A six minute film in English/Swedish produced by the Swedish equivalent of the BBC, on David Fleming and Matt Prescott‘s May 2010 visit to the Swedish Parliament to discuss TEQs.

Below the cut is the full 24 minute interview (entirely in English) from which David’s clips were taken.

With domestic supporters now ranging from the Chairman of the UK Environment Agency and the UK’s Green MP to the leading Labour leadership candidate and the All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil (with whom we will shortly be releasing a policy document on TEQs) the interest in David’s framework for supporting innovation and Transition is building, and not before time in my opinion.

An interview with the ever-insightful Richard Heinberg, discussing where we should put our efforts in the aftermath of the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit. It is well worth a watch, and you might want to consider spreading it to your contacts via the “Share This” link in the bottom right corner of this post.

I heartily endorse his perspective, but disagree when he argues in support of carbon taxation at around fifteen minutes in, saying that “we need to make fossil fuels more expensive”. In my opinion, we do not – we need to guarantee a fair entitlement to the available energy, not ration it by the depth of people’s pockets.

As Richard says, “if you’re taxing everybody on their use of fossil fuels – raising their cost of living – it’s pretty hard to get their buy-in to that”, but once you guarantee people a fair entitlement, in line with a declining cap, society can then collectively focus on keeping the price of energy as low as possible, which is a simply-understood task that everyone can buy into with enthusiasm.

Richard is touching on a widely-unrecognised contradiction at the heart of present energy/climate policy discussions – the desire to raise carbon prices while keeping energy prices low. Market-based approaches struggle to see past this, but TEQs would resolve it at a stroke, through the recognition that reducing the quantity of carbon emissions can be best achieved by means other than a high price.

I just stumbled across this documentary (English with Dutch subtitles) following the story of the 70s/80s punk band Crass. They are still living wholeheartedly by their Do It Yourself ethos and “There is no authority but yourself” philosophy. A recommended watch.

“Tell everybody
Waitin’ for Superman
That they should try to
Hold on, best they can

He hasn’t dropped them,
Forgot them,
Or anything,
It’s just too heavy for Superman to lift”

~ The Flaming Lips

We’ve all seen Hollywood movies in which humanity is threatened by an unstoppable force, powerful beyond comprehension, which is eventually, in the final climax, held back and thwarted by our hero straining every sinew and pushing really hard…

Over recent weeks I have been in two meetings with Ed Miliband, our Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change – one just before Copenhagen, and one just after. At the earlier meeting he told us to judge him on the results of Copenhagen, and (despite my previous comments, and the fact that the UK is one of the minority of countries who have not endorsed a 350ppm target) I do believe that he tried everything he knew to be that hero and bring back a passable agreement.

Unfortunately, this Hollywood story isn’t a useful one for our current predicament. Sometimes superhuman achievements really are beyond the grasp of mere humans. Trying to pull together a global agreement reconciling the fundamentally incompatible demands of unlimited economic growth and a limited physical environment is one such fool’s errand.

In interviews in Copenhagen Ed appeared somewhat bewildered by the lack of progress and, frankly, somewhat dejected. It was hard not to feel for him.

For the technical details of what was eventually ‘agreed’ click here, for the text of the agreement itself click here, or for a more informal ‘executive summary’ see the clip below, but to cut a long story short, nothing was agreed that comes remotely close to addressing the scale of our climate challenge. Indeed, as I and many others have been pointing out for months, an agreement in line with climate science wasn’t even close to the negotiating table, so there wasn’t much point in hoping for it.

When we heard from the beginning that “talks are progressing more slowly than expected”, part of the explanation was that some of the smaller countries were stubbornly refusing to sign their own death warrants this time, no matter what they were offered to do so. Bloody inconsiderate of them.

“We’re dying here, we’re drowning; and some of us know that they don’t really care, because we have to beg them. Actions speak louder than words. If they really do care, please have a little listen to us.” – Jerome Esebei Temengil from Palau’s delegation

(In an idle moment I did wonder whether the negotiations would have proceeded any differently had a volunteer Palauan family locked themselves in a transparent box in the middle of the conference hall, set to gradually fill with water and drown them unless they released themselves upon hearing that the 350ppm agreement demanded by their delegation has been signed…)

Of course there were many reasons why various countries and other interests strove to undermine any meaningful agreement, but I think Algerian envoy Kamel Djemouai, who speaks for 53 African nations, outlined the worst-case scenario well: “No deal is better than to have a bad deal, particularly for Africa.”

Indeed, even the White House admitted before the talks that:
“An empty deal would be worse than no deal at all”

Yet we ended up with what the Financial Times described as “the emptiest deal one could imagine, short of a fist fight”.

(The greatest success of the talks? A bit of childish humour adorning the back of lying climate change denialist Christopher Monckton)

Still, by the time of our post-Copenhagen ‘debrief’ Ed Miliband appeared to have decided (or been told) to put a positive spin on the outcome. Despite looking as depressed as anyone in the room, he described the Accord as a “critical first step”, and proceeded to argue that expectations of Copenhagen had simply been too high. Yet of course those lofty expectations were based squarely on the science, which remains stubbornly unchanged by the recent political manoeuvrings.

I suppose Ed is virtually obliged to appear positive about the political process, because that is what he has invested his life in, and what he is giving all his efforts to. And when that many world leaders gather it is inevitable that the outcome will be spun as some kind of at least partial success. But Ed’s comments in an article last Sunday are rather more telling: “In the months ahead, (Copenhagen’s) concrete achievements must be secured and extended”.

I wonder if such ‘unsecured concrete achievements’ were what Connie Hedegaard (initial President of the Copenhagen Conference and soon to be European Commissioner for climate change) was hoping for when she declared: “This is our chance. If we miss it, it could take years before we got a new and better one. If we ever do.”

