end fossil fuel subsidies – Page 2

Calling All Spaceship Earth Crew

“There are no mere passengers aboard United Spaceship Planet Earth. We are all crew. And the survival of humanity depends on the integrity of the individual,” Buckminster Fuller said in 1982.

Our beloved planetary spaceship is in trouble. Our atmosphere is being destroyed and our precious resources are being senselessly squandered by rogue and rampant capitalists motivated by unnecessary greed.

Somehow they seem to have missed the lesson about all for one and one for all. They know (as Exxon knew) that use of fossil fuels was fucking over the planet. They decided their own measly mortal profits were more important. It is time to take the sons-a-bitches down.

WHAT EXACTLY DOES THAT MEAN?

It means ending all government subsidies for fossil fuels, as soon as possible. It means establishing some kind of tax or dividend to encourage the behavior necessary to secure the future of humanity. A carbon tax. Whatever it takes to turn this ship around. We know that money makes the world go round. So why not make that money work to set the world right:

END FOSSIL FUEL SUBSIDIES AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. \ CEASE ANY AND ALL SUBSIDIES, PERMITS, LAND HOLDINGS FOR OIL, GAS AND COAL. DEMAND A GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABLE TO THE ENVIRONMENT. KEEP FOSSIL FUELS IN THE GROUND FOR FUTURE EMERGENCIES.

A few other things we can do:

1) Get the money out of politics by overturning Supreme Court “Citizens United” ruling. Capitalism in and of itself is not bad. But the American free market variety of it has been disastrous for all but the One Percent.

2) Invest in Clean Energy. All subsidies go to development of solar, wind, electromagnetic, geothermal, wave, hydroelectric, biomass, etc.

3) Demand reforesting of the planet. Legislate requirements for sustainability in development, especially housing. Plus – Green up cities, secure local food production.

And then there is one additional thing we can all accomplish, every day, just by having the guts to speak up:

3) We must help awaken others, in time to realize that all three tasks above need to happen soon. Have the courage to speak up to help others find the political will to help make this happen.

A clean energy world will be a healthier and more prosperous one, since we will no longer have to labor for our daily energy supply. Think about it. Fish don’t pay for water. How did nature’s most sophisticated species accept that he must labor for his daily energy supply? Human beings can achieve 100% clean energy, and live off the abundant natural energies of Earth, if we simply have the courage to wake up and tackle the fossil fools, and demand they let us live a clean, healthy life. Demand they apologize for taking fifty years longer than necessary. Demand an end to fossil fuels. Now.

In the meantime, we can also reduce our own carbon footprints, by buying less, eating less meat, planting more trees and solar power panels, and work to regenerate the environment we are now well on our way to destroying.

“We can make the world work for everybody, without ecological harm, but only if we dare to set out with that objective.” – Buckminster Fuller.

We are all crew on this United Spaceship Planet Earth. What can you do? Speak up. Dare to share this post.

From Weaponry to Livingry. Are We There Yet?

On Buckminster Fuller’s last day on his beloved Spaceship Earth, on July 1, 1983, he left a neatly arranged manuscript on his desk— a fourteen page document entitled Proposal for a Livingry Services Industry. This is Bucky’s strategic plan for converting much of the world’s military (killingry) industries into enterprises committed instead to improving the quality of life for all human beings, or as Bucky called it, Livingry.

He said this shift in focus was a pivotal page in humanity’s final examination as to whether we were a worthy experiment of nature. In other words, unless we can come together to help unite our great Spaceship Earth toward common purposes that will save us rather than kill us, we are toast.

Bucky’s overriding objective, which he asked us all to embrace: “To make the world work for 100% of people, through spontaneous cooperation, as quickly as possible, without ecological harm or to the disadvantage of anyone.”

The Livingry Services Industry proposal was written for a conference at Waseda University in Tokyo. In it, Bucky puts forth an “alternative to politics and its ever more wasteful warring, and inherently vain attempts to solve one-sidedly all humanity’s basic economic and social problems.”

