Summary-March 21 2014
Governments are gridlocked because lobbying by those who put profits over planet stymies change. We have missed all climate change targets to date. A powerful way to get change would be for the billionaires of the world to start spending their money to elect officials who will enact positive climate change policies.
Why add this note to the map?
Two reasons:
1. What do you value more, WhatsApp or Earth?
When I wrote the note in November 2013 I thought I was breathtakingly-bold in suggesting that a bunch of billionaires get together to invest $1 billion in trying to effect positive change in the political system. But WhatsApp, the mobile messaging service, was bought by Facebook for $19 billion in February 2014. So now the question seems to be: What do you value more? WhatsApp or Earth? So maybe it's no longer so far-fetched. Which is good because, you know, the 'stable' ice-sheet is melting.
2. Tom Steyer
Tom Steyer, a billionaire from California, decided to take action. Here is a quote from a February 17 2014 article in The New York Times: "A billionaire retired investor is forging plans to spend as much as $100 million during the 2014 election, seeking to pressure federal and state officials to enact climate change measures through a hard-edge campaign of attack ads against governors and lawmakers."
Prologue
For Blog Action Day on October 15 2009 I put this note on a blog I had at the time:
"Here’s my thought for the day: Latest measurements show that there are 387 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The safe limit for humanity is … 350. Read about the science behind those numbers at the 350.org website. For more information and what you can do next week on October 24th on the International Day of Climate Action please go to the same website."
In 2010 I built a kmap around the work that 350.org was doing at that time. From that kmap I see that in July 2010 CO2 was at 390ppm and you can check
this site for the latest level. I couldn't see how we were going to get the people who had the power to change it to care about this. In October I
started a kmap (use
this link for optimal viewing on a smartphone) which turned into an attempt to pull together different maps at DebateGraph on the subject of the Anthropocene (At the time I was a DebateGraph Associate so I was trying to use what I had). Skip to 2012 and this from the New Yorker article
The Climate Fixers (May 14 2012):
'Many climate scientists say their biggest fear is that warming could melt the Arctic permafrost—which stretches for thousands of miles across Alaska, Canada, and Siberia. There is twice as much CO2 locked beneath the tundra as there is in the earth’s atmosphere. Melting would release enormous stores of methane, a greenhouse gas nearly thirty times more potent than carbon dioxide. If that happens, as the hydrologist Jane C. S. Long told me when we met recently in her office at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, “it’s game over.”'
In November 2013 I thought of something that might help (get the billionaires involved) and published a note about it on a blog I had. Here it is and in the epilogue I discuss one simple thing you can do to help save the planet and the one more slightly more complicated thing (hint: the simple thing is change want you eat).
Saving us in the Anthropocene
In September 2013 Sir Richard Branson asked for a "#7wordstory," on twitter. One of mine was "Billionaires gather, plan, pull together, planet saved." In the same month
Tim Flannery reviewed Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean by Lisa-ann Gershwin in
The New York Review of Books. He quotes from her book:
"When I began writing this book … I had a naive gut feeling that all was still salvageable ... But I think I underestimated how severely we have damaged our oceans and their inhabitants. I now think that we have pushed them too far, past some mysterious tipping point that came and went without fanfare, with no red circle on the calendar and without us knowing the precise moment it all became irreversible. I now sincerely believe that it is only a matter of time before the oceans as we know them and need them to be become very different places indeed. No coral reefs teeming with life. No more mighty whales or wobbling penguins. No lobsters or oysters. Sushi without fish."
On November 10 2013
Roy Scranton had a piece in
The New York Times' forum
The Stone on the
Opinionator blog, called
Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene. Quoting from the antepenultimate paragraph:
The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront this problem, and the sooner we realize there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.
In June of 2012 I wrote about the importance of knowledge cartography:
Knowledge is spatial and this is how knowledge maps fit into our lives. The new model of knowledge visualization is taken from printed maps not printed books.