And what do these ‘achievements’ add up to? Well, if all the aspirational numbers in the Copenhagen Accord were actually fulfilled, they would lead to a CO₂ concentration of 780ppm (double current levels) and a 3.9 degree warming by 2100. If political reality and scientific reality cannot be reconciled, there will be only one winner – Nature and physics simply do not negotiate. As George Monbiot put it, “Goodbye Africa, goodbye south Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral reefs and rainforest; it was nice knowing you, not that we really cared”.

So now the political focus shifts to the odd game of claiming that the Copenhagen Accord represents success while simultaneously blaming others for its failure. Thanks to the nationalistic, competitive nature of international politics, Miliband, Obama and all the other would-be superheroes are desperately trying to find their supervillain.

It has been pointed out before that if an alien invasion was swooping in to attack, with projected human mortality and other effects similar to those of climate change, we would have united against the threat long ago. That is the kind of external enemy we could really get to grips with (Hollywood stories have trained us well for that one), but for as long as politics is treated as a competition between nations, cooperative efforts for mutual benefit will remain beyond us.

Perhaps this time the ‘supervillain’ we face is far more cunning than those movie aliens. He realises that in order to destroy the world with his dastardly plot he needs only to hide from view. As long as humanity perceives no hand but our own in any of these events, he can just sit back and calmly watch us destroy ourselves.

It seems we can accept being killed by our own foolishness much more easily than being outsmarted. Unfortunately, taking a long hard look in the mirror and battling our internal supervillains remains deeply unfashionable…

So where does all this leave us? What are our chances now of avoiding unstoppable runaway climate change, with all that entails?

50%-50% ?

90%-10% ? (I don’t need to say which way)

Not even close.

For years now, I have played host to a cordial internal conflict between the part of me that insists that there may still be a tiny chance left of maintaining a stable climate, and the part that accepts that unstoppable runaway climate change is now inevitable…

I kept reading and researching, the information kept getting worse and worse, and then I recently stumbled across a quote that brought me up short. A 13th Century Islamic mystic by the name of Hajji Bektash Wali made the following pronouncement:

“For one who has perception, A mere sign is enough. For one who does not heed, A thousand explanations Are not enough”

I confess that by now I may have had more than a thousand explanations of why it is too late, but it is still hard to give up hope on this one. In the article referred to earlier, Ed Miliband declared that:

“The challenge for all of us is not to lose heart and momentum. The truth is that the global campaign, co-ordinated by green NGOs, backed by business and supported by a wider cross section of the public, has achieved a lot… no campaign ever wholly succeeds at the first time of asking. We should take heart from the achievements and step up our efforts.”

And of course it is not just the politicians pushing this message. The likes of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth also spun the Copenhagen fortnight as “humanity’s last chance” to avoid the horrific impacts of runaway climate destabilisation, which leaves their calls for (yet) “one more big push” sounding a little hollow, even, I suspect, to them.

Yet the repeated calls to redouble our efforts do retain a certain allure. Yes, in part because finding peace with our own impotence in the face of such large-scale suffering is a formidable task, but I think even more because it would be so terrible to look back and feel that we gave up while there actually was still a chance there. Maybe there’s still a chance that there’s a chance…?

But what if we are on the Titanic and the iceberg has already been struck? Can we think of nothing wiser to do than to try to patch the hole as the ocean rushes in?

There are times when Hollywood heroism is just what is needed, but there are also times when superhuman efforts really are beyond us. And perhaps the perception the mystic spoke of whispers that one such time has come. A time to ponder the reasons why the latest political “last chance” wasn’t taken, to accept that a scientific technofix ain’t gonna save us either, and to look unflinchingly at the unpalatable, overwhelming realities of the period we are moving into.

Let’s at least allow ourselves to really ask: “What does life look like in a world of unstoppable climate destabilisation?”. What does my life look like there?

There are still lives to be lived in that world, choices to be made, love to give and suffering to alleviate. And only by allowing ourselves to explore that unknown realm can we see it for what it is, rather than what we might fear it to be.

On that note, I would like to introduce you to The Dark Mountain Project, started by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, which invites us to explore this very terrain. By way of introduction, this from their Manifesto:

Above is a recording of a quick interview I gave immediately after speaking at the Scottish Parliament earlier this year, as part of the Holyrood 350 campaign.

The Story of Cap & Trade is the second offering from the project that brought us The Story of Stuff. In this ten minute video, host Annie Leonard presents an excellent, clearly explained look at some of the devil in the detail of Cap & Trade, explaining how it works and who it benefits.

Having said that, it does leave out perhaps the most damning criticism of cap and trade schemes like the EU emissions trading scheme (EU ETS) – that they are not only a passive distraction from real solutions, but are actually used to justify avoiding them. As The Guardian reported in October 2007:

“One of the main objections of government to meeting the renewables target…is that it will undermine the role of the European emission trading scheme.” Leaked UK Government documents argue that “[Meeting the EU's target of 20% of energy being renewable by 2020] crucially undermines the scheme’s credibility … and reduces the incentives to invest in other carbon technologies like nuclear power.”

This is Dark Optimism’s first ever guest post. The below article was originally published a week ago by Charles Eisenstein, on the Reality Sandwich web magazine.

It blew me away, exploring the themes of cultural stories and definitions of self that will be familiar to my regular readers, yet bringing to light their deeper reaches in a way that I found both enlightening and exciting. It is longer than my usual contributions, but well worth the effort.

As Charles kindly gave permission for me to reproduce his article here, I will let his words speak for themselves.

