Last year, I spoke at a city council meeting in Vista, California where the focus was on the “General Plan”. This “General Plan” is Vista’s version of California state’s “Climate Action Plan”. Since 2011, California law has mandated that every city have a General Plan, but only recently have cities started hosting meetings and workshops to involve community members in discussing what citizens want in the plan and marginally clarifying what citizens should expect the plan’s fruition to really look like.
For context, prior to the meeting, I prepared 3 questions to ask the city officials regarding the General Plan & provided each a copy of the questions to follow along as I spoke. Admittedly, I didn’t expect anything other than outright dismissal of my questions but I was extremely wrong. I got a response I need to share with you.
Before I do that, I want to separately address any potential readers based on geography:
⁃ Citizens of Vista, if possible, start going to the meetings for the General Plan & listen to what’s coming. I know it’s hard to carve out time with all that life sends our way but if you have any level of concern for future of the city (or your place in the city) show up to one of these specific meetings & listen to the plan they have in mind for the city, bearing fully in mind what Commissioner Looney says from 6:30-9:42 in the video below.
⁃ Citizens elsewhere, google whatever state you live in along with the words “climate action plan”. If your state has has one, check & see if a law was passed requiring the city you live in to adopt a climate action plan (CAP) or general plan as well. Since 33 states already have, I’d almost bet on it, so if it happens to be so, I suggest watching the clip below & asking yourself “is what Commissioner Looney says from 6:30-9:42 going on in my city too?”
Sorry this is a long video (by today’s standards) but I wanted to show every city member’s response unedited.
If anyone wants to watch the entirety of the meeting:
I can’t say for certain when, or even if, the things I will write about in this post will happen; admittedly I hope I’m dead wrong overall but deep-down, I see this becoming our future.
I don’t think it’s necessary to be reiterating the approaching global carbon footprint system but for those unaware: in due time, our consumer practices, all objects purchased & accounted for, will come with notations on the receipts of not just how much legal tender was used to procure the objects but how much carbon was released to create the objects & how much carbon is ultimately released to physically get them to you, the consumer. My favorite real-life example of this burgeoning system is the DO Black card from MasterCard that came out in 2019 but there’s a slew of others already available for public use & others on the way.
Though it seems to be a newfangled form of accounting & a tool for conscious conservation efforts on a personal scale, the question of “what are you doing to reduce your carbon footprint” is hardly a novel inquiry & a plastic card with a monthly carbon limit is not the sole solution we will be propositioned with.
Immediately following the advent of the climate movement & all rhetoric revolving around personal carbon emissions, a consensus was beginning to form in academia, politics, economics & in the bedroom: that children are the worst emitters of carbon.
In 2009, statisticians at Oregon State University published a paper titled, “Family planning: A major environmental emphasis” wherein the first paragraph suggests having one less child will combat climate change on a personal level. Saturated with negative sentiments of western lifestyles, lines like, “[u]nder current conditions in the U.S., for instance, each child ultimately adds about 9,441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average parent – about 5.7 times the lifetime emissions for which, on average, a person is responsible” are strung together & culminate in a passive-aggressive suggestion that the west forgo rearing children for the sake of…other children, I guess.
But it was well-received; faculty from other universities wrote their own papers with the same topics & arguments, non-government organizations reposted the article on their blogs & even comedians were referencing the paper itself, as seen in a bit done by Doug Stanhope a little over ten years ago now:
He cusses a good amount fyi.
The idea of restricting & reducing creation for the sake of conservation has slowly evolved from academic assertions, comedic input & political banter to just about an every day conversation for just about every single thing.
One of the articles I find most interesting & equally alarming comes from the online publication “Science Alert” where the concept of a digital carbon footprint is discussed & detailed as a remnant of corporate & civilian impact on the environment by way of data storage & use of memory space. The very last paragraph in the article says, “[y]ou can even make a start yourself by deciding which photos and videos you no longer need. Every file stored on the Apple iCloud or Google Photos adds to your digital carbon footprint,” which leads the ultra-cynic in me to believe they are slowly advocating for the self-induced destruction of self-documentation & digital relics of our families: “delete your family photos & family history for the environment or pay an inflated rate to compensate others for your narcissism” is really all I see that turning into, up to a point.
Though, here in California, like we always do, we took this idea a step further & started to run with it.
It was only a few months ago when a Smithsonian Magazine article came out with the title, “California Has Legalized Human Composting” & a subheading saying, “By 2027, Golden State residents will have the choice to turn their bodies into nutrient-rich compost”.
Though it seems conscientious & admirable to willingly forego a traditional form of burial or even cremation (which I’ve already seen ridiculed online as the “worst method” because of carbon release) I doubt this option has anything to do with ecological efforts & has everything to do with the next generation of children.
Imagine, a couple in America give birth to a child in 2030 & successfully provide the child the resources & nutrition they need until 18 years of age. Imagine, the parents die on the day after the 18th birthday, successfully leaving behind a small portion of liquid cash & a negative carbon footprint; surely, the IRS & any presiding authorities will tax the cash transferred from estate to beneficiary but how will the child offset the increased carbon footprint they inherited from their parent’s knowing the value of the footprint was exacerbated by the child’s existence?
Will little Sally, Sarah, Sue, Simon, whatever they may be called, have the option of cremating their parents to reduce the inherited carbon footprint? Will little Jack & Jill have the option of purging data centers & servers of their parents digital documents & photos of themselves as infants to reduce the inherited carbon footprint?
Today, the question of “what are you doing to reduce your carbon footprint?” is almost entirely presented to adults & in scenarios wherein the adolescent members of society are queried the same way, the answers are predetermined & practiced in school settings ie recycling, reusing, excessive hand sanitizer use in lieu of washing hands with water & soap; today, the answers from adults vary between “being conscious of where my consumables come from”, “cutting back on using this/that resource”, or the big one, “not having kids”.
Examples from Reddit:
Another example:
In 20-30 years, the question of “what are you doing to reduce your carbon footprint?” will be presented to kids that grew up in a world where they were told that they themselves are the problem; that their parents selfish decision to give them life is what will ruin the rest of ours & they will have evidence of this sentiment almost everywhere they look. From legislative & authoritative bodies like the UN & the WEF, all the way to regular people online, the children of today will have incontrovertible evidence that their existence was called into question by those who were never going to raise them or impact their lives in any positive way…and they will act in kind when asked, “do you think this life has value when considering how much carbon their lifestyle creates, or created?” Just in case anyone read it wrong, they will not act kindly – they will reciprocate these public calls for the extermination & restriction of specific life-forms; they will look to their predecessors & see a precedent that allows them to view life & death as parts of a financial equation that may or may not provide them financial gain. Maybe they’ll know there’s nothing to gain from this admittedly prematurely postulated position I’ve posed but maybe they’ll act accordingly just to spite the ones that started this game of hating the next generation, a sort of “treat others the way they treated me” mentality.
All I know is we are on a slippery slope of involving & equating the external adjudication of postmortem affairs with climate change narratives & finances in a way we have not thoroughly grasped or even imagined.
Do what you will in this life but remember: future generations will know what was done unless something is done to hide the truth. In 20-30 years, what will be the truth? That we’re doing all of this for the next generation? That we’re doing all of this for the environment? We’ll see.
As of late, the discussions of fertility rates, bodily autonomy/agency & general adolescent care increasingly center around philosophical assertions as to the pertinence of proposed legislation or outright purely economic statements pointing to losses & gains.
On June 17th, 2022, the World Economic Forum stated, “[f]or the last 70 years, fertility rates have decreased worldwide, with a total 50% decline.” This was only a few months after Elon Musk tweeted (in May of this year) a WSJ article about US birth rates declining; since then, as though everyone’s been putting their minds (and other things) to it, a flurry of seemingly reactionary events have taken place. On June 18th the CDC approved COVID-19 vaccination for children who are at least 6 months old, legislative action took place in the form of the Roe v Wade overturn scenario on June 24th & only a handful of days prior to writing this, scientists in Israel announced a breakthrough in medical research & experimentation: the “synthetic embryo” which “bypassed the need for sperm, eggs and fertilisation”. Even at the Oregon Health & Science University, artifical eggs devoid of genetic material are being manipulated:
"If successful, they plan to then fertilize those eggs with sperm and grow the resulting embryos in the lab for five or six days to see if they develop normally." If the technique proves to be safe, the creation of artificial human eggs could one day be used to treat infertility and even enable same-sex couples to have genetically related children.”