The concept is born of pure common sense: “War has taught man that it is all right to use our scarce resources to dominate and kill people. We must now make the decision to reallocate those resources, to help people live better. If we only prepare for war, that’s what we will know. We must also prepare for peace, by converting some of our weaponry to ‘livingry’.”

Thirty five years have passed since Bucky authored this paper. The days when we even discussed peace as an actual plausibility are now far behind us, but hopefully also just ahead.

Bucky aid he worked fifty years ahead of time. So maybe we are almost there.

Take a look at Bucky’s World Livingry Services Industry proposal.

Then take a look at my recently released book, The Girl from Spaceship Earth – A true story about the lost wisdom of a genius Steve Jobs called the Leonardo da Vinci of the twentieth century, and who nine out of ten students of Stanford University (where his archives are held) have never heard his name. The “why” behind it all will blow your mind.

Thanks for reading and sharing BuckyIdeas.

A big year for Spaceship Earth?

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Things are looking up in Bucky’s world. A true leader has emerged in US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. He knows the importance of the statement above. And why government must be returned to the people. In addition, the climate deal in Paris appears to have been a turning point. Wall Street is wobbling, no doubt in fear of Bernie.

But there are serious challenges. Exxon lied effectively for thirty years, derailing Humanity’s most important task, that of weaning ourselves off fossil fuels. Monsanto is still suing California to stop it from labeling RoundUp as a cancer causer, while they greedily buy up non-GMO seeds and refuse to label GMOs. Methane plumes beyond our fathoming are still poisoning the skies in Southern California. Fracking is still screwing up water supplies and lives throughout America are being derailed by irresponsible corporate powers only concerned with their own profits.

Removing the current corporate control over America’s government is key. Bernie Sanders is the only one willing to take this on. The only one even talking about it.

This didn’t start out to be a Bernie ad, but darned if it didn’t become one. Surely Bucky would be #feelingthebern. 2016 could be the year.

Desperate times call for big ideas.

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How to Think Like Bucky

This amazing book continues to provide the most useful access to the mind and heart of Buckminster Fuller of anything I have found.It is surely the most valuable Bucky thinking available today, and in true Bucky style, it is linked here, for free.

BOOK REVIEW:
AFullerExplanation By Amy Edmondson

For years I worked to wrap my head around some of Bucky’s ideas, and then one day I picked up this book and the veil was thrown off. Amy Edmondson’s A Fuller Explanation opens up the mind and heart of Buckminster Fuller better than anything I have found. It can truly show you how to think like Bucky, and in true Bucky style, it is made available to you free by clicking here.

This book is a study of Bucky’s major discoveries and ideas. It also deciphers Bucky’s most important two books: Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking and Synergetics 2: Further Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking.

Together these two volumes (also available free by clicking) are over 1400 pages. Their length, along with Bucky’s exquisitely accurate, but often awkward version of the English language, have been barriers for many seeking to understand Bucky’s timeless concepts. But Amy Edmondson changes all that, making even Bucky’s mind blowingly brilliant concepts about synergetic geometry and the geometry of thinking accessible.

From the Preface: “Synergetics, in the broadest terms, is the systematic study of space, and as such is an inherently comprehensive discipline. Designers, architects, and scientists can easily find connections to their work; however, the larger significance of Fuller’s geometry may be less visible. Experience with synergetics encourages a new way of approaching and solving problems. Its emphasis on visual and spatial phenomena combined with Fuller’s holistic approach fosters the kind of lateral thinking which so often leads to creative breakthroughs. Moreover, familiarity with synergetics facilitates recognition of significant patterns that might otherwise be missed.

The recent discovery of C60—a carbon molecule that’s a tiny replica of Fuller’s geodesic dome—provides an apt illustration. In naming this new molecule “buckminsterfullerene”, scientists Harold Kroto and Richard Smalley have lightheartedly acknowledged a debt to Fuller for enabling them to identify this geometric configuration occurring on a scale far too small to be seen directly. As a result, almost a decade after Buckminster Fuller’s death, his name can be found in some newspaper or magazine on a weekly basis, due to C60’s far- ranging implications for science and industry. Scientists have speculated that “buckyballs” may revolutionize industrial lubricants, plastics, and even lead to superconductors that carry electricity without resistance. Buckminsterfullerene’s structure is what Harvard’s Arthur Loeb has called a “truncated icosahedron”; Bucky called this particular geodesic shape the “hexapent dome”. The rest of us call it a soccer ball! Whatever the label, this structure is characterized by inherent stability and the efficient use of space. And so, if Nature were doing her job, buckminsterfullerene would be the only logical choice for structuring C60. Discovering the shared principles behind structures of all materials, shapes and sizes is what synergetics is all about.”