—

The medicine man enters the outer vestibule of the sacred healing chamber. He dons the ceremonial vestments and performs the ritual ablutions, purifying himself for the healing ritual that is about to commence. Putting on identical masks, he and his acolytes enter the chamber, to which all others are forbidden entrance. The man they are healing is ready, having been ushered into a deep trance by another shaman using a magical elixir. Within the chamber are the ritual implements, which have themselves been purified, and which none but the initiated are allowed to touch. The medicine man calls for each implement in turn, handed to him by an acolyte. He uses these in a ritual scarification procedure that removes a small part of the ill man’s body. When he awakens from the trance, the man is magically healed, though some further ceremonies are required before he is able to leave the grounds of the temple of healing.

To even be allowed to perform this complex healing ritual, the medicine man must go through many years of training that include numerous tests, initiation ordeals, and the mastery of a special esoteric language. Upon completing his training, he is welcomed into the brotherhood of adepts, and his name is altered with a symbolic suffix. He swears a sacred oath and is given a piece of paper inscribed with mystical symbols in an archaic script. Thenceforth, he is treated with honour by his people and accorded all the perquisites of status.

I have just described surgery, as performed by licensed physicians in a modern hospital. All of the elements of ritual are present, yet we do not typically see what goes on as a ritual. “That’s not a ritual,” we say, “because each of those actions — the hand washing, the surgical masks, the professional training — all have a very good, rational reason.” Rituals, we think, must tap into something irrational, something magical; if they have any real effects, they are purely psychological in origin. We see rituals as a separate category of action that has been largely eliminated in today’s rational, science-based society. Asked for an example of a ritual, we might point to Communion in a Catholic church, or to a sweat lodge ceremony, or to something indigenous people do on the Discovery Channel.

I would like to offer a different conception of ritual that illuminates its continuing ubiquity in today’s world, and that suggests a means to deploy ritual as an agent of transformation. Let’s play with this definition: a ritual is a prescribed sequence of symbolic actions that draws meaning and power from a “story of the world”. In turn, it reinforces and affirms that story.

What, then, is a “story of the world”? By a story I mean a system of meanings and explanations that focuses human intention, assigns roles, coordinates activity, and says what is real. One example is the Story of Money, which assigns meaning to the slips of paper and information bits that comprise our money system. When that story falls apart, such as in Weimar Germany or 1993 Yugoslavia, money becomes nothing more than its physical substrate.

If you can enrol people in a story, then you can create something much bigger than you could build with your own hands. Even something so mundane as building a house requires telling a story that people believe in. The story, “A house will be built here,” includes such elements as workers’ paychecks, agreements to deliver materials, disbursement schedules, and so on. All of these are symbols. On the physical level, the workers’ paychecks are but slips of paper with blobs of ink on them. They have power only because of the story that embeds them, a story that all participants believe in. An alien anthropologist, though, might laugh patronizingly at our concern over these magical talismans with their sacred inscriptions. The same goes for the construction contract, inscribed with the mysterious personal mark of each signatory, and the delivery contract, which we inscribe with row after row of symbols in the superstitious belief that the desired materials they symbolize will actually show up in a truck on the appointed day.

Our lives today are rife with little rituals that sustain the Story of the World in which we have been living. There is nothing unusual about this; it is as it has always been. However, we are entering one of those special moments in history when an old story is coming to an end, to be replaced by a new one. We are emerging from two stories, in fact, two stories that are deeply interlocked. The first is the story of Self and World: we are discrete beings, fundamentally separate from each other and from the objective universe that contains us. The second is the Story of the People: it is the Ascent of Humanity, in which science and technology lift us from a state of dependency on nature to become nature’s master, separate and superior. The consummation of this story would be a destiny of space colonization and immortality, in which computers, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering complete our domination of nature and free us from natural limitations. These stories embed other, smaller stories, stories within stories within stories, that include everything in our world that depends on agreements, meanings, and symbols. So money, as I’ve said, is a story. The government is a story. The American Medical Association is a story. The law is a story. Dates and times are a story. An educational degree is a story. Professional licensure, your credit rating, ownership of any property, the air traffic control system, all are stories.

The rituals that sustain these stories include such things as writing a check, signing a contract, affixing a stamp, waiting in line, voting, filling out a form, writing a report, issuing a grade, affixing a label, signing off on a proposal, asking permission, showing a passport at immigration, friending someone on Facebook, registering a vehicle, making a schedule, using a theatre ticket, filing a lawsuit, or issuing a receipt. I think it is quite easy to see how these actions maintain the web of stories that underlies our society. It is perhaps more difficult to see the ritual nature of such activities as using hand disinfectant, getting a vaccination, dialling a telephone, taking a pill, using a condom, studying for an exam, performing a safety check on an airplane, performing surgery, or planting a garden. These tap into a much deeper level of story, that which underlies what we call physical reality. I won’t discuss this level much right now: the metaphysics of symbols, the ontological status of the storyteller, and so on. The laws of physics, that we think are so objective, reflect on a deep level our sense-of-self and the story of What Is that defines self and world. But my purpose right now is not to undo these deep metaphysical stories. For now I will speak mostly of the stories and rituals that create social reality. They will be enough to create a world far more beautiful than we dare imagine today.

As the overarching stories of our civilization draw to their conclusion, the rituals that draw from them and sustain them begin to grow stale. They lose their seamless integration into the logic of our lives, and begin to look, well, like “rituals.” Their meaning drains away from them. In previous essays I described how this is happening to our language, provoking a crisis of meaning where words are losing their magic. This is obvious to me every time I download some software or make a purchase on line, and have to click an “I agree” button located underneath a voluminous scrolling window filled with legal text entitled “Terms and Conditions.” When I do this, I am supposedly entering into a contract, a concept that draws on ancient sacred ceremonies that involved the swearing of oaths, the letting of blood, and so on. In political and legal philosophy, one often comes across the term “the sanctity of contract.” But today we recognize the numerous on-line contracts that we enter into as meaningless formalities, and we do not really feel like we are lying when we affirm, “I have read and agree to all these terms and conditions.”

