A Republic for the Earth

by

Richard Garner

In 2024 extreme weather and extreme weather related events induced by climate change led to the deaths of thousands of people around the world and millions were displaced from their homes. Here in the United States extreme heat waves made worse by climate change led to the deaths of 2,300 people at a minimum in 2023. And scientists think that deaths made more likely by extreme heat are very much under-reported.

Extreme weather and extreme weather related events include heat waves, extended downpours of heavy rain, flooding, droughts, wildfires, cold spells and more frequent, more damaging hurricanes and other storms. (See AP analysis finds 2023 set record for US heat deaths killing in areas that used to handle the heat AP News May 31, 2024 by Seth Borenstein, M.K. Wildeman and Anita Snow at https://apnews.com/article/record-heat-deadly-climate-change-south-11de21a526e1cbe7e306c47c2f12438d and US deaths from heat are dangerously undercounted by Ariel Wittenburg, Chelsea Harvey and E & E News at https://www.Scientificamerican.com/u-s-deaths-from-heat-are-dangerously-undercounted/)

In addition to extreme weather made worse by climate change the extra heat in the atmosphere because of the buildup of greenhouse gases is causing ice in glaciers and in the Arctic and Antarctic regions to melt. This process is having many bad effects that are threatening humanity and the biosphere. The melting of the ice in glaciers and in ice shelves in the polar regions is causing a rise in the level of the world’s oceans. Sea level rise could lead to coastal flooding and even inundate many of the major cities of the world.

The melting of glaciers in mountainous regions of the world could lower future fresh water supplies in large areas of the world. (See What countries and cities will disappear due to sea level rise? By Joe Phelan March 27, 2022 at https://www.livescience.com/what-places-disappear-due-to-rising-sea-levels. Also see https://climatechange.academy/introduction-to-climate-change/melting-glaciers-ice-caps-sea-levels/ This second article at this website cites estimates of maximum global sustainable human population where the lowest figure cited is 4 billion. Other sources have made much lower estimates such as 2 billion or even lower. I will address this issue more fully in other blog posts. However, this particular article is especially good in describing some of the potential effects of melting glaciers in other regions besides the polar regions on fresh water supplies, including especially the glaciers in the Himalayan mountains. See the passage that begins with the words “Himalayan Water Tower.”)

The whiteness of the snow and ice in the polar regions reflects back into space more of the heat that falls on the earth than in other parts of the world where this heat is absorbed. With the melting of the glaciers and the ice in these regions a lot less of this heat is being reflected back into space. This is potentially a kind of feedback loop where climate change feeds on itself. Permafrost, permanently frozen ground in these regions is also melting, leading to the release of methane, an even more deadly greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. This is also a potential feedback loop that could make climate change much worse.

The loss of sea ice and the melting of permafrost is threatening the survival of animals that depend on it including polar bears, walruses, arctic foxes, snowy owls and reindeer. (See Six ways loss of Arctic ice impacts everyone World Wildlife Fund at: https://www.worldwildlife.org/resources/explainers/six-ways-loss-of-arctic-ice-impacts-everyone/ .)

In addition to the melting of the glaciers, the heat being trapped in the atmosphere by the buildup

of greenhouse gases caused by the pervasive use of fossil fuels is partly going into the oceans. The

buildup of heat in the atmosphere and in the oceans is affecting ocean currents and threatening to

destabilize them. (See Key Atlantic current could collapse soon ‘impacting the entire world for centuries to come’ leading climate scientists warn at https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/rivers-oceans/key-atlantic-current-could-collapse-soon-impacting-the-entire-world-for-centuries-to-come-leading-climate-scientiss-warn/)

Climate change is also profoundly affecting the rest of life on Earth. It is presenting challenges to survival for other species of life, not just humanity.(See Climate Change Impacts Across the Refuge System on the US Fish and Wildlife Service website https://www.fws.gov/story/climate-change-impacts See also 5 Ways Climate Change Affects Animals and How We can Stop it by Jacquiline Covey Defenders of Wildlife at: https://defenders.org/blog/2023/08/5-ways-climate-change-affects-animals-and-how-we-can-stop-it/ and The Impact of Climate Change on Wildlife and Ecosytems by Yuhaan Zeng Journal of Biodiversity and Endangered Species at: https://www.hilarispublisher.com/open-access/the-impact-of-climate-change-on-wildlife-and-ecosytems-99429.html As you might gather, I do not agree that the suggestions for how to stop these affects by Defenders of Wildlife are adequate.)

In 2016 Donald Trump was elected President. In his campaign Trump made it clear that he thought

climate change is a hoax, Once in office, he acted on his beliefs. He took the United States out of the

Paris agreement of 2015 and he refused to lead the United States in fighting the buildup of greenhouse

gases in the atmosphere. In other ways he demonstrated either indifference or hostility to any view

that environmental problems in general are real.

In 2015, in his speech announcing that he was running for President, Trump attacked the nation and

the people of Mexico. He said that Mexico was sending its worst people to the United States as

immigrants. He attacked the character of these immigrants. He said they were criminals. This was

an absolutely vicious lie. The truth was that they were among the best people of Mexico, some of

the most ambitious and hard working.