Bucky often said that he was working fifty years ahead. Many of the ideas discussed in this book were from the 1960’s or earlier, so they are right on time for 2016. You will see that most of Bucky’s insights and discoveries have aged very gracefully, and that they are eternal. You will understand that as we gain clarity about what they mean, we can be inspired toward further discoveries to help solve problems on Spaceship Earth.

Maybe we will even pass the ‘final examination’ Bucky said was underway. The more of us who read and think like Bucky, the better our chances. Only knowledge can save humanity from itself.

Read A Fuller Explantion.

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DENIERS ON THE RUN. CAN PARIS BE WON?

Deniers are on the run in Washington D.C., as illustrated in this hilarious photo and story linked here from the Onion. They are newly feral creatures sensing the gig is up. Exxon is under investigation. Oil prices are on a roller coaster. Bill McKibben’s divestment movement is a big success. The application for the Keystone XL pipeline is being withdrawn. Americans are wising up. Our eyes are opening to the dysfunction of our present model of government. We know war is waged for profit. We know we have all the technology we need to create clean energy. And we know that we can get the money out of politics.

With either Bernie or Hillary as our new president, America’s hope for an actual renewal is good. Maybe this was the change Barack Obama was promising? But what really matters now, and matters most, is what happens in Paris this December.

This next climate gathering is surely humanity’s last best chance to turn things around. World leaders will gather and choose to come together and work to get our ecosystem back into balance with nature, or blow it for good, by waiting too long and doing too little.

To help make sure it happens, Bucky would say that we must each dare to speak about it, and demand it. Dare to demand Climate action now. Support Clean energy development. Now. Enough with the fossil fools being allowed to place their measly mortal profits ahead of the welfare of not just all of humanity, but of all life on Earth.

How dare they? How could we have been so blind for so long?

#DEMANDCLIMATEACTION #350.org #RaiseHellSleepWell

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http://www.theonion.com/…/vicious-feral-house-republicans-r…

Why 1980s Were The Despicable Decade

Now we know for sure: Starting in the 1980s, the fossil fuel industry intentionally misled the world about its beliefs regarding climate change. In order to protect their measly mortal profits, they lied. They discredited the science they knew to be correct. For decades. If you haven’t seen the latest on this, read the story in The Guardian: Fossil Fool Racketeering Report

There is some satisfaction in having been right all these years about the shenanigans of the industry/government alliance that formed in the 1980’s, but mostly there is anguish and an increasing sense of hopelessness. Maybe the Baby Boomer generation should be renamed The Bamboozled generation. How could we have been so blind?

Bucky knew this intentional deception was going on when I met with him in 1982. He said (and I paraphrase, but these ideas are also found is his books): “The industry is working very hard to stop renewables. Because they cannot find a way to place a meter on the sun, profit-only-motivated interests are stopping solar from happening. I say this is the greatest crime ever committed against humanity.”

President Jimmy Carter at installation of solar panels on White House. President Ronald Reagan removed them in 1980, the kick of to an awful decade in American history. — 1980 kicked off the worst decade in American history. President Jimmy Carter had recently installed solar panels on White House. President Ronald Reagan removed them, calling them folly, and fairy dust. Reagan and his crony corporations had already gotten together to create socialism for them and trickle down capitalism for the rest of us. This created the greatest transfer of wealth in our country’s history. All the wealth went straight to the top, strangling the middle class and the poor. Bucky wrote about this in his book GRUNCH of Giants.

The moment that best characterizes the awful decade of the 1980s was the day the solar panels on the White House were removed by President Ronald Reagan. The metaphor is perfect, as he was simultaneously dismantling all government support of clean energy development, which he and his big oil cronies knew was not only possible, but inevitible, eventually. They wanted a few more decades of mind-blowing wealth before the spigot got turned off.