In a similar vein, many of the more important ritual underpinnings of our society are dissolving as well. The ritual incantations of our financial officials, for example, are no longer having the intended effect on the economy. Our medical rituals are becoming less effective as well, a fact we, in a desperate effort to preserve the familiar story, attribute to “superbugs” or “patient noncompliance” or mysterious “genetic factors,” when in fact, it is the deep story of the War on Germs and the Conquest of Nature that underlies our medicine that is coming to an end. Something similar is happening in the educational system, where the multitudinous rituals based on the factory paradigm of standardization, “class”-ification, “grading” (as of industrial materials), and the subsumption of the individual to authority, are becoming increasingly ineffectual. Finally, the rituals of politics have become a transparent charade, where elected officials cynically invoke once-sacred principles neither they nor their listeners actually believe in. When they fail to keep their promises, when they enact policies that few of their supporters agree with, we increasingly don’t even bother to be disappointed, because the ritual of the campaign promise has become, transparently, nothing but that, a “ritual.”

Rituals are seamlessly woven into a story of the world and are, therefore, not even recognized as rituals (e.g., writing a check). When they start turning into “rituals,” we know that that story of the world is falling apart. What is happening to the rituals that sustain our civilization today has happened before, leaving impotent relics that we call rituals, but that are actually “rituals” in quotation marks. We might perform them out of nostalgia, a reverence for tradition, or in an attempt to restore the lost sacredness of modern life by borrowing it from another culture, but they will have little effect if we do not believe in a story that embeds them.

Let me offer a few examples of fake rituals, these “rituals in quotation marks.” Nearly all of the sweat lodge ceremonies I have been to were replete with fake rituals. Even if they scrupulously followed the prescribed procedures of the native tradition from which they originated, what was once authentic had become fake. That is because we did not truly believe the Story of the World in which the rituals were once embedded. In former times, when a Native American firekeeper invoked the ancestors, he was speaking from a world view in which the ancestors were a present, perhaps a palpable, reality. When he invoked the Four Directions, again he was speaking from a system in which the Four Directions, interconnected with many other stories, were an unquestioned, basic pillar of his understanding of the world, as undoubtedly real and objective to him as protons, neutrons, and electrons are to us. But today we are steeped in a different story, a story in which the ancestors do not participate in the events of our lives, and in which the four directions are merely points on a map. Science defines our basic understanding of what is real, and this reality picture has no room for ancestors, spirits, or Grandmother Spider creating the world. Even if we strive to believe in them, we cannot. A feeling lurks in the background, “This isn’t real.” Wanting to believe something based on sentiments about respecting traditions or restoring connection to earth or spirit is not the same as actually believing something. Beliefs are not mere vapours in the head, but reveal themselves as actions.

Some months ago, I attended a sweat lodge conducted by a full-blooded Native American. The ceremony was held at the top of a hill, with a station to be purified with sage smoke, another station to hear of the rules for the lodge, and so on. Each ritual was contained inside a larger ritual. But guess what the largest ritual was, the one that contained the whole experience? At the very bottom of the hill, before we could participate, we had to sign a waiver. The entire experience took place within a legal container, and that initial ritual gave primacy to the Story of the Law. I don’t think anyone experienced the sweat lodge as transformational; certainly I did not. The only real ritual was the signing of the waiver. Everything else was a “ritual.”

To be sure, it is possible for a very very powerful person to hold a group of people in his or her own Story of the World; in other words, to believe it so completely that he can hold that belief on behalf of those who do not believe. I have experienced rituals of that sort as well, but in my life they have been very rare indeed. In the case I just described, I could sense an inauthenticity, a breach in the integrity of the ceremony caused by surrendering its primacy to a story that was alien and hostile to it.

I hope that the reader someday has an opportunity to be in the presence of someone who can invoke the ancestors for real. Such a person will never say, “I would like to invoke the ancestors…,” which is two steps removed from a true invocation, or even “I invoke the ancestors, ” which is one step removed. He will address them directly, and in his invocation you will hear truth. You will feel the ancestors’ presence, and while your mind may doubt your heart will not. That feeling is unmistakable. Today it is only available to us in special moments, but as the old stories collapse and we reenter a world story that has room once again for the ancestors, we will have this experience more and more often. Life is so much richer for it!

Humanity today is transitioning into a new Story of the People, a new Story of Self, and a new Story of the World. I sometimes articulate it as “The connected self living in joyous co-creative partnership with Lover Earth.” I explained the paradigm of Lover Earth a little bit in “Money and the Turning of the Age”; no longer do we treat earth as a mother from whom we are entitled to take and take without thought for how much she is capable of giving. Such a relationship is proper for a child. I want my own children to feel free to receive — it is up to me to determine how much I am able to give. But the relationship to a lover is different: to a lover we desire to give as well as to receive, and we desire to create together, each offering our gifts toward a purpose transcending each of us, so that our union becomes greater than the sum of our individuality. And so, humanity-plus-earth is becoming a new thing; out of our sacred union, a third thing will be born. At the peak of our separation from nature, we fell in love with the earth, a moment marked perhaps by the first satellite photographs of our gorgeous planet.

As for the connected self, this is the self of inter-beingness, the self that realizes, not only as an intellectual concept but as a felt experience, that its very being includes the being of all other creatures. Contrary to the self of Descartes, of Adam Smith, of Darwinian biology, it is untrue that more for me is less for you. It is the self of the Gift, the self that knows that as we do unto others, so we do unto ourselves. And, that as we do unto ourselves, so we are in fact doing unto others. Such as self no longer lives in an objective universe of impersonal forces and generic masses. Its every choice shifts the cosmos, and everything that happens in the cosmos in some way happens within the self too.

