Judas goats and Scapegoats

and the 1000 ton rule

So many numbers, so many facts and figures and so so many statistics. Contradictory, misused, misquoted, cherry picked, all leading to more and more misrule.

The facts and figures spotlight falls onto the climate and ignores the other crises, the statistics don't reveal the misery and suffering of each and every person. Except for some, like the “1000-ton rule,” according to which a future person is killed every time 1000 tons of fossil carbon are burned. But it's a 'future' person, not me, but then again it could be my child. We are so bad at properly judging risk and our current socio-economic systems push us away from compassionate mindfulness and broadness of view. Someone may consider that the risks of their having an accident in their car are vanishingly small because after 30 years of trouble free motoring they haven't ever been involved in a crash. The next day they have a crash but it will most likely be 'someone else's fault'. They ignore the pollution that has spewed from their exhaust and, along with the other car fumes has actively participated in many deaths. They only look behind when they are reversing and don't see the plume of killer pollution wafting out in their wake nor hear the spirit killing noise of their engine and tires.

The 1000 ton rule doesn't consider all the other insults to which our minds and bodies are subjected but it does bring that spotlight onto the direct and indirect impacts of carbon pollution, 1000 tons will kill someone tomorrow which is another day but arrives fast. The next 1000 tons will kill another person and so on. Then we can multiply the number of 'future' people killed by the total quantity of Co2 pollution, which is a bit more than 1000 tons, every day.

Not very cheerful but people are dying, from all the other forms of pollution, from ultra-transformed foods, from poverty, injustice and on and on. It could and maybe still can be so different, we could have clean air, pure water, equality and a healthy biosphere, frankly it's not difficult. Once upon a time a Government talked about 'build back better', a sad little alliteration and impossible when those people pretending to be the architects of such a rebuild are made stupid by their myopic, blinkered visions and their egocentric ambition. That government as with so many others continue to lead people down a path towards a bitter and tawdry finality which could have been avoided.

Blame gets thrown around like confetti, it's the migrants, it's the wokists, it's the leftists, it's the rightists, whoever, it's always easy to find a scapegoat but we continue to follow the Judas goats into the killing zone, and we die.

I'm travelling and at the port after having passed though a zone covered in razor wire, passing Police searching in, under and over every lorry, through the passport check I'm sitting in comfort in the salon of a ferry. In the bushes and trees around the port you can see tents and people moving around, waiting, hoping for a chance to cross over the frontier and maybe have the opportunity to get a job and make some money and get on to the path towards the lifestyle they have seen in magazines, on social media, on advertising hoardings. They chase a dream and flee a nightmare, then these people, these human beings become pawns in political games fuelled by personal ambitions. 'Let them in', some cry, 'our birthrate has fallen and we need workers to keep our factories going.' 'Keep them out, send them back!' cry others they will destroy our cultures and we the happy majority may become the underdogs.' But those figures we read are people filled with hopes and dreams, filled with creativity, and they die, exploited and then drowned which is a painful and miserable end to their lives. Solutions vomit from the mouths of politicians each under the glamour of their egos and self-centered ambition, solutions that aren't solutions at all, policies which sow the seeds of future conflicts, future wars and revolutions. Humanity, at the moment when it needs, really needs to pull together to sort this mess out, fractures again and again into numerous factions each with their own scapegoats and each with their own Judas goat. It's just all sick and immoral and seriously embarrassing as a future generation will look back at this moment in history and wonder why the hell we didn't do more. Maybe hell is a good metaphor because, as others have noted, that's what we are bringing to the Earth. Mammals have evolved to be able to survive and thrive at lower and lower temperatures but our capacity to tolerate higher temperatures hasn't really changed over many millennia. But then again with the Gulf stream noticeably slowing maybe the ice packs and a full ice age will return.

Solutions?

They're all there and ready to hand, but .... any real solution is going to involve radical change. If we want more equality, no poverty, better health, intact and functional ecosystems and all the rest we will have to completely restructure our social, economic and industrial systems. This is being resisted by those who have invested and myopic interests in the current status quo.

The UK government is playing, again, with the idea of eliminating inheritance tax. Once again doing the right thing, re-examining how inheritance is managed, but, as ever, doing it the wrong way. Inheritance is seen by some as something which promotes inequality and injustice, by a majority of people it is seen as a a good thing and completely normal. I worked hard all my life to build up something that I can pass on to my children and give them a kickstart with their lives. This is an individualist point of view and ignores the fact that said children live amongst other people and depend on them. This brings us to the idea that accumulated wealth should pass on to the community in which the person lived and not just to their direct offspring. A community inheritance tax if you like. A farm I know has been in the same family over 5 generations, each one improving, adding and expanding the farm activities. This farm opened it's doors and is now a community of diverse people who share and continue to build and improve the farm and the village to which it is attached. The bloodline inheritance has stopped and all members have a share.

An argument against such things as community inheritance is that there are no communities any more, a generality but something which is also true as supermarkets, roads and suchlike have fragmented local communities, as has gentrification and secondary 'holiday' homes, Airbnb and similar online rental companies. So we have to address these things in order to recreate our local communities, what is great about this is the secondary consequences of our actions are positive too. By eliminating supermarkets and replacing them with community integrated food production we move away from toxic food and win back our health.

We can move away from the current absurd situation where supermarkets impose low purchase prices on farmers who are then financially helped by their government or the common agricultural policy of the EU. This encourages farmers to produce the wrong things in the wrong way. I worked in a country recently and the agronomist who was helping me explained that the government was encouraging farmers to switch to olive production and away from Durum wheat so widely used in North African dishes This fatuous policy means that said country will have to start importing Durum wheat from neighbouring countries thus eliminating any financial benefit of switching to olives.

Moves to reduce the numbers of secondary homes will reduce the need for new build, house prices and give the next generation access to accommodation within the area they grew up in. By rebuilding or local communities and prioritising their local economies we can reduce poverty and inequality, in the medium term they can both be eliminated altogether.

I could, and often do, go on at length about the ready made solutions that are all around us, this time however my main thrust is to bring a spotlight on the devastation being wrought daily by our food, social, industrial, economic and governance systems. A slow death from eating ultra-processed foods, car or industrial pollution, poverty and fast deaths caused by car and industrial accidents and all the rest. In the end we must understand that people are not 'dying' from these things they are being killed by them. It is homicide at an industrial and global scale. We must stop following the Judas goats, stop finding scapegoats and get down to sorting things out.