Donald Trump’s entire approach to the issue and phenomenon of immigration into the United States is absolutely poisonous in its impact on the potential for solving what might be considered to be the problems caused by a high level of immigration into the United States.

There has never been a President quite like Donald Trump. He doesn’t care about facts. He refuses to accept that he has ever done anything wrong. When political events don’t go the way he wants them to,

he makes up his own facts.

He doesn’t understand science. He doesn’t understand democracy. Incredibly, the Supreme Court, in its immunity decision, said that he did not have to be called to account for his crimes while President.

And yet, the rise to the Presidency of this kind of man was no blind accident. The ground was prepared

by failures of leadership by both major political parties, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, over the last fifty to sixty years.

These failures of leadership have been constituted by the failure to openly recognize and acknowledge and completely engage with the problems of human population growth and economic growth. These two phenomena are the fundamental underlying causes of the world environmental crisis threatening, and not just threatening, but actually destroying the future of American democracy, the American people, all of humanity, and much of the rest of life on Earth.

This world environmental crisis is not something peripheral to American life. It threatens people of

every race and country. It threatens immigrants and it threatens citizens across the face of the planet.

This failure of leadership by the presumed leaders of the Republican and Democratic Parties, and all of the minor parties in the United States as well, to openly acknowledge and address the problems of population growth and economic growth, has extended across almost every sector of American life, in

business, in journalism, and in the academic world.

There were some exceptions to this. Within the environmental movement there were many non-profit public interest groups that focused on population growth and its relationship to the environment as one of the two fundamental underlying causes of our environmental problems in the final decades of the twentieth century. Many of these organizations are still with us, but the intellectual and political approach to the problem of some of the most important ones has changed. Two of the most important ones were the Sierra Club and one called Zero Population Growth.

The Sierra Club was very articulate in advocating for changes in US policies to address US population growth, including immigration into the US.

Zero Population Growth attempted to address both US and global population growth.

There have also been many scientists who have spoken up about the threats posed to our environment by human population growth, including some organizations of scientists. (See National Academy of Sciences National Academy of Engineering and Institute of Medicine 1993 Population Summit of the World’s Scientific Academies Washington, DC National Academy Press  https://doi.org/10.17226/9148 .)

Within the field of economics some economists and other scholars have been developing an alternative school of economics that focuses on the need for an end to economic growth. This alternative school is now called Ecological Economics.(See the International Society for Ecological Economics at https://www.isecoeco.org/ You could join even if you have no background in the study of economics. They have different levels of membership and one of them is very inexpensive.)

Outside of the environmental movement and science, the leaders in different sectors of American life have learned their separate professions within the framework of assumptions made about the rationality and moral rightness of the organization of society as it has been handed down to them from the past. So it has, perhaps, only been human nature that many, if not most would be close-minded in confronting problems requiring a fundamental change in outlook to really understand.

In subsequent posts I will analyze some of the misleading and incomplete misrepresentations of the facts regarding population growth and economic growth that have come forth from these leaders, including those in the journalistic world.

Donald Trump’s approach to the issues he is concerned with, including immigration is so emotionally supercharged and he is so disrespectful of the feelings and views of those who do not agree with him, or support what he wants to do, and so disrespectful of facts and so indifferent to science and the need to protect our environment that it is easy to forget or overlook that the American people faced many extremely serious problems before Donald Trump rose up onto the stage of American electoral politics

in 2015 as a candidate for President.

We already faced the problem of climate change because of the use of fossil fuels. In addition we already faced the Sixth Mass Extinction of other species of life because of the massive further intrusion by humanity into the rest of the biosphere over the last fifty to one hundred years. This massive intrusion into the rest of the biosphere and the degradation and even destruction of habitat for wildlife

has come about because of a tremendous amount of human population growth and a tremendous expansion of the US and world economies. Sometime between 1920 to 1930 world population had grown to about 2 billion. Then it went to about 2.5 to 2.6 billion by 1950, to 3 billion by 1960, to 4 billion by 1975, to 5 billion by 1987, to 6 billion by 1999, to 7 billion by 2011, and to 8 billion by 2022 and it is still growing.

The US economy grew from about $3.5 trillion worth of Gross Domestic Product in 1960 to more than $23 trillion by 2024. In the same period the world economy grew from about $11 trillion worth of Gross Domestic Product in 1960 to more than $83 trillion in 2020. This degradation and destruction of habitat for wildlife (land undeveloped for human perceived needs and wants) has been taking place because of all the different activities engaged in by we humans. The problem is not just using fossil fuels or climate change. Even if we all got around by bus or never ate meat, as long as our populations and economies continue to grow, we will have an extreme threat to all of humanity and much of the rest of life on Earth.(See https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NGDPRSAXDCUSQ, See also Global Real GDP [Inflation Adjusted “Constant” at https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population)

In addition we already faced the consequences for our democracy of the re-globalization of our economy that intensified in the 1970s with a focus on American manufacturing corporations that

moved their production from states with strong laws protecting labor unions to other states that did

not, and also to other countries in the less economically developed parts of the world. This movement

of these corporations was referred to by some economists as a “deindustrialization” of America. (See The Deindustrialization of America by Barry Bluestone and Bennet Harrison)

This deindustrialization took place before the passage of NAFTA in 1994 and later GATT.