I won’t even get into the chimeric sperm part of that article – it makes me think of “The Island of Dr. Moreau” a bit more than I’d like to, even if it is a great film.
Further along the list of issues I don’t like to mentally tackle are those where I’d be expected to correctly ascertain “what it is to be human” or what sort of legislation a nation would need in place when technologies like the aforementioned are on the cusp of large-scale/common application.
“If the “entity” — let’s call it — develops like a natural embryo and has nearly identical genetic properties, why would it be considered something other than bona fide human life? After all, a cloned human embryo doesn’t involve the use of sperm but is as fully human as its counterpart that comes into being through fertilization. Just because sperm and egg are not involved would not necessarily make the resulting entity less human. What should matter is the nature of the thing itself, however brought into existence. Just calling something “synthetic” doesn’t make it so. And the burden of proof in this regard should fall on the scientists to demonstrate that the process would not create an organism before they are given carte blanche.”
It eloquently encapsulates the gravity of the situation; hopefully, it also explains why, in this paper, I will not claim to know where to begin in these matters of adjudicating the rights & rewards of another entity.
What I’d rather do is discuss our technological dependence since the advent of agriculture & surmise as to what lengths we could go in this digital world to achieve the goals of procreation, stewardship & social longevity.
Back then…
It is no mystery to those fortunate in their education that agriculture was the first technological advancement of our species. While the use of tools is considered a benchmark of evolution, it was the shift from meek hunter-gatherers (kept in check with the games of chance & fate, always on the hunt with their breakable tools) to stewards of the earth (with a voracious appetite but a tolerance for sitting around) that set us on a path towards further discovery & social evolutions.
Chief amongst the agricultural innovations in 7000 BC was alcohol; everlasting in it’s application to societal affairs, micro & macro, alcohol is a testament to the human predisposition to be technologically dependent. This is not to say every human dead & alive has imbibed, nor contrarily, that there’s no such thing as an alcoholic since we’re fated to be dependent on this ancient technological advancement; this is to point to the fact that the discovery of fermentation has been utilized in our times of joy, reception of sacrament & stifling of sorrows. Most, if not, all of the emotions that humans have developed, deepened & attempted to describe to each other has involved alcohol in some way as we’ve been further socialized with one another.
After certain technologies, like fermentation & animal husbandry, become familiarized & fully integrated into the social fabrics we’ve knit over the millennia, it is near impossible to regulate or outright restrict their applications. Historically speaking, the US government’s 19th amendment is a perfect place in “recent” history to point to for an example of a glaring dependence on a technology familiarized & fully integrated into social order. After 13 years of prohibiting the production & consumption of alcohol during a Protestant movement in the 1920’s, the American people said “I need a drink.” Comparatively, in Islam, alcohol is scripturally prohibited but even though there’s around 50 majority-Muslim countries, only 14 enforce this rule in a theocratic manner.
Certain technological advancements have become so integrated that it seems they’ll be here to stay.
Juvenile in the scope of all advancements made thus far, social media platforms are becoming the next dependency. Sure, one could lackadaisically point to the temper tantrum a child throws in response to an authority figure taking away a tablet & call that the sign of dependence but that more closely resembles anger attributed to loss of control. Up to a certain age, a child is simply viewing the tech as a toy & something interesting – half of the kids playing around on mom’s & dad’s phone have hardly any idea what they’re doing or what they’re seeing, they’re just having fun. It isn’t until one is around the teen years that the dependency begins to develop.
Teenagers & adults are better points to assess the progressive dependence on technology that sustains social networking; in the former, there are entire campaigns focused on bringing attention to the addictive nature of social media in a developing mind, studies on the correlation between social media use & teen suicide rates & lately there are proposals by governments to ban teen access to certain apps & limit most that fall under the label of “social media”. In the latter, social media is where most adults find their news, where most of the political rhetoric is being created & utilized & where an increasing number of adults are producing income or at least attempting to.
At this point, the activity on social media reminds me of various games like “The Sims”, numerous “Sid Meier’s Civilization” titles, BitLife & others in the sense that social media has become a false reality wherein the user attempts to affect other entities in a digital plane. Role playing games where one is able to customize their avatar to a high degree also come to mind whenever the idea of “curating” a profile & it’s content comes up in discussion; MMORPGs are comparable to social media in so many ways honestly but the concept of expressing the self in a digital fashion is the primary focus.
Tomorrow…
Social media, across the board, allows anything from anonymity to almost completely unfettered self-expression; some users create entire personas that solely exist online & a relatively fresh example is that of “Lil Miquela” – an avatar created by L.A. based company Brud. Lil Miquela has a few songs on Spotify, 3 million ardent fans & followers on Instagram & has spurred on a slow race between other companies to make their own versions of these advanced avatars.
Some want to create avatars of brand-new, never-before-seen “people”. Some want to create more advanced avatars of ourselves, much like the bitmoji stuff I find a bit creepy. I personally can’t wait to see the creation of the first “digital dependent”.
As a kid, one of my favorite shows was called “Digimon: Digital Monsters”; there’s a slew of games based on the series but the prevailing theme is that, there exists, in a digital world accessible by our modern day devices, digital monsters we can befriend, battle with & help evolve as we nurture it like a pet. Released right after the original Tamagatchi’s, Digimon simply took the “digital egg” concept a bit further which led to Pokémon introducing their own egg-aspect to the games & anime just a year later.
In most of these iterations, the player would simply walk with the egg or provide it care in some form. In Pokémon Go, the mobile app, players still do this walking but it is now tracked with GPS & motion sensors in our mobile devices. The same devices responsible for the rapid onset of targeted advertisement, rampant mass surveillance & public documentation of conspicuous consumption, aka flexing on social media.
In due time, thanks to the rampant & often unchecked state of data collection we exist in, the companies working on those digital avatars will proposition the people:
Provide us your consumer data & your health data & we’ll create an online representation of what your child would look & act like! For a yearly subscription, we’ll use our AI to evolve the level of interaction & appearance that mirrors actual human cognitive development. Available to couples, individuals, corporations & communities our digital denizens will be an extension of you!
Already so absorbed with cultivating & curating our own profiles, I can see a future wherein companies appeal to our nature to nurture & desire to create by offering to “assist us” in creating “offspring with an off-switch” & it going over extremely well. The idea of “digital resurrection”, holographic models of dead individuals, has already been introduced to the public through events like the Tupac hologram from 2012, Robert Kardashian “showing up” at Kim’s birthday party in 2020 & now Amazon’s working on it’s Alexa technology to “let people turn their dead loved ones’ voices into digital assistants”.
There’s plenty of apps where you & another person can upload photos of yourselves & see an AI generated example of what your offspring would look like; there’s fertility clinics that offer couples the ability to predetermine the eye color of their coming child; in due time, companies will exist that provide all this & more, for the right price, of course.
Though what is the price for even further mixing the digital plane & the physical? For attempting to curate a persona in a space of manufactured members of society?
Remember that line Wesley wrote?
“Just because sperm and egg are not involved would not necessarily make the resulting entity less human. What should matter is the nature of the thing itself, however brought into existence. Just calling something “synthetic” doesn’t make it so.”
I believe we’re on the cusp of having to deal with these issues, whether we want to or not. The level of dependence on technology thus far has not peaked or begun to plateau & accordingly we must expect progressive integration of human activities involving creation, description & everything in between on the digital plane. We’re not going to be able to ban social media & the technologies of mass communication much like we weren’t able to ban the manufacture of alcohol, so will we see something play out that feels almost surreal as watching an obviously fake avatar take selfies in an obviously real place? Or will we simply accept the advanced integration of the human experience in the digital plane until that’s all there is?
Thanks for reading.