Just as the rituals of the old world create and sustain it, so also can we use rituals to create and sustain the new world-generating stories. Rituals occupy a special status among all the actions and beliefs that form a story-matrix. Rituals connect us to what is real within that story. They are among our most powerful tools of reality creation. Therefore, if you would like to participate in the creation of the world of the connected self living in co-creative partnership with Lover Earth, I suggest you enact rituals that empower and create this new story. You can easily recognize them, because from within the new story they are natural and true. They are not “rituals,” but an integral part of the new reality. From within it, they make sense. From the perspective of separation they are irrational, but from the perspective of reunion they are not irrational or magical at all. They will, however, feel sacred.

Let’s consider a small example: sorting out your garbage for recycling, composting, etc. In the old story, unless you are doing it to avoid a fine, this is quite irrational. What benefit is there to you if the landfill is a few inches lower? In the objective world of force and mass, it simply does not matter if you, one person, recycle or not. It doesn’t matter either if you buy lots of plastic packaging, or eat beef from a deforested Brazilian jungle, or save a few gallons of water every day by conserving toilet flushes. In any event, the juggernaut of destruction rolls on. These actions only matter if everyone else does them too, and if they do, then it doesn’t even matter if you do them or not. Therefore, it is irrational to do them if they involve any expense or inconvenience, as often they do.

Because they do not make sense from within the old story, we find all kinds of ways to make ourselves do these things anyway. The favourite means is to connect them to our self-image, so that we get to think of ourselves as worthy and good because we recycle, care about the environment, and so on. We can understand them as rituals — which is what comes to mind naturally as I watch people sort different kinds of cans into different bins — whose symbolic meaning is “I am doing my part,” “I am good,” “I am right,” or “I am worthy of love.” Unfortunately, they actually feed a deeper story, which is something like, “I am not really good, so I must recycle, I must try hard, I must be a good boy or girl.” In the case of many environmental activists, these efforts usually accompany a sanctimonious attitude: a conditional approval of the self and a resentment toward those who are less enlightened, less ethical, less conscious. There is little joy to be found in sanctimony.

These same rituals become much more powerful within the new story. Instead of thinking about them in terms of ethics, doing your part, or being good, think of all the irrational things you do as gifts to Lover Earth. When you pay triple for a fair-trade shirt, or do without one; when you plant a tree or help stop a new road; when you make any contribution, no matter how small, to the well-being of the planet and its animals, plants, waters, air, soil, and people, source that act in the spirit of gratitude and offer it in the spirit of a gift. Even if your offering is like the shy, small gift of a teenage boy to his sweetheart, the earth will be touched and grateful. This gratitude is something we can feel. In the old story, the story of impersonal laws and generic masses, the only explanation for this feeling is that we are imagining it, projecting it, anthropomorphizing the earth. From the story of the separate self, how could you feel what another is feeling, and why would you even care? It is irrational. But in the world of the connected self, it is quite to be expected that we can feel what others are feeling, for they are us. Each of us is the sum total of our relationships, and not separate beings having relationships, discrete subjects possessing something separate from our core being called a “relationship.”

What is irrational and difficult in the old story becomes easy and natural in the new. The struggle to be good is over. That struggle, that war against the self, is based on a conception of a self that is bad: the Economic Man seeking to maximize rational self-interest, the selfish gene seeking to maximize reproductive self-interest. Our civilization is built upon that self; hence a penal system, a religious system, an educational system designed to overcome our natural selfishness through fear, guilt, and shame. Do you, my friend, feel guilty for not living more sustainably? For your complicity in a culture that is destroying the earth? Do you wield that guilt over yourself and others in order to compel better behaviour? If you do, then the rituals of recycling and reducing will actually strengthen the old story of which that guilt is part.

Instead, I invite you to embed these rituals in the new story, and in turn to draw upon the new story in creating new rituals. From the old story, it is stupid for me to wash used pieces of plastic wrap and stick them to the refrigerator to reuse. How much oil or landfill space am I going to save that way? Not very much! But I don’t think of it that way at all. I am not doing this to be good or to do my part. I am having a personal relationship with that piece of plastic wrap, and with all the beings that created it, and with all of its relations. When I bury my compost instead of putting it in the trash can, I feel the happiness of those apple cores at returning to the ground, and the happiness of the earthworms who will turn them into soil, and of the soil that will receive the worm castings. Entering the new world means shedding any pretence that you or I are better, more ethical, more moral, or more spiritual than anyone else, and allowing our true selfishness — the selfishness of the connected self — to blossom. It is an opening to more pleasure, a bigger trusting of desire, not a conquest of pleasure and desire. And if the joy I share with the apple core is my projection, if the story of the connected self is my own comforting illusion to assuage the loneliness of living in a cold hard universe of force and mass, then so be it!

Many of the rituals of the old world can be embedded in the new. In addition to the above, such things as writing a check can be done in a new spirit of gratitude and gifting rather than payment. Other of the old world rituals are fast becoming obsolete, however, and we want no part of them. I, for example, cannot bear to write a resume when one is requested for a conference I’ve been invited to speak at. Nor do I participate in many of the rituals of the medical system or school system. Other rituals that feel wrong to me I still participate in, because I am afraid or not ready to exit that part of the old world. I still file an income tax return, for instance. Each of us, as we pioneer in our own way our unique part in the story of the connected self on Lover Earth, is moved to leave behind different of the old rituals.