In 1992 Bill Clinton was elected President and in 1994 NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) was passed by Congress. Later a GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs ans Trade) was also passed.

These agreements further intensified a process of globalization of the US and the world economies that had picked up speed in the 1970s. This globalization undermined American democracy by undermining American labor unions and the ability of the United States to protect its workers, citizens and the environment within the United States from the consequences of economic activity.

American labor unions and the cause of protecting the environment in the United States and in the world had been under attack during the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, and during the single term of his successor, George H. W. Bush.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s the modern environmental movement, a broad popular cultural and political movement focusing on protecting the entire living environment within which humanity lives, and is dependent on for its own survival, emerged into public consciousness and America’s intellectual and political life. This movement had some early successes.

In 1970 Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin and Dennis Hayes, a graduate student assistant at Harvard University organized the first Earth Day, which took place on April 22^nd. This was a kind of ad hoc fair celebrated at different places across the country where different public interest environmental organizations have presented information to the public on different environmental problems and invited people to participate in helping to solve them. This event has been held annually on approximately April 22^nd of every year. (See https://www.senate.gov/art-and-history/history/minute/Gaylord_Nelson_promotes_the_first_Earth_Day.htm Also The 1970 Clean Air Act Amendments were passed and signed into law by President Nixon. See https://www.britannica.com/topic/Clean-Air-Act-United-States-1970 and a Clean Water Act was passed and signed into law in 1972. See https://www.britannica.com/topic-Clean-Water-Act. An Endangered Species Act was enacted into law in 1973. See https://www.fws.gov/law/endangered-species-act And in 1970 the United States Environment Protection Agency was established. See https://www.epa.gov/history/origins-epa)

Tragically, the full measure of the impact of human activities upon our environment was not well understood at the time of the emergence of the modern environmental movement and it is still not well understood now, more than fifty years later. Environmental issues have been seen as peripheral to our primary concerns as a society and as individuals, as luxury issues not as important as economic and political and other issues.

There are many reasons why environmental issues have lacked the centrality within the democratic discourse of our society that they really require to be effectively solved. One of the most important is that the two most fundamental underlying causes of our environmental problems, human population growth and economic growth, have been very controversial and poorly understood, even among many of the most ardent advocates for the environment.

Another important reason is rooted in our American history as a people. First as British colonists and later as citizens of the United States we have been a people of the frontier. Mostly this consciousness has been focused on the physical frontier. At the beginning of our history we saw the North American continent as a mostly empty place capable of sustaining virtually endless expansion into it. Thomas Jefferson expressed this well in his first inaugural address in 1801 when he said that “there would be room down to the thousandth generation….” We have also seen our country as at the edge of a political and psychological and cultural frontier as well. However for the purpose of understanding the origins of the world environmental crisis this view of the frontier as an inexhaustible physical thing has been most important. We have spent our time mostly developing the conditions of material abundance within our so-called “free economy’ and relations of equality within our society. It is difficult for us to understand that both population growth and economic growth both have to end and even be partially reversed if the biosphere of life on Earth is not to suffer irreparable damage with horrifying consequences for the American people and all of humanity. (See The Great Frontier by Walter Prescott Webb)

In 1968 a book titled The Population Bomb, written by two biologists, Anne and Paul Ehrlich, although credited only to Paul because of the publishing conventions of the time, was published. The book was about the basic logical structure of the problem for human beings of continuing population growth that never ends. The authors point out how absurd it is to believe that it can continue indefinitely. The book also contains a prediction that massive famines would occur in the economically less developed parts of the world in what was for them, the near future, the 1970s and 1980s. Apparently, truly massive famines did not occur, although there were reasons for thinking that they might.

The main reason why they did not was that something called the Green Revolution occurred. New, more productive varieties of wheat and rice helped to boost food production just in time to avert the predicted famines. Unfortunately, far too much was concluded on the basis of the prospect of famines being averted at that point in history. That famines had at least temporarily been avoided was potentially a tremendous gift to humanity. It was the gift of more time to recognize and do something about the logically inescapable problem of indefinitely continuing human population growth. Tragically, we have squandered that time. The scientist who received the Nobel peace prize in 1970 for his work that helped bring about the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug, understood that population growth was still a problem and he said so in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. (See Borlaug, Norman

Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, Oslo, December 10, 1970 at

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1970/borlaug/acceptance-speech.

Far too many people, including many opinion leaders in the United States, failed to understand what had happened. They concluded incorrectly, that the failure of massive famines to occur was proof that the problem of human population growth was not real. Many people also thought, again incorrectly, that the Green Revolution was proof that technology would always provide a solution for whatever problems continuing human population growth created.

A great many people, myself among them, who had read The Population Bomb, and understood what the Ehrlichs were saying, knew that the problems caused by continuing human population growth extended beyond the need to produce adequate food for a growing number of people. We understood that the problem of human population growth was always about the total impact of everything that we Americans and we humans do on the rest if life, on the biosphere, because of that growth. And this growth and this impact are occurring not just in the economically less developed parts of the world. They are also happening here in the United States, despite our low fertility rate. Our high level of immigration into the United States, over the past fifty years has meant that our population has continued to grow. We are projected by the US Census Bureau to continue growing into the second half of this century, almost entirely because of an assumed continuing high level of immigration.

