sequestration. Replacing dying or low productivity stands can improve a forest’s ability to capture and store carbon and contribute to climate change mitigation. This can be done by planting tree mixes that are more resilient and protecting young sprouts from damage after harvest. A U.N. report explains that the largest GHG emission mitigation benefit, in the long term, comes not from reducing harvest volumes but from adopting a sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual yield of timber, fiber or energy from the forest. Clearcutting disturbs soils, wetlands, and peatlands, releasing their vast carbon stores, and diminishes the boreal forest’s ability to sequester carbon from the atmosphere.

The combination of the “better utilization” approach (increasing the utilization of wood harvested and ensuring that a higher percentage of residues are used as fiber inputs and/or in bioenergy production), along with promoting the development of products that can store carbon for longer, was by far the most effective strategy for most Canadian forest locations. Managing forests through the growth and harvest cycles can also have an important role in carbon mitigation efforts. Forest management practices that would help lower emissions include using wood left after harvesting and trimming, which is currently burned in slash piles, and protecting more primary forests from logging. Generally, clear cut logging exceeds mining industry in negative effects. However, extraction is an essential component of the global movement toward electrification, and new mining projects are appearing on the horizon. The ones affecting forests need to be reviewed closely.

Among terrestrial ecosystems and their habitats, forests have the highest carbon sequestration rates, reaching up to three times that of wetlands and agroecosystems. Wyloo Metals estimates that, along with the nickel that it owns in the Ring of Fire, an area larger than Rhode Island, and the deposits of platinum, palladium, copper and chromite could be worth $67 billion. These deposits of rare metals are buried under a swampy expanse of spruce forests and rivers in northern Ontario. Here lies one of the world’s richest untapped sources of nickel, copper and cobalt – metals that are essential for making the batteries that power electric vehicles. But these precious commodities are buried under a vast ecosystem of peat bogs, known by local groups as “the breathing lands” that holds more carbon per square foot, than even the Amazon rainforest. Digging them up could trigger the release of more greenhouse gas than Canada emits in one year, turning one of the earth’s biggest carbon sinks into a major source of emissions.

The Hudson Bay Lowlands are often cited as the second-largest peatland complex in the world, after the Western Siberian Lowlands in Russia. Ontario’s lowlands squirrel away 30 billion tonnes of carbon and soak up more from the atmosphere every year. With threats to the boreal forest only growing as the climate changes, protecting these important lands is more critical than ever before. The world is facing twin crises: rapid biodiversity loss and climate change. The size of the challenge demands that we work at an unprecedented pace to conserve the natural areas that are our life support systems. Our collective actions will determine the nature that will be saved, and the nature that will be lost. Canada has an important role to play in meeting this challenge.²

Our actions must include processes that reduce inputs. The mining industry uses a large amount of water and land in their operations. Collective actions in the Ring of Fire region must adopt low-impact mining techniques that include the ability to reduce surface disturbance at mining sites and lower soil erosion. Low-impact mining techniques such as in-situ leaching will minimise soil erosion, reducing surface disturbance as well as moving less material needing backfilling. This is a positive solution for both the mineworkers and our environment. Up-cycling transforms waste and unwanted products into new or alternative products. For example, waste rock can be used as a material in landscaping projects or tailings, a common by-product of the mineral recovery process, can be given new life in the form of resins and glass to bricks and cement. Water can easily be recycled for use in the dust suppression process.