Rituals bridge the distinction between symbol and reality: they don’t just mean something, they are something. They are actions in themselves. When tribal peoples conducted a ritual re-enactment of the creation of the universe, they weren’t just narrating or representing that creation, they were actually participating in it. For them, cosmogenesis wasn’t a discrete event at the beginning of linear time, but an ongoing event taking place outside of time and diffracted onto it. The ritual didn’t represent the creation of the world; it was the creation of the world. So also, the world-creating rituals we enact today must be real to us. Do not invoke the Four Directions or the ancestors unless they are a living reality to you. Otherwise you will just be “playing Injun’” and reinforcing the story behind the phenomenon of cultural appropriation. Rituals must not be less real than any other action; they must be more real. Rituals are actions that are infused with sacredness, connecting us to what is real, true, and important. Perhaps one day, a fully healed humanity will no longer distinguish something called a ritual, because all actions will be sacred. Until then, rituals serve to remind us of the sacred world-creating power of all we do, just as prayers can remind us of the sacredness of all speech, and holy sites can remind us of the sacredness of all the earth.

Make your rituals real. Your gifts to Lover Earth and to other parts of your connected self are not just symbols of love, they are love. I am not saying to be content with reusing your plastic wrap. Momentous and heroic actions, that save a forest or free a nation, come from our enactment of the roles of a new story too. They are always irrational from within the story of separation. No one ever did anything great by fighting herself and trying hard to be good. No will is strong enough. But when we give ourselves to a great story, it carries us towards acts which, from outside it, look brave and magnanimous. As we release ourselves into the story of the connected self and Lover Earth, as that story becomes real to us and we believe it in every cell, we become capable of miracles: things which were impossible from the old story, but possible from the new.

The institutions built upon the stories of the Ascent of Humanity and the separate self are falling apart around us. I believe that everyone knows in his or her heart that we are indeed connected, interdependent for our very being, and that we are coming into co-creative partnership with a planet we are falling madly in love with. You may know it and not quite believe it yet. My job is to help you believe what you already know. But even if you don’t fully believe it now, no matter. The old stories cannot hold much longer. Like it or not, we are being thrust into the new. But why wait? The rituals that connect us to the reality of Reunion are already coalescing, forming new systems of meaning, institutions, forms of social interaction, conceptual vocabularies, exchange infrastructure, and the myriad human roles of the new stories. Paradigms as diverse as permaculture, energy healing, nonviolent communication, P2P economics, alternative currency, and thousands more all draw from and contribute to the new Story of the People, Story of the World, and Story of Self. As we work, each according to our gifts, to create them, we make it all the easier for the heart’s knowing of a more beautiful world to blossom into belief and then into reality for all of us. That new world is a place we can only enter together. The reality of the connected self requires it.

~ by Charles Eisenstein, originally posted at Reality Sandwich

As the evidence for the utter inapplicability of free market carbon trading to our climate emergency continues to pile up, interest continues to grow in the less PR-friendly alternative – the rationing of carbon-rated energy.

Yesterday, the UK Government’s All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil and Gas published a report commissioned from The Lean Economy Connection. The report, which I co-authored with Dr. David Fleming, emphasises the necessity of considering our pressing energy challenges alongside climate change, and argues that national energy rationing systems on the model of TEQs (Tradable Energy Quotas) will be essential to the fair distribution of fuel as shortages unfold, with implementation now an urgent priority for the UK.

John Hemming MP, Chairman of the All Party group, stated that the UK government remains unprepared for peak oil: “The evidence is now strong that peak oil is either upon us or just over the horizon. Even the International Energy Agency accepts that an oil supply crunch seems to be on its way. The UK government should urgently consider the TEQs system, as I believe it’s the only comprehensive and fair way to tackle climate change and the coming oil crisis.”

“The alternative to rationing by tradable quotas is to hold back consumption through massive price increases. This gives economic instability, unemployment and fuel poverty. We need to plan for a system to give some stability in what will soon be a sellers market for fossil fuels rather than a buyers market.”

TEQs were also the subject of a Parliamentary Westminster Hall debate on the 18th June, called by the Chairman of the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, after the EAC came out firmly in favour of what they term ‘Personal Carbon Trading’ (PCT) following DEFRA’s pre-feasibility study in May 2008.

Despite their welcome enthusiasm, I do find this ‘re-branding’ of the debate somewhat pernicious. Of course it is to some extent understandable – politicians deal in public consent, and words like “quotas” and “rationing” bring with them the distinctly unwelcome connotations of shortage and war. Indeed, perhaps only truly horrific words like “taxation” would rank lower in a popularity contest.

Yet a moment’s thought shows us that this bad name is undeserved – rationing is a response to hard times, not the cause of them, and in times of shortage we cry out for fair shares. We need only imagine wartime Britain without a rationing system.

The difficulty today is perhaps that the electorate do not yet recognise the scale or urgency of the energy/climate problem we face, and so are more than happy to do without the inconvenience a solution might bring.

Still, politics is politics, we might think, and in a democracy ideas must be ‘sold’ to the electorate (here H.L. Mencken comes to mind: “Democracy is the system where everybody gets what the majority deserve”).

Yet despite the names “PCT” and “TEQs” often being used interchangeably, the distinction between the two is not merely a matter of marketing, it is the distinction between two discrete schemes, and between two very different cultural approaches.

It is the distinction between a system that maximises economic growth and hopes to reduce emissions, and one that guarantees emissions reductions and lets the market (and citizens, businesses, communities…) figure out the best solutions within that context. It is the distinction between a ‘market-based framework’ (a la the ineffectual EU ETS) and a framework within which the market is constrained.

When it comes down to it, there is no getting away from the fact that it is not PCT – an extension of the discredited carbon trading model to the level of the individual – that we need, but TEQs – energy rationing – with the size of our rations determined by energy availability and the latest science on retaining a hospitable climate.

It is true that trading is a necessary part of such a scheme (both since prohibiting the exchange of rations in the past has always led to substantial black market activity, and since certain vocations intrinsically require more energy, meaning that a non-tradable equal entitlement would simply destroy many professions) but it is not the essence of the scheme. The heart of the scheme is a non-negotiable respect for the limits set by physical reality, and a desire to harness the collective genius of the populace in thriving within those limits.