In 1970 US population was about 203 million. Today in 2025 it is about 342 million .

In the same time period global human population size has grown from about 3.7 billion in 1970 to about 8.1 billion now in 2025 and is still growing.

(See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population. Also see

Historical population change data (1910-2020) US Census Bureau at: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/popchange-data-text.html and US population clock at: https://www.census.gov/popclock/ .)

The United States Census Bureau has been making projections of population growth for the United States for at least several decades into the future in recent years. These projections into the future show significant differences in the amount of total population growth in the near future given different assumptions about our continuing high level of immigration into the United States. One of these projections released in 2017 showed a population of almost 447, 000, 000 for the year 2060 under a high immigration scenario. Another released in 2023 showed a total population of over 396,000,000 for the same year. Our current population according to the US Census Bureau is over 342,749,000.

What both of these sets of projections show is that population growth in the United States is likely to continue at a very high level in coming decades if we continue to have a very high level of immigration. The second projection, the one for 2023, extends to the year 2100. However, other information I have presented in this blog post suggests that projections out that far are very unreliable.

What these projections fail to mention is the increasing costs for everything that this growth will inevitably bring and the increased pressure on that part of the biosphere within the borders of the United States and in the world as a whole that it will inevitably mean. (See Table 1 under High Immigraion Scenario at:

ttps://www.census.gov/data/tables/2023/demo/popproj/2023-alternative-summary-tables.html. Also see Projection of the Population and Annual Population Change by Alternative Immigration Scenario for the Unites States 2017-2100 under Summary Tables at:

http://www.census.gov/data/tables/2017/demo/popproj/2017-Alternative-Summary-Tables.html. Also see US population Clock at:

https://www.census.gov/popclock.)

The consequences of population growth, both US population growth and global population growth, are falling on the same entity: the entire biosphere of life on Earth.

In addition to the consequences of population growth for the biosphere, there is also economic growth as the other fundamental underlying cause of our environmental problems. Economic growth is defined as the increase in the total amount of goods and services produced in an economy in a given period of. time, such as a year or three months. This economic growth, no matter how efficient the processes are that produced it, or how efficient those processes become, inevitably involves an increase in the total quantity of matter and energy taken from nature and used to satisfy the perceived needs and wants of human beings. This constant growth cannot be sustained. It is incompatible with the continued survival of humanity and much of the rest of life on earth.

I titled this essay Systemic Failure, Planetary Catastrophe and a Path Out of the Darkness of Our Time. By Systemic Failure I meant in part the rise of the kind of man that Donald Trump is to the achievement of the Presidency of the United States. In a broader sense I also meant the failure of the American people and American civilization to recognize, come to understand and address effectively the two fundamental underlying causes of the world environmental crisis, human population growth and economic growth over the course of the last fifty-five to sixty years. The Planetary Catastrophe I was making reference to also has this dual nature. It includes all of the tragic, horrifying consequences that have unfolded from the fact of Donald Trump’s election twice to the Presidency of the United States. It also includes all of the tragic consequences that have flowed from our failure as a people to recognize and come to grips with these two fundamental underlying causes of our environmental problems, population growth and economic growth.

I said that Donald Trump called climate change a hoax before he was elected to his first term in 2016. Then he acted on his belief once elected as I said.

The nature of the problem of climate change that we need to focus on is this. If we lose valuable time in trying to limit the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere because our most important political leader, our President, is pulling in the opposite direction, that time, while he is President, is essentially time that we cannot get back. In order to compensate in a subsequent time period we would have to make even bigger reductions in the greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere, in a shorter time.

During Biden’s term in office, we failed to do this. The Inflation Reduction Act, in relation to the problem of climate change, mostly promotes the use of renewable, so called Clean Energy. The theory put forward in support of this act is that this will mean greenhouse gas emissions avoided. But will this be enough?

There have been many scientists, hundreds in fact, who have been saying that we are not doing enough. Although Biden, through executive action, attempted to restrict some emissions, he also promoted the continued use of fossil fuels.

And now Donald Trump has been re-elected. He wants to reverse the gains we have made in expanding renewable energy and fighting climate change. He wants to end the expansion of wind power and even cancel the operating permits of the existing wind plants. He even wants to reverse the use of low flow shower heads despite the water shortage here in the western United States.

In his first term, with his refusal to fight the buildup of greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere, he probably helped to set the world on course to an unendurable, unlivable degree of climate change. In his term, although President Joe Biden did lead on climate change and did accomplish real changes in policy that will lead to significantly less greenhouse gas emissions being released into the atmosphere there are important reasons for thinking that what Biden was able to accomplish was not good enough to compensate for what Trump failed to do in his first term and not good enough to get us off the path to an unendurable, unlivable degree of climate change here in the United States and worldwide.

The original “Build Back Better” proposal included a Clean Electricity Performance Program that would not only have provided incentives for utilities to switch from using fossil fuel energy to more renewable or so-called clean energy, it would also have imposed fines or fees to the extent that they did not. Something like this was critically necessary to help the United States come to grips effectively with the problem of climate change although it too would still not have been enough, given that both major political parties are wedded to a commitment to ongoing population and economic growth.