Canada’s boreal forest is often called “The Lungs of the Earth.” Spanning almost 300 million hectares, it is the Earth’s largest terrestrial carbon sink, has some of the most intact forest left on Earth, and provides habitat for countless species of plants and animals, including over 300 species of birds. Its deep peatlands capture and store carbon at the highest rates of any northern ecosystem. Andrew Forrest, the Australian billionaire owner of the most promising mining assets in Ontario’s Ring of Fire region, says the viability of the critical minerals project is at risk because of Canada’s regulatory burden, its cumbersome consultation process and persistent delays in building crucial infrastructure. On the other hand, to protect the secret of the forest: it is necessary to reduce outputs, implement proper waste disposal, reusing mine waste, use eco-friendly equipment, and rehabilitate mining sites. Basically, the project begins with adopting such processes as lower-impact mining techniques like in-situ leaching mining that can reduce the environmental impact.³

¹ https://www.borealforestfacts.com/?p=550

² https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/what-on-earth-ring-of-fire-peatlands-1.6388489

³ https://republicofmining.com/2023/05/24/ring-of-fire-project-at-risk-due-to-red-tape-and-cumbersome-consultation-process-billionaire-owner-says-niall-mcgee-globe-and-mail-may-24-2023/

Why do we lie? Lying allows a person to establish perceived control over a situation by manipulating it. It’s a defence mechanism that (seemingly) prevents them from being vulnerable, that is, to not open up and reveal their true self to another person. People with certain conditions – including narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder – tend to act in manipulative or deceitful ways regardless of the consequences and upset it might cause. By some accounts, politicians’ lying is a rational response to the expectation that other candidates will engage in deceptive behavior.  Davis and Ferrantino theorize that lying is incentivized by the lack of transferable property rights to political office – it’s easier and faster to return a faulty used car than a faulty politician. Everything Nietzsche calls lies are ways of making something seem real which is not – including the negative case of not wanting to see something. Rather than worry about the fact that everyone lies, we should concern ourselves with the reasons why politicians lie.

One might say that dishonesty in politics is a long-standing tradition – politicians with a greater willingness to lie have a better chance of being re-elected. Plato proposed a justification for politicians’ lying in The Republic: “Then if anyone at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the State should be the persons; and they, in their dealings either with enemies or with their own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public good.” As a detractor of democracy, he likely cared little whether the public would be able to detect such deception. While such a “royal lie” would be beneficial to philosopher kings, for actual politicians, the “public good” casts a wide net. Many politicians have clearly benefitted from telling voters what they want to hear or what they want to believe, and history is filled with examples of politicians lying to cover up crime and corruption.¹

What happens when a lie hits your brain? The now-standard model was first proposed by Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert more than 20 years ago. Gilbert argues that people see the world in two steps. First, even just briefly, we hold the lie as true: We must accept something in order to understand it. For instance, if someone were to tell us – hypothetically, of course – that there had been serious voter fraud in Georgia during the presidential election, we must for a fraction of a second accept that fraud did, in fact, take place. Only then do we take the second step, either completing the mental certification process (yes, fraud!) or rejecting it (what? no way). Unfortunately, while the first step is a natural part of thinking – it happens automatically and effortlessly – the second step can be easily disrupted. It takes work: We must actively choose to accept or reject each statement we hear.

In certain circumstances, that verification of a lie simply fails to take place. As Gilbert writes, human minds, “when faced with shortages of time, energy, or conclusive evidence, may fail to unaccept the ideas that they involuntarily accept during comprehension.” The narcissist gradually wears down your self-awareness and self-trust, leaving you vulnerable to their manipulations. The most common signs of cognitive dissonance include: Doubting your own memory or recollection of events, conversations, and experiences; second-guessing decisions and choices. Pathological liars can’t stop lying even when it causes psychological distress, puts them in danger, and creates problems with relationships, work, or other aspects of daily life. Those who have followed Trump’s career say his lying isn’t just a tactic, but an ingrained habit. Donald Trump has been a pathological liar all his life, and now he is finally facing accountability via the court system.²

Cognitive-dissonance is just one of many biases that work in our everyday lives. We don’t like to believe that we may be wrong, so we may limit our intake of new information or thinking about things in ways that don’t fit within our pre-existing beliefs. Psychologists call this “confirmation bias.” People may run into problems with cognitive dissonance because it can be, in its most basic form, a sort of lie to oneself. As with all lies, it depends on the size of the lie and whether it’s more likely to hurt you in some way in the long run. We tell “little white lies” everyday in our social lives (“Oh yes, that’s a great color on you!”) that bring little harm to either side and help smooth over otherwise awkward situations. So, while cognitive dissonance resolves the internal anxiety we face over two opposing beliefs or behaviors, it may also inadvertently reinforce future bad decisions.