But why should we care? The answer is that we need to find answers. We need to find answers to the challenges we face as humans on a planet with finite resources, now living in the Anthropocene. We can only do that if we act fast and collectively, across national borders, if we network as people and with our resources. The best way to organize our response is with Cloud-based knowledge maps formed around community.
At the time I thought that we could solve our challenges in the Anthropocene using
knowledge mapping in the sense that I use it within the discipline of knowledge cartography. I must admit the
Stung! review took the wind out of my sails. I had been kind of counting on the oceans. So now what?To go back to my #7wordstory ...The answer lies with the billionaires. There were 1,426 billionaires
on the Forbes list as of March 2013 with a total net worth of $5.4 trillion (2013 U.S. Federal budget $3.8 trillion (requested)). They influence governments all over the world. The two Koch brothers have "given more than a hundred million dollars to right-wing causes." The quote is from
an article by Jane Mayer (who wrote the book
The Dark Side) in
The New Yorker, written in August 2010. From the article:
A Republican campaign consultant who has done research on behalf of Charles and David Koch said of the Tea Party, “The Koch brothers gave the money that founded it. It’s like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud—and they’re our candidates!"
What needs to happen next is that the billionaires need to start spending money to try and save the planet. It might not be possible.The billionaires must think that having a personal wealth of one billion to 70 billion dollars will shield them from the upcoming apocalypse. This is not so. We are already feeling the effects of climate change as Roy Scranton's article describes and who can forget the European heatwave of 2003 in which thousands died? Climate change is here. The billionaires' children will suffer and their grandchildren even more so.What should the members of The Billionaires Club do then? They have to get together and spend one billion dollars to support the election of candidates in the United States who will force the Government to act on climate change. They need to spend one billion dollars on promoting the whole food, plant-based diet because livestock greenhouse gas emissions account for between 18% (more than the transportation sector) and
possibly over 50% of greenhouse gas emissions. And (by the way) climate change is affecting global food production right now in a terrifying way. As Lester Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute wrote in
in an article in October of this year:
- To state the obvious, we are in a situation both difficult and dangerous.
The world today desperately needs leadership on the food security issue to help the world understand both the enormity of the challenge we face and the extraordinary scope of a response, one that, among other things, requires a total restructuring of the energy economy. The scale of this economic restructuring is matched only by the urgency of doing so. Political leaders talk about cutting carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050, but if we stay on the current trajectory the game will be over long before then. If we want to stabilize climate, we need to cut carbon emissions far more rapidly. President Obama needs to understand both the gravity and urgency of the tightening food situation and the consequences of leaving it unattended. We are not looking at 2030 or 2050. We are looking at an abrupt disruption in the world food supply that could be just one poor harvest away.
A further two hundred million has to go to the establishment of a foundation that will encourage all billionaires to put their money into trying to elect reasonable people all over the world so that we can make a last ditch attempt to save this planet and its people.[...] The alternative, of course, is just to be kind to each other.
revised December 2013, minor revision for clarity January 2014. minor edits March 2014.
Epilogue-What can you do?
Here is the one simple thing you can do: Consider switching to a whole food, plant-based diet, which helps reduce greenhouse gasses. It's also one of the healthiest food choices you can make (you can take this course and see also this and this; Kaiser Permanante doctors recommending that doctors recommend the diet to all their patients and Montefiore Hospital in New York implementing it for heart patients) plus the food is delicious. And see this trailer. See also the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies. The more complicated thing is find a way to engage the billionaires. Do you know any? If you think you have something to contribute you could also work on this kmap and others like it.
One more thing: I say in the last sentence that the alternative is "just to be kind to each other." I would now add: Work to reduce suffering.
UPDATE: April 13, 2014: Guardian reporting on latest IPCC report.
UPDATE: April 17, 2014: With the release of this report, the note would seem to be more relevant than ever.
UPDATE: April 22, 2014: One way to deal with the situation is to withdraw.
March 21 2014.
minor edits march/april/july 2014
moved to map october 2014.
moved to 12 challenges map, august 2016, minor edits.