P.S. the digital dependents are already on the way:
On the surface & even from a distance this new ordinance seems fickle, overreaching, unnecessary or long overdue – the opinions vary as greatly as the personalities & cultures of California itself.
Unbeknownst to most, this new ordinance is a sign of the times to come. An indication of the veracity with which the governing bodies & authorities are willing to display in their endeavor to see predetermined plans finally implemented across the populous.
Just this past week, the neighboring City of San Diego enacted their own legislative frameworks regarding bikes too! Mayor Todd Gloria, members of SANDAG & affiliated organizations presented the 2022 edition of the Climate Action Plan, even though only weeks prior, what was reported to be over 4,000 citizens expressed discontent & preferences requesting the withdrawal of the plan altogether.
For those that have already read my post, “Environments & Requirements”, you may skip this video from a 2009 city council meeting in San Carlos, CA showing council members ignoring the words of the citizenry & implementing an ICLEI-derived plan. For those now coming across this site, I’d recommend watching & comparing the disregard of the San Carlos council members to the disregard of our politicians today as far climate legislation is concerned.
The folks seen in 2009 & the folks seen last week are of like mind: they simply wish to oversee their lands themselves; they uniformly wish to see the lands & its resources benefit the locals to the greatest degree. The politicians seen in 2009 & today are the same: they wish to see their plans fulfilled, no matter the cost as increased taxes will foot the bill.
Proposed taxes & suggested economic frameworks of San Diego’s 2022 version of CAP range from gallon per capita water limits, an increase in funding for tree rebate programs I covered a bit in “The Products of a New Environment” & transportation ordinances that all relate to a 2050 plan the City of San Diego has been pushing since at least 2010 involving…you guessed it: bikes. If you look to page 56 of the 2022 CAP, under Strategy 3: Mobility and Land Use, you see the City’s obsession with bikes & disdain for internal combustion engine vehicles at once:
“Shifting away from a car-centric transportation system starts with a loading priority for our roadways, prioritizing and protecting the most vulnerable modes such as walking and biking, and enhancing public transit for improved efficiency and performance. The loading priority concludes with shared, commercial, and personal electric vehicles, underscoring a commitment to the full transition of all vehicles from combustion engines and fossil fuels. The City will reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) for trips through transportation infrastructure and technology improvements, transportation demand management (TDM) programs, and land use changes.”
It should be noted that this 2022 plan is simply a foundation for the 2050 plan titled “Riding to 2050: The San Diego Regional Bicycle Plan” but there are a number of proposed actions relating to Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions & other climate issues that will be enacted along the way as 2035 is a mid-point target year from now to 2050. Among the myriad of proposals to curb GHG emissions, one of marked interest is found in the 2022 edition of the CAP on page 69:
1) Reduce GHG emissions and water use of total beef, pork, chicken, turkey and dairy purchases by 20%.
2) Increase local, healthy, and sustainable foods to 20% of total food purchases prioritizing locally sourced, valued workforce and animal welfare.
Interestingly enough, in the entire CAP document, only one page is devoted to “Measure 5.3: Local Water Supply” & simply discusses the aforementioned gallon per capita limit; in one week the Federal government is going to impose water restrictions on 40 million people due to the state of the Colorado River basin, yet the City of San Diego has apparently nothing to say on the matter.
At the moment, the City of San Diego is primarily focused on regulator technology & economic frameworks that will advance the 2050 plan. In all fairness, San Diego has been this way since it entertained ICLEI & other entities; in the 2010 version of “Riding to 2050: The San Diego Regional Bicycle Plan”, published while Jerry Sanders was Mayor, on page 49, “encouragement programs” are proposed as an economic method of enticing, to some perspectives coercing, citizens & businesses into participating in these programs where ride-sharing & biking are the preferred forms of transportation.
Encouragement programs are generally characterized by their focus on encouraging people to bicycle more frequently, particularly for transportation. Encouragement programs increase the propensity for bicycle trips by providing incentives, recognition, or services that make bicycling a more convenient transportation mode. The following encouragement programs are recommended for implementation in the region and described in more detail in the remainder of the section:
⁃ Bike Sharing Program
⁃ Pilot Smart Trips Program
⁃ Employer Incentive Programs
⁃ Bicycle Friendly Community Designation
⁃ San Diego Region Bike Map
⁃ Identification and Way-finding Signage
⁃ University-base Bike Orientation
In the version published in 2011, the concept of ride-share programs is expanded & marginally defined a bite more with examples like the Guaranteed Ride Home Program (which I had no clue existed until today) & iCommute, a vanpool program with a subsidy of $400 per month per vanpool. By 2015, under the direction of then Mayor Kevin L. Faulconer, the ride-share programs expanded into a contract with DecoBike but ended in 2019 after the City of San Diego claimed a breach of contract occurred on the companies end – though this is disputed by DecoBike.
In terms of high occupancy transportation, all versions of the climate plans advocate for electric vehicle fleets; the most common form is tied to K-12 & collegiate school bus programs. This past July, a San Diego based company, Nuvve Holding Corp., announced a joint venture with San Diego Gas & Electric where eight electric school buses in the Cajon Valley Union School District will connect to the grid & serve as a pilot program for the next five years, not only for state-wide school transportation use but also for the federal Build Back Better plan as Nuvve Holding Corp. announced a Memorandum of Understanding with the US Department of Energy some time ago regarding V2G & V2X technology.
An often overlooked aspect of the V2X technology that appeals to governing bodies is the “connected vehicle” nexus & data mining capabilities thereof. In these evolving iterations of climate plans related to the years 2025, 2030 & 2050, digital details are a prerequisite of all vehicles that will be on the road for a consortium of reasons that summarily present as regulatory technology. In early plans, connected vehicles simply refers to vehicles capable of emitting wireless data vehicle-to-vehicle & vehicle-to-infrastructure so as to aid in the flow of traffic; as we’ve seen with newer plans & in European counterparts, intelligent speed limits, excessive tracking & the aforementioned prioritization of biking civilians are the culmination of these mandated advances in vehicle technology.
I have yet to address the cost of all these mandated applications of higher-end vehicle-to-everything technologies; I’ve considered making a whole post on the expected costs incurred for civilians in the wake of these subnational & national mandates stemming from international contractual agreements but I’ll simply point out that the average all-electric bus costs $400,000 & in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, eligible “clean” vans, SUVs & pickup trucks qualify for a rebate of $80,000 upon purchase & other vehicles for $55,000. I really can’t imagine how much these all vehicles will cost in total but if the rebates are already close to some people’s yearly income, I can imagine most will not be buying these vehicles, unless on an already strained credit line.
So, I guess we’ll all bike to work, right?
But what if your bike breaks down & you live in a city like Los Angeles where you can’t rely on your local handy-folk to lend a helping hand anymore because of a city ordinance? Guess you’ll pull out your card anyways & pay for a ride on an EV bus, rent a ride-share bike or pay for a ride on the rail transit system.
From what I can gather, the Guaranteed Ride Home Program only covers three rides per year; seems like baseball, three strikes & we’re left outside.
Amazingly, the word “homeless” shows up only one time in the entire 2022 San Diego Climate Action Plan, whereas the word “bike” shows up 49 times. I wonder, if one is left outside, what is the plan, what are the options & allowances afforded by a City that can’t even type the word “homeless” more than once in a 238 page document?
I believe, we as modern humans, exist in a virtual reality based upon codes of rulers & the minds of a million writers, dead & alive. Through the use of the written word & other innovations, we have created a “scripted” reality where things begin in the mind & eventually become reality, if allowed by regulatory powers of an ancient, yet ever evolving code.
Academically speaking, a malleable collection of qualities set us apart from the other fauna of Earth:
⁃ abstract thinking
⁃ blade technology
⁃ creating & working with fire
⁃ dancing
⁃ making music
⁃ symbolic behaviors like art or ornamentation.
The malleability arises out of occasional dissenting opinions on theories like the Upper Paleolithic Revolution on either the basis that it is anthropocentric at the foundation & thereby flawed due to examples like the “Stone Age Chimps” or criticized as inherently dismissive of archeological sites across the Middle East & Africa & thereby flawed in relation to timeline construction.