Lying can significantly increase the chances of creating false memories as the most persuasive lies often combine elements of both truth and falsehoods. For instance, a criminal offender may provide a false alibi for an event by including elements of a true experience that did not occur during the time in question. As a result, while the event itself may have happened, it did not take place during the time the crime was committed. This combining and later remembering of details about both the true and false versions of events requires considerable cognitive effort on the part of the liar but is necessary to maintain the deception. To decrease this cognitive load, the brain subconsciously starts to think of the fabricated information as the truth, eliminating the need for the liar to keep track of conflicting storylines (Otgaar & Baker, 2018). Thus, the creation of false memories is demonstrated as a subconscious process that decreases the cognitive load typically associated with telling a lie.³

Of course, many of Trump’s lies are conventional lies similar to those that politicians often tell to look good or avoid blame. But the number of these types of lies by Trump vastly exceed the number of lies by previous presidents. Our brains are particularly ill-equipped to deal with lies when they come not singly but in a constant stream, and Trump, we know, lies constantly, about matters as serious as the election results and as trivial as the tiles at Mar-a-Lago. When we are overwhelmed with false, or potentially false, statements, our brains pretty quickly become so overworked that we stop trying to sift through everything. It’s called cognitive load – our limited cognitive resources are overburdened. It doesn’t matter how implausible the statements are; throw out enough of them, and people will inevitably absorb some. Eventually, without quite realizing it, our brains just give up trying to figure out what is true. These efforts are key response to a culture of lying in elections.

Thus, if Trump has a particular untruth he wants to propagate – not just an undifferentiated barrage – he simply states it, over and over. As it turns out, sheer repetition of the same lie can eventually mark it as true in many of our heads. It’s an effect known as illusory truth, first discovered in the ’70s and most recently demonstrated with the rise of fake news. In its original demonstration, a group of psychologists had people rate statements as true or false on three different occasions over a two-week period. Some of the statements appeared only once, while others were repeated. The repeated statements were far more likely to be judged as true the second and third time they appeared – regardless of their actual validity. Keep repeating that there was serious voter fraud, and the idea begins to seep into people’s heads. Thus, Trump’s lies corrode democracy.

People lie to have control over you. People lie to manipulate you. People lie because they are afraid they’re desires will not be met. In 2018 Bernie Saunders called Donald Trump a “pathological liar” who “works night and day on behalf of his fellow billionaires.” Trump is a successful liar because he refuses to remember. When Trump is facing a potentially very bad news cycle his move is to: distract, divert, repeat – to move the problem out of the public eye. Lies can be used to get others to form false beliefs and garner their support. It is well known that false information can influence people’s thinking even after they come to realize the information is false. The cure for the present epidemic of narcissism is for us to stop lying to ourselves about what we think we know.

Trump won the nomination as the candidate who lied the most, won the presidency as someone known to lie; has an unshakable base despite ongoing lies. Cognitive biases reflect mental patterns that can lead people to form beliefs or make decisions that do not reflect an objective and thorough assessment of the facts. For instance, people tend to seek out information that confirms pre-existing beliefs and reject information that challenges those beliefs. This bias is the tendency in all of us to believe stories that reinforce our convictions – and the stronger the convictions, the more powerfully the person feels the pull of the confirmation bias. The problem is exacerbated by voters’ strong incentive to be “rationally ignorant” of politics. Widespread voter ignorance also incentivizes another common type of political deception: lying about the nature of your policies in order to overstate benefits and conceal possible downsides. An ignorant electorate cannot achieve true democratic control over public policy.

