Publisher's Synopsis
Contents: Introduction: The bs 4 premises: the urgency of a global environmental crisis; the fact that we are doing next to nothing about it; failed thinking as central to it; when we recognize the underlying pattern, a solution will be evident. Part 1: The Accidental President: How Donald Trump forced a rewrite of this book. Part 2: Duty To Warn: Interesting Times: The global environmental crisis, of which Climate Change is only one of a dozen parts, is vastly more dangerous, moving faster, and with higher risk outcomes, than is discussed in the general public. Three specific factors, when understood, will make the urgency obvious and terrifying: carbon feedback loops, thermal (or climate) lag, and methane. Mental inertia and political gridlock only add to the urgency and the risk. "A failure of imagination" leads to a description of the best and worst possible outcomes, including human extinction within 100 years. Part 3: Thinking, So Why Don't We Get It? Failures in thinking, in decision-making, information, politics, and economics are central to the crisis. Changing thinking is an essential first step toward a solution. Part 4: Information: Our definitions and understanding of Information are too general, too broad, both too specific and not specific enough, and inadequate to the crisis. We need to expand our definition and understanding of Information, in 4 fundamental types, to fully grasp our dilemma. Part 5: Power as an Organizing Principle: The climate crisis results from our abuse of fossil fueled power, a failure of political, economic, and informational powers, which reflect abuses of power at many levels of our civilization. We need a different understanding of the role of power in the crisis, including psychological power. Part 6: A Systemic Failure: The Climate Crisis alone ought to point to a significant failure in our civilizing functions: information and knowledge, politics and economics, power and democracy, and others. When we factor in the other crises our civilization faces, from war to refugees to racism and corruption and others, we cannot avoid concluding that the entire civilization is in a state of crisis. When we understand the root causes, and the connections among them, a radical but feasible solution ought to become obvious. The book points to the current model of globalized capitalism - outlaw capitalism - as central to the causes. When we understand this, we can see that trying to fix our many crises separately is pointless; when we find a common cause, solving most of them becomes feasible. Part 7: The Reckoning: When we take a wide, big picture view of the crisis, from, on one hand, the standpoint of damage done to human well being and the health of the earth; and on the other hand, the quantity of wealth and value extracted, through that economic model; we can see that a reckoning is justified and overdue. We need to imagine - not the redistribution of wealth, rather - the correction of a mis-distribution of wealth that has taken place, destructively and by design, mainly over the last 50 years. Part 8: Total Global Reparation, as the promised solution, is 5 projects: 1. Revitalizing democracy in the US and the world; 2. Converting the global economy to a fair and sustainable model (A Green New Deal, for example), including the elimination of poverty; 3. Reparation, repair, restoration, and preservation of the global ecosystem; 4. Limiting our numbers: getting to zero global population growth, then deciding if negative growth - reducing our total numbers - is necessary; 5. Global Demilitarization: We must look at war as an obsolete function of outlaw capitalism and one of the worst sources of ecological damage and human suffering. The US can lead the world toward a state of secure and lasting peace.