Sadly, the slightly subtle distinction between the necessity of utilising trading in an energy rationing scheme, and the insanity of ‘trading as replacement for solution’, leaves plenty of ground for the professional spin doctors to confuse those who don’t have time to unpick the differences, leading us ever closer to the non-solution of a scheme designed to pander to the popular pretence that we can simply ignore the realities of our time.

—
The Dutch edition of David Fleming’s seminal description of TEQs – Energy and the Common Purpose – has also recently been published.

A week after NASA’s leading climate scientist Dr. James Hansen, actress Darryl Hannah and others crossed the line into illegal direct action in a desperate attempt to prevent coal mining and burning from ending our hopes of retaining a hospitable climate, twenty-nine protesters are standing trial here in England for a similar action last year.

The ‘Drax 29′ admit stopping (safely) a coal train two miles outside the Drax power station in an attempt to prevent the deaths already being caused by climate change. Nonetheless they have entered a “Not Guilty” plea against the charge of ‘Obstructing the Railway’ (which carries a maximum two year prison sentence). They are defending themselves in court, and after reading their inspiring closing statement justifying this position to the jury, I felt moved to create the pledge above. You can read their defence yourself in The Guardian here, or it is reproduced in full below:

–

Members of the jury.

I’m going to try to summarise why we feel that we are not guilty, why we feel that what we did was right, despite the very proper laws against obstructing trains, why we feel that it was the wrong decision of the Crown Prosecution Service to prosecute us in this case, and why we don’t feel that we are guilty of a crime.

I want to start by responding to your request for clarification yesterday about “lawful excuse”. His honour may say [in his summing up] that it’s true that there are ways in law to make space for circumstances, to allow a bigger picture to be considered.

These ways can have different names for different offences — so for example “lawful excuse”, which you asked about yesterday, applies only to the charge of criminal damage. For example, last September, a jury in Kent found six protesters not guilty of committing £30,000 worth of criminal damage to Kingsnorth coal-fired power station, since the group were acting to prevent a greater crime. Those on trial did not disagree that criminal damage is a crime, just that, in certain circumstances, it may be necessary and proportionate to cause some damage to prevent a great crime. That jury agreed.

His honour may explain that there is a legal defence of “necessity”, that applies to most laws, and that it was on the basis of “necessity” — the fact that we believed our actions were going to save lives and that we had to act — that we prepared a legal defence before this trial. Along with many legal professionals we were very disappointed by his honour’s decision prior to the trial that this defence was not available to us in law. Nonetheless we decided not to appeal against it. We felt that you the jury would be free to decide on the facts of a case as you find them – and not just the ones his honour tells you are relevant.

It’s up to you to decide whether what we did was necessary. I would like to emphasise to you that we believed and we still believe that it was urgently necessary to do what we did, and proportionate to the scale of the problem, that the consequences of that train taking coal into Drax are so serious that any reasonable person would understand our reasons for stopping it. To help explain why we were so sure of the links between Drax’s activities and deaths around the world we had expert witnesses lined up to talk to you about the immediate and ongoing harm that Drax’s emissions cause. However from what evidence we have been able to get across to you, with his honour’s indulgence, we hope that you can see that these facts speak for themselves, and our actions, though harmful, were indeed necessary to try to stop a greater harm. And if you agree with that then you still have a legal right – as the jury – to find us not guilty.

You’ve heard it said already I think, that the judge decides about the law, but the jury decide about the facts. What does that mean? It means you the jury can decide as you see fit. You the jury have a constitutional right to follow your own judgement and not necessarily follow the judge’s directions to find us guilty. In other words, you get to make the final decision. In law this principle is called the jury’s power of nullification, and it’s been a right that has been regularly used over the years when juries have felt the law has been applied harshly, or inappropriately, or unjustly, or incorrectly.

Perhaps I can explain this with a quote from a very senior judge, Lord Denning. He said:

“This principle was established as long ago as 1670 in a celebrated case of the Quakers, William Penn and William Mead. All that they had done was to preach in London on a Sunday afternoon. They were charged with causing an unlawful and tumultuous assembly there. The judge directed the jury to find the Quakers guilty, but they refused. The Jury said Penn was guilty of preaching, but not of unlawful assembly. The Judge refused to accept this verdict. He threatened them with all sorts of pains and punishments. He kept them ‘all night without meat, drink, fire, or other accommodation: they had not so much as a chamber pot, though desired’. They still refused to find the Quakers guilty of an unlawful assembly. He kept them another night and still they refused. He then commanded each to answer to his name and give his verdict separately. Each gave his verdict ‘Not Guilty’. For this the judge fined them 40 marks apiece and cast them into prison until it was paid. One of them Edward Bushell, thereupon brought his (case) before the Court of the King’s Bench. It was there held that no judge had any right to imprison a juryman for finding against his direction on a point of law; for the judge could never direct what the law was without knowing the facts, and of the facts the jury were the sole judge. The jury were thereupon set free.”

This was affirmed as recently as 2005, in relation to the case of Wang, where a committee of Law Lords in the highest court in the land, the House of Lords, concluded that: “there are no circumstances in which a judge is entitled to direct a jury to return a verdict of guilty”. So you do have that right to decide for yourselves. And unlike in 1670, his honour won’t be able to fine you, or put you in prison for making what he sees as the wrong decision.

There have been many cases over the years where juries have decided, on reflecting more broadly, to find people not guilty despite directions from the judge. For example, the case of Zelter and others who were accused of damage to an aircraft about to be used for bombing civilians. In all of these and others the judge said that the defendants admitted the offence and so must be found guilty. But the jury chose to look outside the limited view of the court room, and to find them not guilty.