Truth, much like knowledge, is bound to power and similarly operates amidst the individuals and institutions that generate and sustain it. The economic elite do not hesitate to present their ideology as interpretation of truth. The “truth” the market reveals is never in actuality some eternal, given fact. The market is never a neutral arbiter of truth, so the “truth” it reveals about government practice has always required interpretation. Nietzsche believed, one should be conscious of the illusory nature of what is considered truth, thus opening up the possibility of the creation of new values. It is necessary to create the social environment or milieu to support good governance to control cognitive dissonance and the consequent balancing of perception that leads to misperception. The truth is that capitalism creates enormous wealth, but it concentrates into oligopolies and monopolies, to the extent the economic elite creates and normalizes a culture of lying to itself leading to its inherent instability.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) claimed there are no facts only interpretations. In his view there was no objective fact about what has value in itself – culture consisted of beliefs developed to perpetuate a particular power structure. The system, if followed by the majority of the people, supports the interests of the dominant class. Basically, the status of Trump’s lies will determine the outcome of the 2024 election in America. To respond to this culture of lying: The tech platforms must get more aggressive about policing content; put in place robust cybersecurity and infrastructure security arm; maintain a central authority to report false and misleading information; a system to manage “rumour control” during election day to address questions on conspiracy theories circulating in the community; resources to combat false information on line (review the effect of layoffs in tech industry); counter the ongoing weaponized criticism of research on misinformation⁴ (i.e. Jim Jordan’s efforts).

¹https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8378529/

² https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/donald-trump-lies-liar-effect-brain-214658/

³ https://www.psychologyinaction.org/lying-can-reconstruct-memory-how-we-come-to-believe-our-own-lies/

⁴ https://www.npr.org/2023/11/10/1211929764/election-false-claims-social-media-cisa-trump

Thomas Hobbs (1588-1679) identifies three reasons conflicts appear – competition, distrust, and the desire for glory – that throw humankind into a state of war (i.e. chaos), which is for Hobbes the natural condition of human life, the situation that exists whenever natural passions are unrestrained. Hobbes is famous for his early and elaborate development of what has come to be known as “social contract theory”, the method of justifying political principles or arrangements by appeal to the agreement that would be made among suitably situated rational, free, and equal persons. Thomas Hobbes and other early social contract theorists argued that the state emerges in response to natural anarchy in order to protect the people’s interests and keep order. Hobbes believed that the social contract was designed to invest absolute power in a ruler to govern the citizenry. Locke believed that the social contract meant investing some power in the hands of the ruler, whose power would be used to protect his citizens’ human rights.

Around the turn of the 21^st century, anarchism grew in popularity and influence as part of the anti-war, anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movements. Anarchists became known for their involvement in protests against the meetings of the WTO, G8 and the World Economic Forum. Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that is skeptical of all justifications for authority and seeks to abolish the institutions it claims maintain unnecessary coercion and hierarchy, typically including nation-states, and capitalism. In 2020, Trump’s Fourth of July remarks, “We are now in the process of defeating the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters and people who in many instances have absolutely no clue what they are doing.” Trump floats pulling federal money from ‘anarchist’ cities, in particular, places that he said are not letting police enforce laws. President Trump wants us to believe anarchists are responsible for America’s sorry state.

The historic anarchist movement is identified with a workers’ movement which flourished from the 1860s down to the close of the 1930s. Anarchism is usually grounded in moral claims about the importance of individual liberty, often conceived as freedom from domination. Anarchists also offer a positive theory of human flourishing, based upon an ideal of equality, community, and non-coercive consensus building. Anarchists disdain the customary use of ‘anarchy’ to mean ‘chaos’ or ‘complete disorder’: for them it signifies the absence of rulers in a self-managed society, more highly organized than the disorganization and chaos of the present. The historic anarchist movement of the late-nineteenth century was therefore distinguished from the rest of the international movement of organised labour by its rejection of state intervention from above in favour of self-organisation from below, as well as by its rejection of constitutional protest in favour of direct action.

