NASA scientist James Hansen endorses book which calls for 'ridding the world of Industrial Civilization' – Hansen declares author 'has it right...the system is the problem'
Can you believe that someone this nuts heads a major government bureaucracy - NASA GISS? That a nut like this created the climate models the Climate Scientology cult depends on?
Whats the difference between Farnish and Hanson and the Unabomber? Farnish and Hanson don't want to personally get their hands dirty.
Book proposes 'razing cities to the ground, blowing up dams and switching off the greenhouse gas emissions machine'
Friday, January 22, 2010By Marc Morano – Climate Depot
Below are excerpts from an article by James Delingpole of the UK Telegraph. Full Telegraph article here.
Excerpt: In a scary new book called Time's Up - whose free online version titled A Matter Of Scale you can read here - author Keith Farnish claims: "The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization."
[...]
He (Farnish) believes - as the Hon Sir Jonathon Porritt does - that mankind is a blot on the landscape and that breeding (or for that matter, existence) should be discouraged: "In short, the greatest immediate risk to the population living in the conditions created by Industrial Civilization is the population itself. Civilization has created the perfect conditions for a terrible tragedy on the kind of scale never seen before in the history of humanity. That is one reason for there to be fewer people, providing you are planning on staying within civilization - I really wouldn't recommend it, though."
Among his proposed solutions to this problem are wanton destruction:
"Unloading essentially means the removal of an existing burden: for instance, removing grazing domesticated animals, razing cities to the ground, blowing up dams and switching off the greenhouse gas emissions machine. The process of ecological unloading is an accumulation of many of the things I have already explained in this chapter, along with an (almost certainly necessary) element of sabotage."
Needless to say, our friend Dr James Hansen thinks this book is the bees knees. Here is his puff on the Amazon website: "Keith Farnish has it right:
time has practically run out, and the 'system' is the problem. Governments are under the thumb of fossil fuel special interests - they will not look after our and the planet's well-being until we force them to do so, and that is going to require enormous effort."
End Article Excerpt. To read James Delingpole of the UK Telegraph's full Telegraph article go here.
Related Links:
James Hansen's Former NASA Supervisor Declares Himself a Skeptic : Says Hansen 'Embarrassed NASA' & 'Was Never Muzzled' – January 27, 2009
US Senate Report: Don't Panic Over Predictions of Climate Doom - Get the Facts on James Hansen
UK Guardian: NASA scientist calls for putting oil firm chiefs on trial for 'high crimes against humanity' for spreading doubt about man-made global warming – June 23, 2008
NYT's Revkin chides Hansen for promoting sea level claims that are at upper boundary of what is 'even physically possible'
climatedepot.com
Excerpt:
....
Sabotaging
Civilization is not going to go down without a fight, and the forces unleashed can be truly terrible if the past and current behaviour of governments, their corporate owners and their military marionettes is anything to go by. In Chapter Thirteen I wrote: “The laws in each country are tailored to suit the appetite of the population for change”. This statement is especially relevant to sabotage: if the ruling Elites feel that their beloved system is under threat then they will do their best to suppress this threat. This suppression may be carried out legally and visibly, or illegally and invisibly. Public activities that were once permitted will be criminalised, and anyone that directly challenges the stability of the machine will be taken out of harm’s way and, where necessary, made an example of.
It would be reckless of me not to tell you this.
The system has legitimised all of its efforts to fight back and suppress opposition because the vast majority of people who are subjected to its activities are fully paid up members of Industrial Civilization. It is “right” that civilization maintains its stability because without stability, civilization collapses and can no longer impose its will upon the population. Does that sound like a coherent argument to you? In all truth, that really is the best argument civilization has for its continued existence: it has to be maintained because it has to be maintained. Even a heroin addict, shooting up to get the fix that they agonisingly crave knows that their habit will eventually kill them. Even a lifelong nicotine addict will admit that smoking is bad for them and they should stop. Hands up if you think Industrial Civilization should be stopped.
* * *
I take no great pride in knowing that for a large part of my working life, over the last five or so years, I could have caused a breakdown in the global economy; yet I chose not to make this happen of my own accord. My position placed me in charge of key data centres, front line IT security and technical disaster recovery mechanisms, the failure of which would have caused major disruptions in the global financial trading engine. I could have been a hero of the anti-civilization movement: but no one would have known my name, and no one would have found out what I did. That’s not why I didn’t do anything, though.
My lack of motivation to make the change – to sabotage the global economy in some way – was largely down to living, for many years, the life of the industrial worker; a slave to my mortgage and to the system that told me that this was the way it had to be. I wasn’t connected enough; I wasn’t angry enough; I thought this was just the way it had to be. I guess there are lots of people in the same situation I was: perfectly poised to screw up the system in some way, but not sure if it is the right thing to do.