Once one watches enough of those David Attenborough nature documentaries, it becomes clear a few species provide examples of conscious application of musicality, dancing during mating rituals & exhibiting traits of observable grief over death like seen in elephants. To a degree, I agree the consensus is flawed but primarily by simply overlooking the magick of that is the written word.
The first technological advancement that truly separated us from the rest of nature & reality itself was the written word. Though the vocalized form of communication we possess is impactful, for the nature of this post, consider the fact that even though I’m not aware of the exact structure of the language my two cats employ between each other – I am aware it exists solely by observation of their interactions. That said, they possess no ability to transcribe & place ideologies nor information outside of themselves in a physical form for other members of their species – this is where humans are distinctly different & where the focus of this piece lies.
Much like other animals that exist in systems wherein large populations of the species can coexist by self-determined structure (matriarchal bees & ants, lion pride hierarchy, etc) humans have had some form of communication available to them that allowed a level of societal structure. Flimsy as it was, it was/is there.
Summarily, prior to the advent of technologies that accelerate the means of communication, communication itself was solely a tool employed to determine the course of public affairs & sustain order.
The first level by which humans can surpass this simple function is through psychological time travel & plane-jumping – a true culmination of the powers of abstract thinking & language exemplified by the written word. Across the globe we see examples of cultures that in varying degrees live in ways that dismiss time as a concept or overall concern; regardless, they still have social order & essentially confirm the prior statement regarding communication as a function for public affairs. Where there is no consideration of time, a language will not exist around time & this is a necessary aspect of the first level.
As humans began to transcribe ideations from their psyche onto the walls of caves & mountainsides, we were scratching at the surface of the virtual reality. Through art & lexical lacerations in runic & hieroglyphic form, our ancestors were practicing how to properly transcend their personas & perspectives across time & space. Consensual determinations of symbolic choices over generations gave rise to inherited meaning & understanding that exists outside of the present moment – early on we were writing a code for our personas to exist in a fixed virtual plane where our sentiments & ideologies would be catalogued in ways that support maximum fungibility. Not only for self-expression but the continuous regimentation of social order throughout time.
The basis of this premise lies in the assertion that written language was a necessity for continuity of social order by way of coded law & epitomized by the discoveries of the Codes of Ur-Nammu & Hammurabi, two social contracts between masters, free folk & slaves all more or less based around “if, then” statements. These were the first examples of humanity using the written word to design the future & transcend time itself; over time itself, the codified laws would evolve to meet the needs of the preferred social order or limit specific actions in a social setting.
Thousands of years after the reign & coded structures of Sumerian & Mesopotamian design that still solely attempted to sustain order, further coding developed by the Roman counterparts in the gradual formation of the “res publica” (the republic) introduced a new concept that exists in a reimagined fashion today in countries across the globe: the virtue & virtual man.
In 509 BC, the last king of Rome lost power & out of this vacuum of control eventually came the “Conflict of the Orders” – a political bout between the upper class & the lower class in regards to political equality. One of the first lasting outcomes of this conflict was the creation of the “Laws of the Twelve Tables” in 449 BC which was essentially a formalized documentation of the rights & the duties of the citizens of Rome in the public & private spaces of life posted in the town centers for all to read. In the 60 years between the end of a kingdom & the creation of a republic, ideations of public good & the correlated self began to swirl amongst the populous giving birth to the Latin word “virtus”, the root of both virtue & virtual.
Virtus applies solely to one’s behavior in the public sphere as it relates to political action & the public good; private matters, in Roman society in the context of the republic, had no bearing on one’s social standing & was not a space where one could rise through the ranks of society with conscious efforts. Bearing in mind the basis of all social order thus far in society was economic in nature given all codes related to property rights related to land & slavery or varying allowances afforded by a master class, the concept of virtus was revolutionary & magical all at once. It implied that merit determines the value of an individual, not their heredity; their social standing would be a reflection of their public services or lack thereof & that with enough public conformity to the legalized standards of right, one could achieve a greater status in the public realm.
Ages ago, ideal individuals were imagined & described through engravings on varying mediums; following the proliferation of these virtues, such individuals began to exist in the physical realm. As I mentioned in a long-winded manner throughout “Ramparts & Revolution”, many of the qualities we inherit from our ancestors are remnants of coded determinations of what an amicable member of society is & what our roles/limitations are within the society. The original authors & philosophers that promulgated the concepts of public good & elevated social order may be dead & gone but they are immortalized by their success in time-traveling & plane-jumping as millions still adhere to their written words.
In this realm where ancient code dictates current & future actions & ultimately the nature of our social existence, the authors themselves are the original “avatars” in this virtual reality – they are the first “profiles”. From the base models they described in the manuscripts pertaining to the proper person in relation to politics, we find the framework for not only politicians but all common folk in the scripted reality known as political theater.
With the innovation of mass printing & the gradual expansion of conscious members of the virtuous framework called “the law”, a level even further separated from reality was established by transporting ideologies & codices outside of their original space & time; by removing the need for a centralized space of reception originally required by the likes of Ancient Rome, the “forum” of political discourse is equally tangible & intangible, ultimately blurring the lines between public & private.
Through this degradation of perceived parameters between private & political spaces, a variety of imaginary & borderline disingenuous avenues of political discourse are made available to both common folk & the presiding political parties.
The original, probably the most impactful yet least defined, is the form of doublespeak; by intentionally providing the possibility of misinterpretation on the listener’s end, fraudulent activity is excused & oftentimes conflated with near-successful or fully successful attempts at gaining or maintaining virtue through false honesty or shifting of blame. Though more often utilized by governing bodies or entities within, citizens can parrot talking points or expand upon them at will in their own areas of influence. Through this creation of near-truth, another layer of virtual existence is added to the coded world we already live in.
Another tactic often employed to maintain a public perception of obvious effort to positively impact the public good is the action of donation or charity. In US history, the first observable form of charity as a tactic to maintain social standing was in reaction to the public opinion in 1889-1892 regarding the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, comprised of over 50 wealthy steel, coal & railroad investors/owners like Andrew Carnegie (owner of Carnegie Steel). On May 31st of 1889, a pre-existing public dam that was purchased & hastily redesigned solely for the construction of a private lake resort for the South Fork Club broke & resulted in the deaths of over 2,200 people & property damage of about $17 million (today that’s over half a billion). The dam itself was built by members of the community as they were employed under the monopoly (or “vertically integrated” as the doublspeakers would say) Andrew Carnegie created through Carnegie Steel; to brush aside this obvious conflict of interest & evidence of guilt in legal proceedings that would happen in 1892 (you should research why it was postponed on your own), Andrew Carnegie visited Johnstown on November 28th, 1889 & donated $54,000. Following the donation, Carnegie created multiple foundations, spread philosophical concepts related to philanthropy through self-authored books in libraries he built across New England & sold his companies in 1901 to J.P. Morgan, the business mogul of hell who affects American lives to this day, even in death.
Following Carnegie’s efforts to shape public opinion in light of wrongdoing using an interplay of legal tender (written money) & the mass media news networks, variations of this tactic described with examples of “greenwashing”, charities outed as tax-havens, etc began to appear with increasing regularity. Today, the tactic is essentially overused as public opinion is now wary of this avenue due to the propensity of tax-free groups being tied to laundering operations or other morally questionable events.
Finally, the most recent, innovative & interactive tactic lies with virtue signaling; clearly defined as: “the action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one’s good character or the moral correctness of one’s position on a particular issue” virtue signaling, in my opinion, is the culmination of the written word, doublespeak & the attempt to create charity through commentary to elevate one’s social standing in our coded virtual reality. This is not to say that virtue signaling is the highest level of altered communication in a fabricated system, although some may have made or may eventually make this argument, I’m not aware of such stances nor do I share them.
Though as novel as the concept & action of virtue signaling is, I will admit that the veracity & overall impact of the tactic may evolve & progress either naturally or by design, especially considering it is built upon the framework of digital social media.