The narcissistic anarchist is an off-compass libertarian unity ideology that advocates the individual has the right to focus on himself and improve himself as he wants, such as even use others for his own benefit. Anarchists consider the state as a tool of domination and believe it to be illegitimate regardless of its political tendencies. Instead of people being able to control the aspects of their life, major decisions are taken by a small elite. Noam Chomsky, probably the most prominent American anarchist, believes the philosophy’s appeal comes from the “discontent of people feeling they have no control over the decisions that concern them.” Today, most anarchists say they strive to transform society from within, working toward a day when government will shrivel and disappear. But anarchist views are spreading among young activists, largely because of the anti-globalization movement that undermines local decision making.

Despite his claim to be “the only thing standing between the American Dream and total anarchy”, it is clear that Trump is the real anarchist. He aspires to one man rule ability to sow disarray, certainly within his own party, and gradually throughout the country. Of course, he wants to accrue power, which may be what misled us into thinking he was a potential fascist. Like most strongmen, he wants to do harm to the less powerful – to wit, immigrants and the poor – but it may be no accident that even his attempts at strong-arming turn out to have the opposite effect: chaos. What has happened in America over the past five years is exactly what we should expect to happen when the person in charge has no stated beliefs other than his self-interest, and little agenda other than tearing down the accomplishments of others.

On a more political level, during the pandemic we saw more and more individuals who were shut out of the American dream. They are angry about it and frustrated about it. Anger is a vital emotion. It lets us know where our boundaries are and what we stand for. Without anger, we would be passive and overly accommodating, so it’s really important to listen to the emotion. Ignoring it will not make it go away. Anger is like a spring inside our body. If we push it down and try to squash or suppress it, all that happens is that we become even tenser. Instead, it is important for us to learn ways to recognize and manage our anger so that it can be transformed into something useful. Anxiety and anger are key motivating factors underlying support for populists, although they are of course no strangers to promoting fear and other negative emotions, thus emotions shape politics.

Who are Trump’s supporters? When you look around, Republicans today are really anarchists dedicated to undermining government in the furtherance of an economic state of nature where the rich rule. By undoing government, this anarchism undoes the only protection most Americans have against the depredations of the Trumps of this world and against the often cruel vicissitudes of life, like health crises. Take away government, and you strip away those protections. Also, take away government, and you also enable Trump and his fellow plutocrats to further enrich themselves because there would no mechanism to stop them. This has long been the Republican way: greed disguised as a fear of government overreach. Again, Republicans and their presidential anarchist ally can undo things, as they have done with environmental protection. Anarchy is incorporated in their policy. Fascism, on the other hand, requires a program and unity of purpose. Instead, America is careening toward the first industrialized state of anarchy.

Trump won the nomination as the candidate who lied the most, won the presidency as someone known to lie; has an unshakable base despite ongoing lies. Underlying social issues made this possible. All workplaces, however harmonious they appear, contain a relatively high number of employees who are disillusioned or angry at what they see as real, hurtful and relevant issues of serious dissatisfaction with their lot. Resentment as a cultural response to economic struggle has political consequences. Because of growing disillusionment and anger students and workers voted for leaders outside the mainstream party candidates during the 2016 presidential primary elections – the consequence of being left behind by soaring inequality and the failure of government to deliver. Donald Trump figured out how to harness their disillusionment and growing anger. Trump appeals to resentment that ultimately rests on economic failure: working-class whites have been left behind by soaring inequality (but they mistakenly blame emigrants taking their jobs).