The Inflation Reduction Act abandoned this policy change of a carrot and stick for the utilities and substituted incentives for the expansion of renewable energy including for electric vehicles, although it did include a modest fee on methane emissions from oil and gas drilling. This fee on methane emissions has now been repealed by the Congress. (See A new program will incentivize utility companies to tap clean sources and that’s not the only good news by Angely Mercado Popular Science 09282021 at

https://www.popsci.com/environment/clean-electricity-performance-program,

also The Cost of Cutting Bidens key climate program by John Engel Renewable Energy World October 19, 2021 https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/energy-business/policy-and-regulation/the-cost-of-cutting-Bidens-key-climate-program,. What the collapse of Build Back Better would mean for climate change

by Josh Lederman NBC news December 19, 2021

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/what-collapse-build-back-better-would-mean-climate-change-n1286288 . And Congress votes to kill Biden-era methane fee on oil and gas producers AP News by Michael Phillis and Matthew Daily February 27, 2025 at https://apnews.com/article/methane-fee-repeal-epa-oil-gas-drilling-4844558bece1e683da9246ee226c57b5

and

World on pace for significantly more warming without immediate climate action, report warns

AP News by Seth Borenstein October 24, 2024 at https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-chaos-warming-15-pollution-carbon-832773cebb14b4ea8c8930580537e567.

Kamala Harris had relatively little to say about climate change in her campaign for President. She repeated this error in what she had to say about Trump’s performance as President at the end of his

first 100 days in office.

Both major political parties are continuing to fail the American people with every passing hour of every passing day. We need to push both of them into the pages of history with all deliberate speed.

I said that even before Trump was elected to his first term in 2016, we already faced the Sixth Mass Extinction of other species of life. This term refers to the fact that there have been previous periods of mass extinction of species in the history of biological evolution on Earth not related to humans.

This most recent mass extinction is directly related to human activities, specifically those stemming from ongoing population growth and economic growth.

There is something called biodiversity. This refers to the diversity in the number and variety of other species of life. This is what the Sixth Mass Extinction is partly destroying.

I have referred to the reports by the World Wildlife Fund on the amount of surviving biodiversity in the world in other blog posts and in the videos I have put up on YouTube. In their most recent Living Planet Report for 2024 they say that between 1970 and 2020 the world lost 73% of populations of other species.

Projecting backwards and following the rate of decline this means that we could have less than 25% of the amount of biodiversity that existed in 1970 still in existence now, in 2025.

Not only have we lost almost three quarters of the populations of other species that we still had in 1970, many other scientific studies have shown the impact of human activities because of population growth and economic growth on the rest of the biosphere. In one study it was shown that only 3% of the land surface of the earth remains undisturbed by the effects of human activities. (See Where might we find ecologically intact communities? By A.J. Plumptre et al in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, April 15, 2021 at https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/forests-and-global-change/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2021.626635/f )

We are dependent on the continued existence of biodiversity. We could not live without it.

Even if Harris had won the race for the Presidency in 2024, the United States and the world would have been on course for the destruction of the world’s remaining biodiversity.

Despite Trump’s views on and approach to immigration, both major parties fail to see population growth as a problem. They also see economic growth as meritorious in nature, and something they should be striving to bring about. In fact, the more the better.

Continuing population growth and economic growth will make certain what I said above, the destruction of Earth’s remaining biodiversity. And with this destruction, the end of humanity will be certain as well.

World population is now about 8.1 billion people. The United Nations Population Division projects another 1.6 billion people or a population of about 9.7 billion people by 2050.

The leaders of both major political parties here in the United States and all the minor parties as well, and the leaders of all the countries of the world have no plan for how this additional number of people will be accommodated and still preserve Earth’s remaining biodiversity.

(There is something called the Convention on Biodiversity. This is a treaty among most of the governments of most of the nations of the world that was established in 1992. Supposedly this Convention is doing what will protect Earth’s remaining biodiversity. Only they are really only pretending to do this. The Convention on Biodiversity is a mountain of verbiage, double-talk and empty promises. They published a report in 2020 in which they admitted that they had failed to reach their most important targets for preserving biodiversity.

The Convention on Biodiversity fails to recognize human population growth and economic growth as the two most fundamental causes of the extensive loss of biodiversity which has already occurred and the horrifying loss of Earth’s remaining biodiversity which is now in process and is logically inescapable if we do not change our thinking and the fundamental nature of our civilization. People who are concerned about the future of humanity and the biosphere will have to turn elsewhere for the means to preserve the only known life in the universe. See Convention on Biodiversity https://www.cbd.int and The world set a 2020 deadline to save nature but not a single target was met, UN report says CNN by Jessie Yeung at: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/16/world/un-biodiversity-report-int-hnk-scli-scn/index.html.)

The idea that there cannot be any legitimate concern about the high level of immigration into the United States that does not originate in racism is false. As I have tried to make clear in other posts on this blog and in the videos I have put up on YouTube, the expressions of racist opinions about immigrants by some people, including some of our political leaders and the dispassionate analysis of the effects of a high level of immigration into the United States on the US and world economies and on the part of the biosphere within the US and on the global biosphere are two logically separate processes.

