The one-sentence summary

It is possible to picture how the world can overcome the climate challenge that we face and arrive at a happier and less destructive future.

Can’t be bothered to read it? Listen to the 5-minute summary in two parts.

Want to buy the book? CLICK HERE

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

  • This is a fiction book in which fictional eyewitness accounts tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. It is impossible to summarize in the conventional sense, but here are some points of interest.
  • You can’t trust volatile people, and they know it.
  • Old Chinese saying: cross the river by feeling the stones.
  • First there is practice, and then theory.
  • Trotsky said that the party is always trying to keep up with the masses. Strategy comes from below and tactics from above, not the reverse. The smallest trigger can start a mass movement.
  • Sastrugi are sharp, irregular grooves or ridges formed on snow surfaces by wind erosion and deposition. Snow can be sastrugied.
  • The Basque country in Spain is the birthplace of Mondragon, a kind of co-op of co-ops, in which the profits don’t get shifted out to shareholders. Instead, it is divided three ways – a third for the employee owners, a third to capital improvements, and a third to charities chosen by the employees.
  • The author envisages a range of boom and bust scenarios including the Little Depression and the Super Stagnation.
  • Fiat money is a national currency that is not pegged to the price of commodities like gold and silver. Its value is largely based on the public’s faith in the currency’s issuer – normally a government or central bank.
  • New modes of transport include five-masted ships with photovoltaic or piezoelectric sails and surfaces, kites at the front and hydrofoils for optimum speed.
  • One testimony is the personification of carbon, from its explosive birth with a mighty explosion, to incarceration inside the hot new earth, to being stuck simultaneously to two oxygen atoms, then released from a seam by humans in 1634.
  • Once the so-called experts realized that they had no idea what the global economy was really doing, they introduce Carbon Quantitative Easing – a huge new multi-variant experiment in social engineering.
  • Pebble mob missiles are more powerful than the atomic bomb. You could use them and they couldn’t be stopped. Small, launched from mobile launchers, coming from all directions in a coordinated attack in which they only congregate at their target in the last few seconds of their flights. They give off no radioactive signals and can be hidden until the moment of launch. A frightening vision of the future – this is of course fiction, for the moment at least.
  • Modern Monetary Theory is a philosophy of economics that holds that the economy works for humans, not humans for the economy. In another MMT acronym, it is referred to as the Magic Money Tree. Governments don’t experience debt like individuals do because they can create new money whenever they want.
  • Jevons Paradox states that more energy creation means more energy use, but clean sources can outrun that equation, because it doesn’t matter how much you use.
  • Economics is above all a system of quantified ethics and political power that depends on measurement.
  • In the 2,000-Watt Society, everyone operates a low-burn approach, with every item usage rated for energy costs and carbon burn.
  • Have you heard that the warming of the oceans means that the amount of omega-3 fatty acids in fish, and thus available for human consumption, may drop by as much as 60%? Since these are crucial to signal transduction in the brain, it’s possible that our collective intelligence is now rapidly dropping because of an ocean-warming-caused diminishment in brain power.
  • Change itself was changing.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

  • All of this is of course fiction, or as some might say, science fiction. But as ever, the more plausible it seems the closer it may be getting to near-fact in the not-too-distant future.