Trump promotes many lies about a so-called stolen election. These just happened to occur in swing states. These false claims included fraudulent totals in Philadelphia, a truckload of ballots being driven from New York to Pennsylvania, false claims about Dominion voting technology (in particular, in Georgia), a false claim about non-citizens voting in Arizona, the false story about election workers in Georgia, a false claim about Dominion machines in Michigan. The Jan. 6 riot was fueled by Trump’s ‘lies’ about 2020, special counsel, Jack Smith, alleges. Remember, Trump promised to blow things up; now he has. That Wednesday in January will be remembered as a day that brought a frightening and predictable culmination to two months of lies by the president. The world media reaction to chaos as a pro-Trump mob storms the Capitol with the common theme: “Anarchy in America”.

Workers have always been exploited, but that rate of exploitation – measured by the productivity wage gap that is today’s reality – is increasing exponentially. Workers today have a good reason to be angry. However, anger is power. It’s red. It’s heat. Anger is movement and sound. Anger is a force for change, a force of strength. Since Reagan years, the social contract has always been broken. Governments have largely failed to uphold their end of the social contract: to guarantee safety, offer protection, uphold rights, fight inequality and act in the best interest of all people. We need to channel anger for positive change. Instead of being a destructive state, anger can be a potent force of nature that can move us forward and fuel optimism, problem-solving, and creative brainstorming. In other words, if we want to make a change, we need the powerful motivational push that anger can provide.

Let us review Hobbes’s picture of human nature: We are needy and vulnerable. We are easily led astray in our attempts to know the world around us. Our capacity to reason is as fragile as our capacity to know; it relies upon language and is prone to error and undue influence. When we act, we may do so selfishly or impulsively or in ignorance, on the basis of faulty reasoning or bad theology or others’ emotive speech. To address this uncertainty and insecurity, we turn to a social contract, basically, freedom is good, but security is better. Thomas Hobbes’ social contract theory, especially the idea of the state of nature, is a cornerstone of Western philosophy. It marks a philosophical shift from the divine right of kings to a social consensus as a legitimizing force behind state powers. His philosophy helps us ask important questions about power, limits, and the potential pitfalls of democracy.¹

Rousseau (1712-1778) argued that inequality was not only unnatural, but that – when taken too far – it made decent government impossible. He believed laws should pursue freedom and equality. People need to feel their vote produces something and their voice is worth something. This includes the idea that society exists because of an implicitly agreed-to set of standards that provide moral and political rules of behavior. The system must address three fundamental challenges: familiar elements of the safety net, such as social insurance and pension benefits, need to address a new set of circumstances, such as the need for people to re-skill during much longer working lives. Second, social contracts must be relevant in a world being reshaped by technological revolutions, and the transition to a clean energy economy. Third, a modern social contract must tackle the inequality and exclusion that plague societies in all corners of the world.²

¹ https://iep.utm.edu/hobmoral/

² https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/a-new-social-contract-for-21st-century/

Since the Industrial Revolution, emissions of greenhouse gases due to human activities have increased from a negligible level to more than 40 billion tons a year. As these emissions have accumulated in our atmosphere, they have increased the average annual temperature by about 1 degree Celsius compared with the pre-industrial era. Temperature increases have led to glaciers and ice caps melting, sea levels rising, and more frequent and extreme meteorological events, such as heat waves and droughts, with cascading effects on ecosystems, agricultural yields, human health, and livelihoods. While the effects of climate change are global, and their projected impacts concern every area in the world, a wide scientific literature suggests that climate risks disproportionately affect the poorest countries and people, who are more exposed and more vulnerable to their impacts. Another narrative, climate science denial and greenwashing, has been to quash all immediate impulse to respond to perceived crisis and buy time for commercial interests to construct some other eventual market solution to global warming.

Greenhouse gas emissions today are mainly linked to the level of a nation’s wealth: the richest countries represent only 16 percent of the world population but almost 40 percent of CO² emissions. The two categories of the poorest countries in the World Bank classification account for nearly 60 percent of the world’s population, but for less than 15 percent of emissions. On a per capita basis, emissions are about 20 metric tons of CO²-equivalent a person a year in the United States – approximately double the amount per person in the European Union or in China, and almost 10 times the amount in India. The world’s wealthiest 10% were responsible for around half of global emissions in 2015, according to a 2020 report. The top 1% were responsible for 15% of emissions, nearly twice as much as the world’s poorest 50%, who were responsible for just 7% and will feel the brunt of climate impacts despite bearing the least responsibility for causing them.