Maybe you’re in that boat, but further down the river: informed, resourceful, connected, angry…how do you decide whether it’s the right thing to do?
It comes down to Risk and Reward: the Risk is essentially the sum total of the fallout that could occur as the result of your actions; the Reward is the extent to which Industrial Civilization and its ability to desecrate the Earth, has been weakened. When it comes to Risk, you must go into things with a clear mind – you may have a rabid hatred for some part of the system, but you still need to take responsibility for your actions: will anyone die or be seriously harmed as a direct result of what you do, and are you prepared to take on the responsibility for the harm you may cause? Reading ahead, for a moment, if you take Rule Four into account, you are very unlikely to encounter this kind of moral dilemma; the vast majority of acts of sabotage that are likely to be effective are small acts that are part of a larger, beneficial, whole – small acts that, in themselves do not cause moral dilemmas. If you do encounter difficult choices, though, then Reward can play a part.
Reward is a measure of the net improvement in the long-term survival of humanity; based upon the improvement in the condition of our natural life-support machine. It is most certainly not about fame and glory. Few, if any, people are qualified to judge whether an act of sabotage has sufficient reward to justify a high degree of collateral damage; the best advice I can give is that for all acts of sabotage – large or small, morally-complex or not – always abide by Rule One.
Rule One: Ask yourself, “Is it worth it?”
Though the battle-worn troops of World War II resolutely denied Europe ever had a “soft underbelly”, Winston Churchill nevertheless piled the combined forces of the Western Allied armies into North Africa, across the Mediterranean and into southern Europe in 1943. The Russian forces, along with the Russian people, died in their millions to hold off a rampant Axis army on the Eastern Front; while all the time the Allies were working their way northwards, peeling off division after division of German soldiers, weakening the Nazi defences as they went. Only after Hitler’s fighting machine had been diminished through a combination of eastern attrition and southern guile was it possible for the D-Day landings to take place on the northern coast of France. Beating the unbeatable was a slow, but highly calculated process: at no point after the disastrous attempt to land at Dieppe, did the Allied forces ever attempt a direct assault upon a full-strength enemy.
A good computer hacker will spend a large amount of time not only planning the attack methodology (this is known as “scoping”) but also ensuring that once the attack has been completed, no trace of it remains. This is not too difficult if the attack is a quick “smash and grab” to extract information, change data or bring down all or part of an IT system; where it gets difficult is in the more destructive and less reversible hacks – those that install some kind of mechanism that allows the hacked system to be remotely controlled or re-entered easily though a “back door”, or those that are designed to keep on attacking the system automatically. The best way a hacker can cover his or her tracks is to make sure there is someone on the inside helping them. There is no way of telling how many times insiders have been used to assist with or wholly carry out such attacks, but you can be sure that it is far more than companies and government departments are willing to disclose: after all, who would want to reveal that their own employees can’t be trusted? In fact, because IT systems have become among the most critical components within all the major corporate and political institutions, Industrial Civilization is increasingly at the mercy of hackers and, by extension, keen saboteurs. There are many different types of sabotage: they all need to be carefully planned out.
Rule Two is: Don’t go blundering in – plan your approach.
I was in a perfect position to, at least partly, sabotage the economic machine, but I would have been a prime suspect due to my multiple positions of authority and my well-known environmental leanings: if caught my first action may well have been my last. The best large-scale saboteur has all of the assets mentioned earlier, but is also the one person whom no one will ever suspect – who has no obvious motive and is seen as unlikely to ever exploit his or her position. Dmitry Orlov, an authority on the collapse of the Soviet Union, describes it this way:
To do it right, you have to get paid to do it. Good industrial sabotage is indistinguishable from black magic: nobody should know that it was sabotage, or how it worked, especially not the person actually doing it. The absolutely worst thing that a half-competent saboteur can be accused of is negligence, but it really should be more of a "mistakes were made" sort of thing. [xxix]
It is no accident that the most effective forms of sabotage are carried out from inside – as Bruce Schneier writes: “Insiders can be impossible to stop because they’re the exact same people you’re forced to trust.” [xxx] Exploiting the trust of someone may feel morally reprehensible, but remember that you are being trusted by someone who is a willing (and possibly eager) participant in the most destructive culture ever seen on the face of the Earth.
The most recent UK Labour Government was almost brought down through leaks made by individuals within its own departments: the leaks concerned something that had forced countless people to reflect on their inner feelings about the morality of a single activity: the Iraq War. Dr David Kelly – the only named source in the revelation that a dossier, specifically produced for the Blair Government as a case for going to war, was hopelessly inaccurate – paid for his “going public” with his life. Whether he died at his own hands, or those of other agencies will never be known for sure, but Kelly was not the only source of leaks concerning the “Dodgy Dossier”, and was certainly not the only source of the many leaks, off-the-record conversations, anonymously sent memos and uncensored government files related to the Iraq War. When something like a questionable war, a genocide or a global ecological catastrophe invokes the morals of people in positions of trust, they can, and will use whatever tools they have at their disposal to undermine whatever is the cause of the problem. If the protagonist (or saboteur, if we are being accurate here) is able to remain in that position of trust, much as Cold War spies were able to pass on secrets for years undetected, then they are all the more effective.
