Save The Planet

skepticism in science is essential to increase understanding of the natural world. Yet, ideologically based disinformation is often ethically abhorrent particularly in regard to behaviors about which there is credible scientific support for the conclusion that these activities threaten life and the ecological systems on which life depend. This report focuses on specific tactics that have been deployed in the climate change disinformation campaign.

the controversy over climate change science that has unfolded in the last twenty years is a strong example of the urgent need to create new societal norms about how to deal with scientific uncertainty for human problems

scientific uncertainty about the consequences of technologies that have great potential for good and harm create new, profound ethical challenges for the human race

at root is the conflict between the need to radically change our use of natural resources and the desire to maintain current forms of economic growth

enhancing the media's ability to communicate messages emerging from the underlying science

governments signed up to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) have missed their 2010 target, set in 2002, of achieving "a significant reduction in the rate of biodiversity loss"

Across generations people construct a conception of what is environmentally normal based on the natural world encountered in childhood

with each ensuing generation, the amount of environmental degradation increases, but each generation tends to take that degraded condition as the non-degraded condition, as the normal experience

None of us living today have experienced certain forms of interaction with nature that were common even one or two hundred years ago.

humans are using 30% more resources than the Earth can replenish each year, which is leading to deforestation, degraded soils, polluted air and water, and dramatic declines in numbers of fish and other species

we are running up an ecological debt of $4tr (£2.5tr) to $4.5tr every year

populations and consumption keep growing faster than technology finds new ways of expanding what can be produced from the natural world

when there’s money to be made, both workers and the environment are expendable

If you are a CEO who skims millions of dollars off other people’s labor, it’s called a “bonus.”  If you are a flood victim who breaks into a sporting goods store to grab a lifejacket, it’s called looting.  If you lose your job and fall behind on your mortgage, you get evicted.  If you are a banker-broker who designed flawed mortgages that caused a million people to lose their homes, you get a second-home vacation-mansion near a golf course.

The 1% are willing to spend billions impeding democratic initiatives, which is why every so-called environmental issue is also about building a democratic culture.

The Stockholm Memorandum concludes that we have entered a new geological era: the Anthropocene

we are transgressing planetary boundaries that have kept civilization safe for the past 10,000 years.

the first “Earth Summit,” was held in Rio, leading to the Agenda 21 “blueprint for a sustainable planet,” UN conventions on climate change and biodiversity, and the creation of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (UNSCD). Since then, an entire ecosystem of global, national, governmental and non-governmental organisations has emerged to advocate and implement the closer integration of human productive life with knowledge about the environment: to observe the “limits to growth.” The most notable of these is the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), under which a global agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions is being sought.

There is vast disparity between what the advocates of political environmentalism have claimed and reality. So why are world leaders set to meet next month in Rio at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development?

The 1972 Stockholm meeting discussed the “need for new concepts of sovereignty, based not on the surrender of national sovereignties but on better means of exercising them collectively, and with a greater sense of responsibility for the common good.” In other words, the world can be fed, clothed and housed at the cost of autonomy. This surrendering of autonomy is a price worth paying, according to its advocates, whose argument has been reduced to a neat little slogan: global problems need global solutions.