I often wonder, given the fact that humanity exists in this state of temporal haziness regarding predetermined valuations of the self & the group, if technology progresses to a point where digital reality is indistinguishable from physical reality, will there be a clashing of digital computer code, ancient legal code & the human lexicon?
Will there be a new level of falsifying & reshaping reality with the spoken & elaborately written word?
Will there be a transparency afforded to the masses for the first time in a situation where cognition & computation intersect & interact on a level we can’t even comprehend at the moment?
Will the concept of virtues, individuality & public good shift to more synthetic attributes as technology & humanity meld into one or will the concepts themselves be completely re-coded?
We all repetitively state that time doesn’t stand still, yet the written word, the essence of a writer, steps outside of this rule & imparts upon readers tales of old, potential futures, present guidelines & creates rules of its own. This act of writing with the intention of transcending space & time is what sets us apart from all other publicly observable beings – the magicks of time-travel & teleportation are available to those fortunate to be literate; those in control of the nature of political discourse are able to simply shape reality by “spelling it out” in coded law. Ultimately, the laws passed under the cover of the night by governing bodies & international committees without public input are the actual occult & dark magicks of the world, the statements & actions thereafter are the added illusions & extra spells to control & contort reality.
Truly, this is why the greatest obsession of any tyrant is the free person’s mind; if they can’t physically restrain or restrict, the next best & admittedly preferred option from the onset of any fear & terror campaign is mental subversion & control.
Be wary of the words you see on the screens & be critical of the means by which a party seeks to achieve your public appreciation. Write with intent & rest assured that even after you begin your eternal rest, an aspect of your self remains in the written world that exists outside of celestial space-time. As a member of the public, it is our duty to determine what are the true values & virtues needed for the public good, not the corporations or some currently prevailing party; should we forfeit the ability & the right to help shape the predetermined best qualities of a citizen of the earth & digital planes we create hereafter, we will be subject to coded terms set by rulers in a virtual reality forevermore.
Are you certain that you’ll reap what you’ve sown?
For the moment, I seek to address those in the southwestern portion of the United States of America & ask those reading from elsewhere to keep an open mind & an open eye. We’re just about halfway into our summer season but we’re nowhere near close to beginning the actual battles that’ll come in respect to water rights & land rights for those in the southwest & eventually the entire nation.
Though one could dive deeper into the legal acumen involving water use, I will not be doing that here. I am admittedly more concerned with the present nature of genetic ownership in regards to gardening & farming – I find the issue to be a bit more murky than Leak Mead is at the moment & I believe predetermined agreements between corporations & legislative bodies will exacerbate any water issue regardless of civilian conservation efforts going forward.
Are you certain the things you’ve grown are things you own?
To illustrate the point of a future scuffle regarding “right to grow”, one must only look to existing laws that provide precedent for such an incident.
“Nonetheless, with the data that can readily be gleaned publicly, our analysis of mapped and referenced patent sequences across the three crop genomes revealed DuPont and its affiliates as the holder of the largest collection of gene patents. It holds more gene patents than Monsanto or the rest of the US industry—including small and medium biotech companies and governmental research institutes and universities—put together (Fig. 1).
Uniquely in the United States, plants and their products can be protected by patents and by other IP mechanisms at the same time. Plant varieties can be protected by a specific plant patent under the Plant Patent Act of 1930 for asexually reproducible plants; by a plant variety protection (PVP) certificate under the Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970 for sexually reproducible plants or tuber-propagated plant varieties; or, since 1985, by utility patents.
Because several types of protection can be granted at the same time—for example, either a plant patent or a PVP certificate with a utility patent—and exclusive rights extend for 20 years, any IP right holder on any of the crops can in principle benefit not only by enforcing their IP rights but also by holding off competition in the market and potentially delaying innovation on certain technologies, especially when the granted rights are under utility patents. Utility patents have a broader scope, including protection on the plant itself, its diverse uses, its progenies and the method used to produce it, and they have an impact on follow-on innovations.”
The commercial aspect of gardening, rife with rebranding & business-to-business marketing schemes like any other discernible industry has notably unique moments wherein legislation concerning biological conservation can be tweaked or outright ignored.
While most Californians by now are aware of the issue of the moderately invasive nature of the Eucalyptus globulus (Tasmanian Blue Gum) & the impact it has on soil erosion & fueling fires, certain corporations that operate in the southwest are tactically circumnavigating subnational & national legislation meant to curb the sale of invasive species & they’re becoming increasingly bold in their endeavors.
In all honesty, I work for a large nursery that supplies plants to a number of states & I thoroughly enjoy my job so I won’t be disclosing business practices I can directly speak to that correlate here. Sorry Too Short, this is the one time I don’t want to blow the whistle. That said, I will do my best to display the matter as a basic schematic so as to allow application to any business that potentially falls under the model to be properly scrutinized in a like manner.
Linked here are the 6 agencies overseeing the invasive species list; if you live in California, look at one of the lists the next time you go shopping at a store that has a garden center. For the past year & change that I’ve worked in the industry, a number of the listed plants have been available for purchase & the number of invasive species being sold on the market is growing.
Through genetically manipulating invasive species, commercial growers are able to market the plants as “new varieties” or “regional friendly” – no determinations, to my knowledge, are required by legislation to assess the nature of hybridized or genetically modified plant varieties in regards to local impact on the environments where these lab-produced plants are introduced & established. As the Non-GMO group put it in their blog post, “nothing in nature exists in a vacuum, and it is unnatural to assume that it would.” So it could be said that these lab-produced edible & non-edible plants on the market are potentially as detrimental as the organisms they are based on, unfortunately only time & focused attention will tell.
At the present time, companies like SDG&E are facilitating programs wherein “qualifying SDG&E customers can receive a $35 rebate for planting or potting a 1- or 5-gallon tree/plant species.”
Specifically, under the “native trees” category, the Black Willow is native to the East Coast of the US, not the Southwest; furthermore, the other two Willow species listed are more commonly found in wetlands as their root systems take so much water that is advised not to plant them near septic tanks or drainage fields. Intriguing choices to say the absolute least, though when you look to the “regionally-friendly” trees & see the number of invasive species, it doesn’t seem to matter much anymore. Either SDG&E is misinformed or they’re willing to let the public stay misinformed about the future cost of those $35 since it’s all for “local biodiversity, improving air quality, and sequestering carbon.”
That “sequestering carbon” bit is how a lot of these GMO trees are being pushed on the market & into the ground lately & why the Lorax is one of my favorite films of all time.
Artificial Trees & Grasslands Please
Mass sapling-planting campaigns are nothing new; most of anyone who could read this is probably aware of at least 1-3 moments wherein a company or country just threw a bunch of saplings in the ground. My mothers homeland just went crazy with the idea last year & planted 350 million of them.
Without a doubt, the only certainty at all, is that the most interesting & equally terrifying campaigns are the ones that involve the interplay between genetically modified trees & the cap-and-trade carbon-credit scheme.
MasterCard, a proponent of the cap-and-trade scheme, has a credit card called Aspiration: Zero Carbon Footprint where they “plant a tree every time you make a purchase—and let you round up to plant one too. Using this card just once a day can plant enough trees that, once grown, will counteract your daily negative carbon footprint (unless you’re a real gas-guzzler). Spend daily with Zero to neutralize your footprint and earn up to 1% cash back. Use your rewards to plant more trees or receive a statement credit.”
Call me crazy whatever way suits you, merely afford me a bit more of your time if you’ve yet to read Part 3 of “The Volumes on Vitality” specifically the section on utility tokens.
The “statement credit” Zero Card is vaguely proposing in lieu of planting more trees is rather reminiscent of the utility token FreeWater quickly mentioned on their own site & digital advertisements, along with carbon credits as a whole. Aspirations’ “join us in our mission to plant 125 Million trees by 2030” remark on their website, coupled with the self-implementation of a carbon-credit schematic makes it clear they are probably aware of one of the contracts I mentioned in the blog post that precedes this one. Good old “market forces”!