In recent decades, global economic growth has lifted millions out of extreme poverty and reduced inequalities between countries. But unmanaged climate change threatens to set back that progress by damaging poverty eradication efforts worldwide, and disproportionately affecting the poorest regions and people. Mitigating climate change is a necessary condition for sustainably improving living standards around the world. At the same time, distributive and procedural justice must be at the forefront of every stage of environmental policy making. But even as time runs out for tackling climate change, many governments balk at behaviour-change policies fearing they will be politically toxic to voters and unpalatable to the rich. The control that the wealthiest have over governments through lobbying and hefty donations gives them huge influence to dilute climate action and shape the choices available for everyone, says Dario Kenner.¹ Climate equity is the goal of recognizing and addressing the unequal burdens made worse by climate change, while ensuring that all people share the benefits of climate protection efforts.

Fearing strong state regulation that would be needed to address global warming, Big Oil and neoliberal think-tanks joined forces to peddle disinformation on the science of climate change. The template to follow was the good job that think-tanks did in denying the link between second hand smoke and lung cancer – that was fully funded by big tobacco companies – and adopt this model to create denial, doubt, confusion. Over time, as people began to see through these basic lies over climate change, these think-tanks largely backed off trying to convince people climate change was a hoax, rather focused on falsehoods such as anthropogenic climate change is natural, inconsequential (or beneficial), and/or too expensive to fix anyway. We need to embed a concern with climate change into people’s everyday lives, while recognizing the formidable problems involved in doing so: Indirect means may sometimes be the best way. For instance, the public may be more responsive to a drive for energy efficiency or renewable resources than to warnings about the dangers of climate change.

Most carbon pricing systems today have tended to increase cost of food and other basic items and add to inflation. Basically, carbon pricing has failed because the economic burden falls primarily on low-income households, a charge that can be leveled against any market or price mechanism used to allocate a scarce resource. This is why all modern economies have extra stress on social programs to address these equity concerns. Lewis Akenji observes: Individual actions won’t be enough to tackle climate change, and guilt and shame won’t help. But choices and actions do matter. “I think we should all become political activists in one way or another,” he says. “What we’re going to do is very deliberately and decisively go after our governments and ask them to live up to their commitments.” Policymakers must guarantee that adaptation policies will actually benefit those most in need and will not be hijacked by the wealthiest or by political interests.¹

To meet the global target of keeping warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, humanity must significantly reduce carbon emissions, which will necessitate radical changes in how investors and corporations conduct business and public policy. “We need COP27 to expose and change the role that big corporates and their rich investors are playing in profiting from the pollution that is driving the global climate crisis,” says Nafkote Dabi, Climate Change Lead at Oxfam. “They can’t be allowed to hide or greenwash. We need governments to tackle this urgently by publishing emission figures for the richest people, regulating investors and corporates to slash carbon emissions and taxing wealth and polluting investments.” The longer we delay emission reduction, the more robust and disruptive policy reactions will be once societies are forced to face the implications of global warming. The politics of climate change to cope with global warming requires a long-term perspective be introduced.²

What else links climate change and inequities? “A few billionaires (corporations) together have ‘investment emissions’ that equal the carbon footprints of entire countries like France, Egypt or Argentina,” claims Dabi “The major and growing responsibility of wealthy people for overall emissions is rarely discussed or considered in climate policy making.” These billionaire investors at the top of the corporate pyramid have huge responsibility for driving climate breakdown. The evidence is mounting: a World Bank report estimated that an additional 68 to 135 million people could be pushed into poverty by 2030 because of climate change. As the poorest tend to be excluded from the decision-making process, there is always a risk of underinvestment in actions that would be particularly beneficial to them. Policies need to be tailored to ensure they do not impose undue financial constraints on those who have the fewest resources.²