It isn’t even valid logical reasoning to assume that the racist opinions about immigrants expressed by some people are their reason for being against any particular immigration policy or immigration in general. In fact, the opponents of immigration may have been hurt economically by this high level of immigration.

We are all hurt indirectly by this ongoing high level of immigration, including the immigrants, legal and undocumented, who are already here. This high level of immigration has negative consequences for our economy that outweigh any short term benefits from some perspectives, also on that part of the biosphere within our own country, and through our economy on the whole biosphere.

The Systemic Failure of American Civilization refers not just to the re-election of Donald Trump as President, but to the broader intellectual, moral and political failures of both major political parties and the entire complex of American institutions and traditions to recognize the problems of population growth and economic growth as the threats to all of humanity and most of the rest of life that they in fact are over the last fifty years.

The retreat of the US environmental movement from fighting for the open recognition of the problem of US population growth as a threat to any conceivable desirable future for the American people and to all of humanity and much of the rest of life on Earth has effectively neutralized this movement and the world environmental movement as political forces for needed change. This retreat, which has happened over the past twenty-five to thirty years, has given its implicit endorsement to an established political and economic order which is intellectually and morally indefensible. Today’s environmental organizations of whatever size, are merely tinkering around the edges of our environmental problems while they pretend that the big picture of reality as a whole across the face of the planet does not exist.

All factions of both major political parties are pushing different versions of collective insanity for the United States. There are many important differences. The members of the Democratic Party who are elected office holders and candidates for office are much more likely to fight for important government programs such as Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and many others and they are more likely to fight for some protections for the environment However, these protections will always be inadequate, because they don’t recognize population growth and economic growth as problems.

The members of the Republican Party in government, or as candidates for elected office, on the other hand, are extremely rigid in applying their economic ideology to the operations of our government.

Whatever level of government spending is in place in any give time period they think it is too much, even though the evidence of the past one hundred years of US and world history overwhelmingly shows that their concerns are unwarranted. In fact, quite the opposite is the case. We have never spent as much government money for the common good as could have been justified for the sake of freedom and the pursuit of happiness being meaningful for everyone and we still are not doing so. They also always think that the rich and the well-to-do are paying too much in taxes no matter what the facts may be.

However, all factions of both major parties support a continuing high level of population growth based on a high level of immigration into the United States. And they both support continuing economic growth. This isn’t obvious because of Donald Trump’s claims to be fixing our immigration problem, but he is really not. He is exploiting our polarized and mostly ignorant and uninformed debate about it.

On the Democratic side there is no understanding that there will be no lasting progressive or liberal reforms without a comprehensive engagement with the problems of population growth and economic growth.

The criticisms of Trump, by the so-called leaders of both major political parties have been incredibly weak precisely because they have their own misinformation and have been operating on the basis of delusions about the contemporary world for the past half century and more.

Despite the overwhelming obstacles against it, we desperately need a new political party that will recognize these problems and make effectively addressing them the primary part of its platform in the near term and for the long term. This new political party must lead the way in showing Americans how to think dispassionately about immigration and population growth and how to be compassionate at the same time. We need to be dispassionate about the facts and concerned for every human life and every species.

We need to develop an agenda for this new political party and we need to get moving. Deadlines for getting a new political party on the ballot in the various states will come in early 2026.

The following are some preliminary suggestions for elements of an agenda for the new political party that we very much need here in the United States to help preserve the biosphere:

1) Education and advocacy about the two fundamental underlying causes of all of our environmental problems, population growth, including a large volume of immigration into the United States, and economic growth.

2) Explain that the two fundamental causes have negative consequences for our economy, the labor market, the functioning of democracy, and that part of the biosphere within the borders of the United States, as well as the whole biosphere.

3) Explain that because of a high rate of energy and resource use, a high rate of population growth in the US, mostly from immigration, is in some ways even worse for the biosphere than the high rates of natural increase in some economically less developed nations, although much of the Earth’s remaining biodiversity is precisely in these nations where rates of natural increase are the highest.

4) Explain that although the United States does indeed have a quite real problem with racism, it is still possible that there can be legitimate concern about the volume of immigration into the US that has nothing to do with racism.

5) Explain that it is possible to be dispassionate about the facts related to immigration, population and economic growth and still compassionate and concerned about every human life, every species, every ecosystem of the Earth.

6) Explain that our whole discourse and debate about immigration from the perspective of philosophies across the spectrum of political thought lack adequate grounding in objective reality.

7) Many of the arguments for a high level of immigration are circular arguments. They assume what they supposedly prove. An example would be saying that immigrants don’t take jobs because they boost the economy. Continuously boosting the economy is not a good thing in the long run. We have reached the end of the long run, now, in our time.

8) We need an end to economic growth. In order to make that possible we need an end to population growth.

It isn’t credible that an ongoing high level of immigration does not have negative consequences for the people already here, both citizen and immigrant whether legal or undocumented. These negative consequences fall on the labor market, the price and availability of basic commodities, such as housing and water, and on the biosphere.

People have lost jobs because of immigration, both low-skilled and high skilled workers, although proving that large numbers of Americans failed to find work in their preferred occupation in any given time period because a potential employer had already hired an undocumented worker or were planning to is very difficult. The advocates for and defenders of our growth civilization, with its political, cultural and institutional commitment to ongoing population growth and economic growth, have control of the processes of alleged data collection and distribution and interpretation of the alleged data, which is seen through the powerful filter of the basic assumptions of the established economic and political order.