The freedom that you have is what enables the law, where necessary, to move forward. It is what allows you to look beyond the confines of this court to the wider world, and to make a judgement based not just on law, but to make a judgement based on justice. Justice is the force that underpins and breathes life into the law, and it is your role as the jury to see that justice as you see it is done.

We all know that times change, and what was acceptable in one era may not be acceptable in another. You have heard of how it was once legal to own other people, how it was illegal for women to vote. Well one way or another we are going to have to stop burning coal and move on from the fossil fuel era. And that means that the law will eventually have to change and acknowledge the harm that carbon emissions do to all of us, by making them illegal. The only question is whether the law will catch up in time for there to be anything left to protect.

We are not trying to tell you how to decide. We are only trying to say that it is up to you, and we are grateful for that.

I want you to think back to that situation of there being a person on the tracks ahead of that train going on its way to Drax. Members of the Jury, it may sound like a strange thing to say but in truth there is a person on the branch line to Drax. The prosecution have not challenged the facts we presented to you on oath about the consequences of burning coal at Drax. 180 human lives lost every year, species lost forever. There is a direct, unequivocal, proven link between the emissions of carbon dioxide at this power station and the appalling consequences of climate change. That many of those consequences impact on the poor of other nations or people in Hull we don’t know and should not in any way negate the reality of this suffering. We got on that train to stop those emissions, because all other methods in our democracy were failing. Just because we don’t know the name of the person on the tracks or where they live or the exact time and day of their dying, does not in our view mean they are less worthy of protection.

We don’t dispute that there’s a law against obstructing trains. We don’t dispute that obstructing trains is a crime and should continue to be a crime. We just argue that in this case, we should not be found guilty of a crime for trying to block this train on its way to Drax.

On Tuesday the prosecution argued that what we did was quite simply a crime, and as a result we should be found guilty. They were trying to suggest that if you find us not guilty, the whole world would fall apart. We argue that the more likely route to the whole world falling apart is if we continue burning coal in the enormous quantities that it is being burnt at Drax.

His honour may say that we have been telling you stories, that we are trying to introduce emotions into the trial to distort the evidence. But we have been telling you the facts. If those facts move you, that’s because they are moving, and they are what moved us to do what we did.

We are happy to be judged by you, the jury.

Thank you for taking the time to listen to us.

–

See full details of the pledge I have created in support of the Drax 29 – and the option to sign – by clicking the image below.

One highlight for me was watching the world première of the movie “In Transition” and being surprised and delighted to find that I was in it (having completely forgotten the quick interview they grabbed with me at my book launch!). Another was meeting an A-Level teacher who is already using my book as a teaching aid for his Environmental Design students.

But perhaps of wider interest was the fact that Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, turned up at the Transition Conference as a ‘keynote listener’, but still managed to drop a few bombshells.

When we buttonholed him for a bit of a chat (audio here, courtesy of Traydio.com), I was pleased to hear that he understood the need for Government to remain a step removed from the Transition movement in order to avoid “strangling” it. However, I must confess I had to refrain from gasping as he declared that:

“If you think about the history of the debate on peak oil as I understand it, climate change makes debate about peak oil a bit of a second-order debate, because we have to start making the transition to low carbon forms of energy in any case. Whether you think that peak oil’s in 2020, 2030 or 2040… I don’t need to have the debate about peak oil… to know that we have to start making the transition as quickly as possible.”

Where to begin? Clearly Ed’s understanding of the history of the peak oil debate differs a little from mine. Let’s start with the obvious – with many experts agreeing that we likely saw peak oil last year, for our Minister for Energy to be pondering how many decades in the future it might lie is, frankly, terrifying.

But what I personally find even more worrying is that he (and thus presumably his department) has not yet grasped that climate change and peak oil often pull in opposite directions. Perhaps Ed should cast his eyes across the Atlantic to the US Congress, where the advocates of Climate Change Bills (to implement strict carbon budgets) are doing battle with the champions of Energy Independence Bills (to subsidise carbon-intensive tar sands and coal-to-liquids projects).

As I wrote here last year, and more recently in The Transition Timeline, there is a very real tension between addressing climate change and addressing peak oil, and policy based purely on one side of this equation could be very destructive indeed. Unfortunately, our government is still caught on the horns of this ‘supply side dilemma’, and is desperately casting around for more rapidly-deployable low-carbon energy supplies.

It is only slowly dawning on them that renewable supply cannot increase as fast as oil and gas are declining, that nuclear only makes the problem worse, and that coal is not an option if we want a habitable planet. The inescapable conclusion is that if we are to treat climate change with the seriousness which it undoubtedly deserves, then we may well have already entered our years of energy descent. The only reasonable response is to find ways to thrive in this context – to reduce energy demand in line with the reducing supply – but as yet Ed still believes that only Denial sells to the voting public:

“In a way I’m less optimistic than you are… you’re optimistic that you can persuade people to adopt a sort of “no growth” model of society – I’m pretty convinced that you couldn’t persuade people of that… Even if you were right about your model of society, I just don’t believe that you’re going to convince people of that”

Actually, I do agree with Ed that we need to think long and hard about what “economic growth” actually means before we debate whether we want it, though I’m not sure we’ll see eye-to-eye when that debate reaches its head.

Of course it doesn’t come as an overwhelming surprise to see my perspective deemed darker yet more optimistic than the Government view, but since the Transition Vision of the future seems about the only desirable outcome out there to shoot for, I think I’ll just keep right on shooting, whether Ed rates our chances or not.

Having said that, with Rob’s recent post on ‘burn out’ in mind, it’s definitely time for a day off for me. Tomorrow is my birthday, and I will be taking a hard-earned breather at Kew Gardens with my beautiful and inspirational girlfriend. Back soon!