Now, here we are again. Many younger people do not realize we have been here before.

Each of us must demand the clean renewable energy we know is both possible and necessary. With many voices, we will become one, and they will have no choice but to reckon with us.

Let’s give those racketeering oil executives a choice: support clean energy development now, or go to jail for the rest of your life. You have committed great crimes against humanity; at the very least, it is time to stop. End all fossil fuel subsidies now. Those pipeline projects are government projects. They are using our own taxpayer dollars to subsidize our own demise.

Today’s generation may be our last chance.

We will either learn from history, or be doomed to repeat it.

Let’s get this revolution started!

My task is to bring back Bucky’s ideas and serve them up in bite size pieces so that you can use them to make change happen in your world. Bucky’s genius works toward any cause that ‘arcs with the truth’, and it is all actually quite simple.

Take Einstein’s E = mc2 for example. It’s super easy to understand if it’s explained simply: E represents units of energy, m represents units of mass, and c2 is the speed of light squared, or multiplied by itself. Because the speed of light is a very large number, and then you multiply it by itself, you can see the point that this equation shows how even the tiniest amount of matter can release a huge amount of energy, as in a single atom splitting in a nuclear reaction.

Or, as in one person writing to a president, or creating a meme that goes viral.

Bucky’s Synergetic Geometry explains that a triangle is the fundamental building block of the universe, the strongest structure in existence. Modern science is proving him right, as understanding of physics and biochemistry continues to grow.
Social Media creates a perfect triangle. It connects you, to others, through it — a three-sided phenomenon. A de facto digital democracy.

Bucky also called on us to reconnect to nature. Nature, after all, is the perfect designer. She has been at it for billions of years. If a living thing doesn’t abide by nature’s rules, nature expels it like a kidney stone. This is the pathway the human race is currently strolling down while we stare at beautiful behinds on our i-phones. Once we understand how nature works, we can do the same. If we simply set out with the right objective, we can accomplish Bucky’s suggested mission: “To make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”

To get there, he called for an ‘Anticipatory Design Science Revolution’, which sounds like an monster of an idea, but breaking down the genius makes it simple:

Anticipatory – Figuring out which way things are headed.
Design – Creating technologies and artifacts that maximize current technology.
Science – Accepting the truth of the necessity to adapt to nature’s principles.
Revolution – Turning things upside down to make it happen.

The first three are underway. The question is whether or not the “revolution” part is happening quickly enough. Most scientists say it’s not, at least not yet. The fact that we still allowing, even subsidizing, more and more desperate measures to extract fossil fuels from the ground (through Fracking and Tar Sands and building huge pipelines across continents) is surely ample evidence that the revolution has not yet begun.

It is long past time for it to start.

Bucky’s words, first said in 1965, should infuriate us all: “Because our tax-hungry government and our money hungry corporations (which run our government) have not figured a way to place a meter between us and the sun, we are not allowed to enjoy the vast supplies of free (solar, wind, geothermal, wave, etc) energy that could be powering the world.

The technology exists to create a clean energy economy. We only have to demand it happen.

Only the individual has the power to do and say exactly what he believes. No matter what your age or station in life, you, as an individual, have the power to influence others.

We take power into our hands every time we pick up our phones. We can voice our opinions louder, quicker and easier than ever before. We can demand our government create a clean energy economy. We can demand our government develop a better relationship with our boss, mother nature. We can demand they stop “burning up the house to keep the family warm.”

I think if Bucky were alive today, he would ask us to make it a daily habit. Every day: Brush your teeth, comb your hair, read up and then and speak out about something you care about. Put some time every day into doing something for your fellow man. Focus on the environment, or peace and justice, children’s rights, whatever you care most about. If only a small percentage of the seven plus billion of us would start doing this, the revolution would ram right through the current nonsense of today like a herd of wild elephants.

Just like Einstein’s law, such a big concentration of even something very small could release a huge amount of energy.

Thank you for sharing Buckyworld.

Enough about GDP already!

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Category: end fossil fuel subsidies