Logically, if there are large numbers of undocumented workers coming into our country and finding work, they have to be taking the jobs of some American citizens or legal residents who might have otherwise had the job, if not for the undocumented workers. The defenders of the practice of allowing large numbers of undocumented immigrants to come to the United States and not making any effort at enforcement of our laws against it would probably not be so brazen as to suggest that any particular job was created for undocumented workers. However, in some industries something like this may be the case. Some employers, such as in agriculture, may know that they can get away with hiring undocumented workers so they plan on giving them low pay and expecting them to work physically very hard, with few rules or regulations if any imposed by government to protect them. According to a report by the American Immigration Council, the agriculture and construction industries in 2024 each relied on undocumented workers for about 13% of their workers. If this report is accurate then perhaps some occupations are not nearly as unwanted by American citizens as they are made out to be by some American businessmen. The report says that 12.7% of workers in agriculture were undocumented. This was 244, 700 workers. The number of undocumented workers in the construction industry was 1,544,600, Make no mistake, construction is not an unwanted occupation for American citizens. (See Where Undocumented Immigrants work By Katharina Buchholz Statista.com at: https://www.statista.com/chart/34074/us-industries-highest-share-of-the-workforce-undocumented-immigration/)

In the case of highly skilled workers such as those in advanced technology companies the American citizens, who in many cases have had to train their replacements who were holders of the H-1B visa, unlike the low-skilled workers can actually see the person replacing them. However, there is little the workers being replaced can do. Both traditional print-based and electronic news organizations do little to challenge the claims of technology companies that they cannot find American citizens to do the jobs that they say they have to hire citizens from other countries to fill.

In addition to providing stiff competition for jobs in many categories immigration increases demand for all of the things that American citizens need and want. This includes housing and water. A large volume of immigration into our country also affects our ability to control and disperse pollution of various forms generated by the activities of a steadily growing number of people. It makes reducing our contribution to climate change even more difficult.

The most critically important impact of a high level of immigration into the US is on the finite supply of wild lands and undeveloped natural areas, and in general, on the rest of the biosphere that exists within our borders. There is also the impact of our growing numbers including from immigration on the biosphere as a whole that is inevitably impacted by our large volume of trade with the rest of the world that is steadily growing. And this large volume of trade, to be clear, is growing in part because of this ongoing large volume of both legal and undocumented immigration into the United States.

Population growth, including from immigration, will put pressure on the biosphere in the United States and the world, that will eventually overwhelm all efforts at conservation and rewilding.

9) We need to put the issue of immigration into the United States within the framework of population growth as the number one underlying cause of our environmental problems..

We need significant, dramatic reductions in the total number of immigrants as soon as it becomes politically possible. This should be done through legislation passed by the Congress based on informed debate in our society at large and not on executive orders.

10) We need an end to economic growth and a gradual shrinkage of the economy in terms of energy and material demands on the biosphere in tandem with an end to population growth and a transition to a gradual decline of population.

11) We need to develop a national population policy that will recognize the need to bring population growth to an end through voluntary means at least as far as natural increase is concerned. This national population policy should also promote a gradual decline of population size.

12) Limitations on immigration should not involve mass deportations. Most categories of legal immigration will have to end, but we should allow strictly political asylum seekers to continue to come. But even here, we cannot take an unlimited number.

The question of how we should enforce our laws against undocumented immigration is distorted by extreme opinions on opposite ends of the spectrum of political thought. On the one hand some people think that the United States government has no right to try to control the amount of immigration into our country. Some people think that any agency, such as Immigration Control and Enforcement, visiting a place of employment to enforce laws against undocumented employment, is doing so solely on the basis of racism.

This is a tragically flawed view. The idea that undocumented workers don’t really hurt anything by being here simply isn’t true. They inevitably undermine the possibility of a fair labor market for citizen workers even in the case of categories of work that most workers don’t want, such as in agriculture. And most importantly, their presence inevitably puts additional pressure on that part of the biosphere within the borders of the United States and on the biosphere as a whole that otherwise wouldn’t be there. This is because of our population growth and economic growth and our trade with the rest of the world and our highly resource intensive and energy intensive way of life.

The large volume of different categories of legal immigration also undermine the possibility of a fair labor market for citizen workers and put even more pressure on the biosphere because these workers are paid better and have more income. This category of immigration does even more to undermine American democracy.

The other extreme of opinion about how to enforce our laws against undocumented immigration is exemplified by President Trump who is attempting to solve the problem through executive action and military force. We should not be deporting undocumented immigrants to third countries and they have a right to due process. However, this right to due process should not be stretched to an argument that immigrants have a right to come regardless of the facts. It is not enough to say that we should only deport those who have committed crimes. We have a responsibility to the rest of humanity and to all the rest of life on the planet to limit immigration into our country. This logically entails a responsibility to dramatically reduce the level of immigration into our country. We will have to do some deportations.