Rule Three is: Don’t get caught.
But what kinds of sabotage are we talking about? No doubt it’s a major achievement to bring down a corrupt government, but it will only be replaced by one that operates along the same lines as its predecessor – to promote the “need” for economic growth and to spread the influence of Industrial Civilization around the world on behalf of its corporate masters. Bringing down an oil company or even a single refinery will, indeed, cause a halt in the production and sale of a large amount of climate changing hydrocarbons and, if the company or refinery is large enough, could trigger economic unrest; but there are other oil companies and many more refineries, and there are always powerful institutions, and huge numbers of deluded people, who will ensure that the oil keeps flowing – at least until it runs out. The primary targets for sabotage, if enough people are to carry out the tasks necessary to reclaim the Earth for those that actually want to survive, are the things that are stopping people from connecting with the real world: the Tools of Disconnection. If you read Chapter Thirteen, you will get a pretty good idea of the kinds of things that should be targeted.
Rule Four is: Concentrate your efforts on the Tools of Disconnection.
The first reason for this is that disconnection is the biggest problem humanity is facing, and we are trying to deal with the root of the problem here. It may be satisfying to burn down a garage full of SUVs if you have a virulent hatred of gas-guzzling road transport; but these places are insured and there are plenty more SUVs where they came from. In the context of reconnecting humanity, such actions are only symbolic. Far better to sabotage the advertisers and marketing media that encourages people to buy SUVs in the first place; far better to sabotage the government agencies and trade bodies that ensure that vehicle sales and production remain a high priority; far better to sabotage the efforts of the oil and motor companies in convincing people that climate change is nothing to do with them, and even if it is, the disappearing ice-caps are not really that much of a problem.
The second reason to concentrate on the Tools of Disconnection is that the laws that protect the global economy, and the forces that ensure the global economy remains the primary concern of humanity, are currently focussed on protecting the symbolic elements of Industrial Civilization. I don’t believe for a moment that these forces won’t move to protect the Tools of Disconnection if, and when, a concerted sabotage effort takes place; I don’t believe for a second that laws will not be made to ensure those of us who want to opt out of the system are “encouraged” to stay: but for the moment, it is the traditional targets of the symbolic protester – the buildings and vehicles and individual “elite” members of society, for example – that are best protected. If you attack a corporate headquarters or chief executive then you will be stopped and probably imprisoned; if you divert or copy all confidential documents coming out of a corporate lobby group to a publisher of “subversive” materials or a local friendly radio station then who is going to come off worse?
I am not going to dwell on the numerous methods of sabotage open to those who have the motivation and the means to carry them out – those people (of which you may be one of) are almost certainly far better equipped than me, and also know how to do it far more effectively and secretively than I could outline in a book of this nature – but I will reiterate what I think are the four key rules of sabotage, should you chose to take that path alongside the other things I have suggested in this chapter:
1. Carefully weigh up all the pros and cons, and then ask yourself, “Is it worth it?”
2. Plan ahead, and plan well, accounting for every possible eventuality.
3. Even if you understand the worth of your action, don’t get caught.
4. Make the Tools of Disconnection your priority; anything else is a waste of time and effort.
* * *
One question still remains unanswered, but has been well covered by Derrick Jensen in his Endgame books: “How can just a few determined saboteurs make it easier for the rest of humanity to reconnect with the real world?” The simple answer is that far fewer people have to make the first move than you might suppose. As Jensen revealed during a conversation with a former military officer:
They don’t have to break everything in sight. All they have to do is give the first in each line of dominoes a hearty enough heave. Once the reaction has achieved a critical threshold a fire will feed itself and grow uncontrollably. Part of the key is winning the minds of the people who would otherwise plug all the machinery [xxxi] right back in again. Once they realize they can actually walk away, without repercussions, they’ll be able to exercise their human freedoms in prodigious ways. [xxxii]
If you hark back to the discussions about the fragility of civilization then it becomes less of a pipe dream and more of a reality to think that a few people can start the dominoes tipping. And anyway, who is to say that thousands of people are not already partaking in a healthy slice of disconnection sabotage? Even if you simply post a dodgy internal corporate memo to your local newspaper in an unmarked envelope in a post box far from your home, or even if you just paint “Liars!” on a billboard near a busy road junction in the dead of night, you are already joining the swelling ranks of the saboteurs.
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