Another company, Living Carbon, genetically modifies trees in a way that causes “modified poplar trees [to] store up to 53% more carbon than control trees.” In the interview for the article, the CEO Maddie Hall said, “if we were to double the acreage that we have today up until 2030, we would be able to actually plant enough trees to remove 1.66% of global emissions in 2021.” I can’t wait to see how many companies try to buy these GMO trees, then reason to the government & relevant regulating bodies that the trees in question warrant greater carbon capture credit values than purchases of regular trees.
It’s odd though – there is a respectable amount of science regarding carbon capture practices that point out that grass is more of a reliable carbon sink than trees for two reasons: grass grows faster & grass stores the carbon in the soil unlike trees that store carbon in their wood above soil. The carbon above the soil line is pure fuel in the event of a forest fire & hardly the safer choice considering a sizable portion of the US is in a drought & is expected to remain so for the foreseeable future. All this considered, we have a stark prevalence of tree planting campaigns across the globe & across the market & water restrictions across the Southwest that directly impact civilian grass lawn upkeep. It seems as though not all things are considered equally, I should say.
Due in large part to the unequal use of water from the Colorado River Basin, one can see exactly what it looks like when water is continuously taken from one environment & used/left in another. The canopy alongside the canal that exists now is a testament to what Lake Mead will look like(check out 12:16-17:08) in due time, should the water levels continue to recede at the rate they have as shown in the beginning of the video.
But as a whole, what will our collective future be like in regards to water rights & land rights? I often wonder, did the people who wrote the film adaptation of the Lorax just get oddly lucky in retrospect or were they prematurely portraying a theoretical situation where GMO trees modified to capture increased levels of carbon replace natural trees in a system where carbon credits & debits become commonplace across the globe?
Will we prevail through this unifying struggle or will we communally fail, leaving behind only remnants of our attempts to simply survive, much like the Hohokam people who long ago built the canals that the city of Phoenix, Arizona finds inspiration from today?
I don’t imagine these compounding issues can be swept under the rug – we’re talking about the earth itself, where can we sweep it? There needs to be better application of the best practices available to every region afflicted with constrained access to the basics of life, greater attention paid to the outcome of our efforts & actual transparency between civilian, regulator & market. The cool thing is, the civilian is the foundation of the coupled latter & Dr. Seuss said it well enough, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
This is not to say we all need to memorize the list of invasive species & self-impose restrictions; on the contrary, in a world where the morality of consumption is debated & designed by market forces & legislation that can oftentimes be overreaching (hello & goodbye 18th amendment) we, the consumer, must become pickier & demand more of the persons seeking to make off with our hard earned money. We must work to see our own requirements met, soon, before there comes a time, for some maybe August 15th, when the only requirements met are those set outside of our control.
Jefferson, O., Köllhofer, D., Ehrich, T. et al. The ownership question of plant gene and genome intellectual properties. Nat Biotechnol 33, 1138–1143 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3393
Millison, Andrew. “The Canal That Accidentally Grew a Forest in the Arizona Desert.” Andrew Millison, YouTube, 29 Nov. 2021, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jf8usAesJvo.
Assumptions aside, before progressing any further into this text, I’d recommend reading my post, “Environments & Requirements” – it serves as a backdrop for this discussion of ambiguous terminology employed by myself & others of far greater influence.
Admittedly, I was extremely reductive in my total description of the dissenting Justice’s vague reference to “market forces” that economically enacted the moderation sought to be legislatively achieved through the Clean Power Plan of 2015. I was pressed for time in a number of ways & opted to employ a tone as cryptic as the parties involved & for that I apologize.
Across the United States of America & most nations across the globe, contractually binding agreements focused on the years 2025, 2030 & 2050 are actively being implemented & exercised in ways that, more often than not, circumnavigates a nations domestic legislation & overtly neglects public opinion.
Nonetheless, we’re all pressed for time.
By a design I hope to properly explain henceforth, these contracts are primarily fulfilled through utilization of actors in two distinct groupings:
• individual members of domestic governments on the local or national level, party to, or at the very least aware of the contract & beholden to it’s terms. Throughout this text, we’ll refer to them as “domestic actors”.
• individual members of corporations & non-government organizations party to, or at the very least aware of the contract & beholden to it’s terms. Throughout this text, we’ll refer to them as “foreign factors”. (The video I have linked at the end of “Environments & Requirements” is a documented example of the second scenario.)
This aforementioned contract, oftentimes discussed as though singular in nature, is actually a consortium of contracts contingent upon an original that essentially grows through these compartmentalized amendments.
In 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, described as a treaty of nations, was the foundation of the Conference of the Parties (COP) & the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the latter being an international contract signed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on June 5, 1992 and entered into force at the end of 1993. A majority of the 196 parties signed the contract immediately or soon after; the rest signed later in the early 2000’s with the latest being the nation of Andorra on February 4th, 2015. As simply as it is, nations involved are the Conference of the Parties.
The contract created by the CBD is the foundation of a number of other contracts & compartmentalized sub-organizations – for the sake of time & clarity, I’ll be focusing on overall elements & intermittently addressing specifics that will best discuss the “market forces” alluded to all too often.
The degree of obligation parties to the contract are subject to are clearly stated in Article 5:
Each Contracting Party shall, as far as possible and as appropriate, cooperate with other Contracting Parties, directly or, where appropriate, through competent international organizations, in respect of areas beyond national jurisdiction and on other matters of mutual interest, for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity.
As well as Article 10:
Each Contracting Party shall, as far as possible and as appropriate:
(a) Integrate consideration of the conservation and sustainable use of biological resources into national decision-making;
(e) Encourage cooperation between its governmental authorities and its private sector in developing methods for sustainable use of biological resources.
Frequently, the competent international organizations are subgroups that have been delegated authorities vested by these two Articles – entities like the Wildlife Project, Cities With Nature, & the financial arm of the CBD, the Global Environment Facility, in charge of about $5.33 billion from government & corporate investments, all stem from the contract itself while various organizations like ICLEI (the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, the subject of the linked video) are granted jurisdiction & provided impetus by way of the CBD contract.
Furthermore, through manufactured fragmentation of the UNCCC into the aforementioned subgroups & others I’ve opted to forego in the interest of time, individual members from each of the original UNCCC subgroups bestow upon each other & new subgroups a false sense of authority in the eyes of a subnational government & the general public. This inorganic networking founded upon disingenuous representation serves as a way to also build rapport with a subnational government, often the focus of these UNCCC subgroups, through a multitude of domestic actors.
From the state level to the federal level, most nations have members of government party to the contract by association with one, if not more, of the UNCCC subgroups. By my estimate however, there are more members of commerce in leadership positions party to the contract considering the private sector is where the implementation of the carbon credit cap-and-trade system began.
In your own time, pay attention to the prevalence of corporate commitments to sustainability efforts related to the years 2025, 2030 & 2050; it is more than likely that the board of directors, in part or full, are aware of the CBD contract, specifically Article 11:
Each Contracting Party shall, as far as possible and as appropriate, adopt economically and socially sound measures that act as incentives for the conservation and sustainable use of components of biological diversity.
In no clearer terms, this is the foundation of the cap-and-trade system in relation to carbon emissions & other economic sustainability tools like Sustainable Aviation Fuel being spearhead by Shell Corp & Boeing. The actions taken by corporate interests & universities that mirror the SDGs set forth by the UNCCC are in summation the market forces the Justices briefly mentioned – the individuals working in government (e.g. mayors, city council members, directors/chancellors of state universities) while also representing these extrajudicial entities are the domestic actors.
For a few examples, here in the United States of America, since 06/21/22 the point of contact (domestic actor) between the GEF & the U.S. Department of the Treasury is Ms. Abigail Mary Demopulos who has worked as an economist for the Department since 2004, as far as public record states.
If one hyper-focuses on the iCAP objectives (or any of the other versions at USA state universities), it is clear that they essentially copied the framework of essentially every other UNCCC-derived economic climate plan:
Objective 2.2.1: Improve efficiency of space use by minimizing the square footage per person and updating the Space Policy in the Campus Administrative Manual (CAM) by FY23.
Objective 3.3: Establish an Electric Vehicle Task Force to identify key goals for supporting the use of electric vehicles on and off campus by FY22.