A number of theoretical explanations have been proposed for why inequality might raise per capita greenhouse gas emissions, including: 1) inequality exacerbates the ability of the wealthy – who benefit more and suffer less from environmental degradation – to protect their interests within social decision-making processes; 2) inequality reduces cohesion, cooperation, and trust, potentially inhibiting collective action to protect the environment; 3) inequality impedes diffusion of green innovations to the mass market; and 4) inequality leads to Veblen effects whereby consumption of energy-intensive goods and services increases as individuals aim to emulate and compete with the status-based consumption of the wealthy. The outstanding challenge then: how economic inequality itself could be a significant driver of higher greenhouse gas emissions?³

Neoliberalism blames the individual consumer for producing carbon emissions, choosing to ignore the socioeconomic factors that propagate climate inequality in minority groups. This has resulted in environmental degradation and wealth inequality, preventing any possibility of collective action. Since 1988, one-hundred companies alone are solely responsible for 71% of total global emissions. We are instructed by corporations to internalize and blame ourselves for global warming, as they force idyllic neoliberal promises down our throats. The right time to confront climate change was decades ago, but neoliberalism has continued to block political and legislative action, turning science into a political debate. Climate change demands unprecedented public cooperation and coordination. To lower emissions, we must return privatized utilities to public control, regulate companies to phase out fossil fuels, implement a carbon tax, allocate more money to increase community resistance to climate change, and emphasize renewable energy.

Public participation recognizes that everyone has something important to say and gives everyone a voice. Almost half a century ago, scientists and technical experts dominated national and global discussions on environmental change. Today, the role of people, particularly a progressive private sector and civil society, contributes to a diversity of voices that are fresh, vocal and innovative. The leading sustainability data provider found that the efforts of just 22% of the world’s 500 biggest public companies by market value are aligned with the Paris Agreement, aimed at limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. That’s a measly gain from 18% of firms in 2018. Mainstreaming climate reporting among corporations is key for setting or monitoring emission reduction goals. Companies that gain a holistic view of how climate change affects their performance and bottom line through adopting this framework can act as examples.

Where can we turn? Governments should implement a wealth tax on the richest people and an additional steep rate top-up on wealth invested in polluting industries. It will also raise billions that can be used to help countries cope with the brutal impacts of climate breakdown and the loss and damage they incur and fund the global shift to renewable energy. Corporations must put in place ambitious and time-bound climate change action plans with short-to-medium term targets in line with global climate change objectives in a view to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. We must beware of the increase in greenwashing incidents (the process of conveying a false impression, making unsubstantiated claims, or publishing misleading information about how a company’s products are environmentally sound or how the company will achieve its environmental objectives, such as net zero) over the previous years.

By hitting the poorest hardest, climate change risks both increasing existing economic inequalities and causing people to fall into poverty. In summary, the individual action that matters most is voting. Climate change is a problem governments will solve, not individuals. As we move to a low carbon world, those with the greatest responsibility for having got us here must be held to account. That’s starting with the fossil fuel, agribusiness, cement and concrete, and mining industries, plus their financial backers. Moving to open and accessible renewable energy, restoring forests and shifting to sustainable agriculture will not only address the climate and nature emergencies, but it will also reverse the gross imbalance between rich and poor, those who can afford to adapt and those who can’t. Addressing the climate crisis gives us the opportunity and mandate to reorient our societies towards protecting our human rights and repairing political, social and economic inequities.

¹ https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211025-climate-how-to-make-the-rich-pay-for-their-carbon-emissions

² https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-emits-million-times-more-greenhouse-gases-average-person

³ https://lpeproject.org/blog/climate-change-and-the-neoliberal-imagination/