Objective 8.1: Develop a coordinated urban bio- diversity master plan by FY24 to make the Champaign, Urbana, Savoy, and campus metro area a model for biodiversity.
In light of this exceedingly shrouded information, to what degree, if at all, can you be certain that your representatives in government are observing only the constitutional laws of your nation? To what degree are markets truly free?
Again, I’d like to apologize for my preference to discuss these matters from an American/North American standpoint – please do not misconstrue omissions of other nations as indications of absence of this schematic, to reiterate, all nations of the globe are party to the contract as of 2015; from that point forward, all nations were essentially operating in a form of lockstep that is founded upon external influence & market manipulation by way of self-imposed fossil fuel/carbon emission restrictions well before advent of constitutionally observed legislation & incentivized programs for entities that opt to follow the 2030 Agenda.
Essentially, since 1992, even prior depending on the length of research of done, the events & the lifestyles of 2025, 2030 & 2050, regardless of the country, were being planned for precise results. Predetermined forms of economics & reimagined realities await us; in just 3 years from now, our lives will begin to bear greater resemblance across national borders & social groups as our restrictions become unified under a global framework centered around carbon emissions.
Over the next few weeks, I hope to discuss this concept of market forces in further detail & with more focused points of discussion; this post itself, I imagine, has a bit too many links for most readers & still has a bit of ambiguity plaguing it, thus we’ll be returning to this topic numerous times.
In the meantime, research your local entities – determine their unspoken goals & decide for yourself if they are the same goals you & yours seek to achieve.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or anecdotes regarding this text.
In an another example of the Supreme Court redefining & restricting regulatory rights of an agency we see that these Justices, for some time now, have been potentially pondering some sort of idea that the federal government has done enough or what it can. Odd to say, considering this is an extremely active time for the Court as they’ve made a total of 7 decisions since June 23rd of this year; some would say that’s more than enough & some of what’s been done is more than unnecessary.
Solely focusing on the EPA matter though, considering what this decision may mean for our collective future, I wonder if we may witness the beginning of a reinvigorated battle between state economies & the likelihood of various sustainability development goals set by the UN being met by the United States of America by 2030.
Although this recent Court decision emphasizes the States’ right to discern appropriate levels of emission reduction over periods of time, external forces besides the federal government are pushing to incentivize States to move away from coal as much as possible, as soon as possible.
Summarily, the Supreme Court denied the EPA, emboldened by the Clean Power Plan introduced by the Obama Administration in August of 2015, the regulatory power to implement a cap-and-trade economy centered around carbon credits & compliance costs through the form of increased energy prices that would begin this year. The goal of the Clean Power Plan was to reduce carbon emissions by 32% by 2030, a legislative example of a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDCs) spoken of in the Paris Agreement that was adopted in December of 2015.
Every five years, nations that are party to this agreement submit NDCs that detail how their governments will steer their respective nations towards achieving various sustainability development goals set by the UN & its various subgroups like the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) & IMO (International Maritime Organization).
Provided here are the two NDCs the USA has submitted since the inception of the Paris Climate Agreement:
In a portion of the dissenting opinion provided by Justice Kagan, supported by Justices Breyer & Sotomayor, it is said “the effect of the Court’s order, followed by the Trump administration’s repeal of the rule, was that the Clean Power Plan never went into effect. The ensuing years, though, proved the Plan’s moderation. Market forces alone caused the power industry to meet the Plan’s nationwide emissions target-through exactly the kinds of generation shifting the Plan contemplated.”
The “market forces” vaguely presented as proof of some inevitable generation shift are more aptly described in full as the corporate compliance with a global cap-and-trade carbon credit system established by non-government organizations & various conglomerates in the banking & energy industries.
Earlier this year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres spoke at a Powering Past Coal Summit, urging members to reduce coal use in electricity generation “by 80% below 2010 levels by 2030” by “cancel[ling] all global coal projects in the pipeline and end[ing] the deadly addiction to coal, end[ing] the international financing of coal plants and shift investment to renewable energy projects & jump-start[ing] a global effort to finally organize a just transition, going coal plant by coal plant if necessary.”
While the United States federal government itself is not a member of the Powering Past Coal Alliance (a coalition of governments, businesses and organizations) representatives of California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania & Washington state all attend the Summits & act as intermediaries, to a degree, that facilitate the economic & legislative maneuvers these international agreements seek to enact.
Cognizant of these extrajudicial environments that enumerate new requirements implemented through “market forces” just about every year, five years at the minimum accounting for NDCs, I have to wonder, what exactly did the Supreme Court do?
For decades, these UN sub-groups have been affecting governments on the micro & macro level; here’s a San Carlos, CA city council meeting from 2009 that showcases the process by which they circumnavigate democracy through “rapport building”:
In the spirit of the times, I’d like to discuss revolution. Though it is one of the most human activities, in this instance, for the sake of clarity & successful generalized speculation, I’ll compare the human mind & spirit as general components of a computing system. In doing so, I hope to outline innate flaws & fortuitous features in the battle for freedom both physically & mentally.
The mind, agreed upon by addicts, philosophers & most high school football coaches, is the greatest obstacle. The body itself can be manipulated – broken to a point. Yet, the mind, the intangible byproduct of this intricate vessel, is moreso susceptible to manipulation & damage, oftentimes beyond repair.
I view the mind, individual & hive-kind, as systems in which necessary informations, or those that are time sensitive, are subject to the tendencies of a hard drive & a RAM drive.
Within this imagined “hard drive” lies the things we’ve patiently & earnestly considered; the information we hold of such high value that it lies stored in the back of the mind ready to be called at-will. This information spurs on the basic action we display with our body: if one truly believes “might is right” on this deep a level, their physical mannerisms & corporeal presentation will reflect in kind: athletic prowess, brute force, checked or unchecked ferocity. Contrarily, if a mindset values peace through inaction or “turning the other cheek” to a comparable degree, we see events like Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation where “as he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him”.
The “basic truths” we all hold are inherited from older generations or our peers, oftentimes in close proximity. Stewardship, privacy, acknowledgment, control, freedom; there are a number of basic driving concepts, diverse as the number of lives one can lead. The energy of these concept stem from older generations (downloading, so to speak) but “update” as needed; 2,000 years ago, the same basic driving concepts existed but were in different stages of application – different times, different operating systems ie governments, prevailing social orders. Freedom today, in most nations, is vastly different than freedoms described centuries ago; privacy, by the day, diminishes in real life but creates more energy, more drive in some to achieve it (and for that we look to Julian Assange for our barely-living example). I see these “basic truths” as things we deeply appreciate across lifetimes, those things whose absence causes a depression of the energy in us all to do whatever we set a healthy & determined mind to. When a computer shuts off, the hard drive still holds all the pertinent information; we may fall asleep, but even in our dreams we are drawn to what we yearn for most & battle that which we fear the most.
This part of the mind is malleable but rather fixed as these inherited ideals, the downloaded desires are replicants, reiterations of past dreams; if they remained so for a millennia, they will probably remain so. The other side, the “RAM” parts, this is where the battle lies.
Here, in the hyperactive front of the mind, the Random Access Memory drive is where external coercion (stress) creates chaos. Comparatively, a RAM drive is the temporary storage space to the constant storage space of a hard drive; too much power is required to recall all information simultaneously, thus we have the limitations of awareness, focus & stress exemplified by the RAM drive.
This part of the mind exists in a state that initially resembles amnesia; upon further observation though, it is better described as the part of the mind directed & detailed by distraction & external commands.
External commands, the keystrokes that request specific files from the hard drive, are the stressors in life that cause us to hyper-fixate on an obstacle, a miscalculation. It’s in these moments we lose sight of the bigger picture; through the same electric shocks that trigger the mechanical response to have the RAM drive retrieve a specific file, we can view the “shocking” material on mainstream media as a mechanism by which the content creator seeks to retrieve a specific file, a specific reaction from the content consumer.
It’s possible, similarly, to frame these symbolic keystrokes in an authoritative light: as the tools of propaganda become more cutting-edge with the advancement of technology, the gradual human interfacing & censorship thereof online will only better serve to discuss the individual mind & the hive-mind as the computers of social order. Even as governments simply add legislation that illicit trigger reactions in any notable demographic under its authority, the correlation will suffice as misrepresentation on the governing scale can be jadedly termed as the moment the computer screen says “Error 404: File Not Found” as we’ve seen in the instances where FOIA requests are disgraced with black space.
The primary matter of this entire text is to analyze how this specific part of the mind, using a computing framework as lenses, disables revolution. In a sense, the remaining discussion requires a sustained recognition that those in power wish to stay in power; otherwise this ensuing text is for naught-a ruler indifferent to maintenance of power would not operate in the same ways, their hard drive is filled with different information.
The regimes of old, present & yet to be all have a persistent fixation upon the malleable nature of the RAM drive part of the mind where it concerns language & stress.
Moderation of public discourse by way of censorship is the foundation of this manipulation of the RAM drive. Through selection of approved key commands (talking points), those in control of information can either choose to outright “delete” sections of public sentiment & ideologies or saturate the available pool of information (noise) with state-sponsored sentiments & ideologies so the average citizen in the current & future generation inherits this information & essentially “copy & paste”s it until the original native information in the hard drives of the masses is replaced with the new.
Essentially, this would be described as integrative propaganda-that which the narrative controllers wish to see the citizenry slowly accept as reality & convince others of, to download & disseminate.
Agitative propaganda, that which seeks to place the RAM in overdrive, is most commonly found in instances that illicit emotional responses or those that compel an individual to act in an irregular way, or we’ll say “glitch”. In one fashion, narrative controllers can cause this agitation through information suppression; citizens kept in the dark through periods of strife become demoralized at the lack of actionable intel & eventually submit or commit violent acts in a disoriented manner incomparable to prior examples of the group or individuals demeanor-this is the hacking process in a human.
Soon, people will be singing “o’er the ramparts we watch,” & there will be varying meanings; some will imagine physical barriers between free speech, unencumbered travel & freedom of expression. Some will be imagining chat boards, blog sites & stages across the globe affected by double-speak & key commands, wondering what new ways they’ll be able to hack you & I & anyone plugged in, consciously or not.
Hold fast to what you’ve inherited but assess the source; changing our minds sometimes takes a considerable force. Countless campaigns continue attempting to convince future generations that the desires of the past should be left in the past, that they are barbaric due to antiquity. Should we continue down a path that allows the human mind to be manipulated as a computer, I fear our minds will be tormented & left as hollow receptacles of mandated iniquity.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. check out this art this guy I follow on Instagram made; I seriously love his content.
Growing up, I’d heard that someday there would be water wars. Conflicts centered around physical domination of a resource that is already depleting or diminishing in value/utility. I’d heard this from immediate family members, those I’d randomly encounter over the course of a day & the a few forms of content available on the web like this NPR piece from a while back that’s always stuck in my mind.
Though I accept this unfortunate possibility of nations warring over waterways & dams, I often wonder to myself, “what’ll lead up to that? What will the economics of water look like over the course of my lifetime & further on?”
Along the way, going through life with these random thoughts, I’ve come across tidbits of innovation & determinations that I believe paint an abstract picture of what the economics of & around water could look like.
As far as California goes, around 65%, give or take seasonal changes, of the surface water available is in Northern California, hence the mentioning of the basins in the NQH20 index. Most of that water is pumped from the north to south or transported by other means; the rest of the water needed in the south is pumped from groundwater basins regulated by the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014 & other legislative actions.
To do a bit more in depth research & also try my hand at trading the NQH20 contracts, I contacted the CME Group & one of their registered brokers to open an account but was told I do not possess the capital required to participate in the market. I guess I should cry a river & then trade futures on that supply of water.
In all seriousness, not just because my humor lacks refinement by any standard of the word, I bring this up to echo the sentiment Pedro Arrojo Agudo made when he said, “water is increasingly being treated as a mere commodity and even as a financial asset, undermining the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation and the sustainability of the environment.” at the UN General Assembly on October 20th, 2021. If I myself, a “middle-class” citizen, can’t access the potential profits from a water market, what sort of hope or outlook should I hold for my future financial status & the mobility of my money? Will it stretch worse in a world where water prices are speculated on by those who won’t even drink that exact water? Or will those gains “trickle down” too & it’ll all be okay?
About a week ago or so, my fiancé brought to my attention a startup company called FreeWater based in Austin, Texas that markets aluminum bottles & paper-based cartons of “free” water “paid for by ads that are printed directly onto eco-friendly cans and cartons. Ten cents per beverage is donated to charity.”
The 10¢ per beverage is donated to WellAware a non-profit based out of Austin, Texas as well that “fund[s] and implement[s] lasting clean water systems to drive development and empower communities in East Africa.” After a bout of equal parts boredom & being nosey, I perused their IRS audits from 2017 & 2020 & noticed the non-profit WellAware, pays a for-profit company called WellBeyond, which is owned by the same individual, also based in Austin, for “project consulting and execution services for the Organization’s program services in Kenya” to the tune of “$237,460 in paid expenditures and $124,823 of in-kind contributions and expenses,” in 2020.
Through pessimistic lenses critical of foreign conglomerates granted unilateral rights of a resource or location, I look at this “free water” scenario as a possible foundational step towards a future where the 1999-2000 water wars of Cochabamba, Bolivia are replayed with new characters. The protests over the wells & water costs inspired a film called (in English) “Even the Rain” that I saw some years ago now; as summer is upon & droughts continue, various scenes from the film cross my mind as of late, especially so when I think of the creeping normalization of water as a commodity.
FreeWater, in their FAQ section, says they’ll be launching “a new type of utility tokens called the FreeWater token.” Ignoring the application of a currency not scrutinized by external securities aspect (hello crypto), I’ve sat wondering how many energy resources will someday have respective “utility tokens” created by large conglomerates; I eventually wonder, will there be tokens or other company-based credit systems for electricity too? Mastercard already has a card in Sweden with a company based there that “not only helps users track and measure CO2 emissions associated with their purchases, but also puts a limit to the climate impact of their spending with a carbon footprint limit.”
Hear me out, I’m not saying blockchain currencies won’t be a part of the future with my jab earlier towards cryptocurrencies in a general way. Earlier this week, Shell Corp., American Express Global Business Travel & Accenture announced a joint partnership to create a company called Avelia Solutions, that facilitates a “blockchain powered book-and-claim solution that provides you with fully traceable environmental attributes of SAF (sustainable aviation fuel) to help decarbonise your air travel.” I see these continued applications of blockchain pay systems & corporate tokens to be indicative of the fact that they’ll be the norm at some point.
As far as innovation besides blockchain tokens & the like goes, technology related to water & other liquids necessitates further discussion on the levels of access & uses of water.
Over the last decade & change, the desalination industry has made improvements in technology & production costs to combat the decreasing level of access of freshwater, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have developed a method using microbes to clean both organic contaminants and salts from hydraulic fracturing wastewater, while producing renewable energy & countless other examples can be given but my favorite comes from even further back in time: MagnetoHydrodynamics (MHD).
Popularized by a few Tom Clancy books, MHD systems can be found discussed & funded at length by parties like the US Dep of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, NASA & the HIT-SI lab, part of the William E. Boeing Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics at the University of Washington.
I’d wager, if this technology that utilizes water as a fuel component becomes widespread with multiple applications (as far vehicles go) water will become even more scarce but truly live up to its designation of “platform of mobility”. In a way, it’s like we might go from ancient, disconnected seafaring peoples that eventually learned flight to evolving into spacefaring peoples that will use water as much as our ancestors did before us, maybe even more.
In my mind there’s a war between all these thoughts; possibility versus possibility, only settled by time passed. Hopefully, we enter a future ultimately lacking in strife that is abundant with the needed resources for us all to equally enjoy the gift of life. I hope we all someday look at a glass completely full, instead of bicker about the determined or perceived volume.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. leave a comment! Tell me of your goals, expectations, concerns for 2022; I hope to create an area where it can all be hashed out.
P.P.S. are there water restrictions where you live too?
The Rumination Compilation 