The first thing we need to do is to put our country’s discussion and debate over immigration firmly within the framework of the problems of population growth and economic growth. This doesn’t mean washing our hands of the millions of people who would like to come to our country to live if they could or who feel desperate either for their lives or for political reasons or because of the hardship of their lives. We need to approach the search for solutions to the problems of population growth and economic growth with a sense of the unity of humanity and the unity of life. To do this we will have to change the political and economic structure of our country in profound ways. We will have to update our understanding of what it means to have a representative democracy and a good society. We will have to base this understanding on the enormous expansion of human knowledge including the sciences that has taken place since the founding of the United States.

Ideally we should try to shift more of the responsibility for the enforcement of our laws against undocumented immigration from the immigrant worker to the employer. It isn’t completely clear how to do this. Some people seem to think that our current system of electronic verification of legal status for employment is reliable. Others do not. Most employers do not use it. We should make the effort to make it more reliable, even if it involves significant time and expense. And regardless of how reliable it may be, we should require all employers to use it. If it can be proven that an employer knew that a worker was without legal status that employer should be subject to stiff fines or civil sanctions.

When large employers such as technology companies tell us that they have to have legal immigrants to fill certain jobs, we should tell them no. We should require them to train American citizen workers for those jobs or their company does not need to exist. We need to understand that the protection of the biosphere within the borders of the United States and across the face of the planet has to be prioritized over economic concerns. It is the biosphere, with its shrinking remaining biodiversity, that is in extreme danger. Not the US or world economy.

Family migration should be gradually reduced.. And we need to tighten our procedures for screening asylum seekers so that we are only taking strictly political asylum seekers. Even here we cannot take an unlimited number.

10b) Ending economic growth may be even more difficult than ending human population growth. Herman E. Daly, the principal founder of the school of economics called Ecological Economics offered a very credible and important suggestion on how we could go about doing this. He suggested that we take away from commercial banks the power of partial seigniorage or their ability to participate with our country’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, in the creation and expansion of the money supply. They have this power of partial seigniorage because they are allowed to make loans and charge interest on these loans under a system where they only have to keep a very small percentage of the total amount that they have out in loans as reserves backing up the loans. This is called a fractional reserve system.

Under Daly’s proposed reform the commercial banks would be required to hold 100% of the amount that they have out in loans as reserves. They would still make loans and they would still charge interest on their loans but it would be on the basis of other people’s money and not the money they create by making loans on the basis of fractional reserve deposits. They would also charge fees for checking or facilitating electronic payments.

There are various objections that might be offered to this idea of taking away from the commercial banks the power of partial seigniorage, some of them political and some logical and political. Some people might say it would be a form of communism, or the government would have too much power. How would it actually work in the real world? The banks would be dependent on some people being able to afford to save and make deposits. However, it would be an important starting point in trying to figure out how to end economic growth. And let us be clear: the economies of the US and the world not only need to stop growing. They need to shrink or gradually be reduced in size.

We need to thoroughly understand the capitalistic process, and figure out how to gradually cut it back and contain it within the boundaries of the state.

There are some people who think that we can pursue a policy of “degrowth” of the economy without paying attention to the need to stop population growth. This is a delusional system of belief.

Others think that capitalism is the problem and that it requires economic growth. It is assumed that switching to socialism is the answer. This is also a delusion. Almost all of the socialists have also failed to recognize that population growth has to stop.

Being able to seriously consider ending seigniorage for commercial banks will require a completely different intellectual, cultural and political climate of opinion than we have now.

In addition to considering how to end seigniorage for commercial banks we need to look at the international empire of business corporations and other large businesses and consider how to end or establish more limits on their control of the world economy and their indirect influence and even to a significant degree their control of the US government. Right now this empire of corporations and big businesses is turning the whole planet into one big commodity to be turned into products as each of these individual businesses tries to grow more and more and get bigger and bigger. Federal chartering of the largest business corporations and licensing of the biggest non-corporate firms would be one possible path to doing this. “

We are going to need a fundamentally different kind of civilization, dedicated to the intellectual and moral growth of its citizens and a healthy relationship between humanity and the rest of the biosphere.

The processes of ending economic growth and population growth will have to take place in parallel. As soon as possible we will need to make a transition to a gradual decline of population and a gradual shrinkage of the US economy.

Daly and the Ecological Economists have had other important ideas including the idea of limiting the amount of income inequality that would be allowed. Daly had the idea of limiting the amount of income going to those receiving the highest amount of income to no more than ten times the amount received by those receiving the lowest amount of income. This would be in contrast to our current situation where the amount of income going to those receiving the highest amount of income is hundreds of times the amount going to those receiving the lowest amount of income. ( See Ecological Economics Principals and Applications by Herman E. Daly and “Money and the Steady State Economy Center for the Advancement of a Steady State Economy at https://steadystate.org/money-and-the-steady-state-economy .)

13) We need women’s rights to reproductive choice and women’s rights to equality recognized in law and the constitution.

We also need the same protections for LGBTQ people.

However, we need to realize that there can be no lasting achievements for women’s rights or women’s empowerment or LGBTQ rights within the framework of a society that cannot and will not last, and this one will not.

14) For the most part, the new party should support many of the programs that resulted from previous periods of reform that were interventionist in character with respect to the so-called free economy that helped to provide greater security and healthcare for almost everyone such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

15) The new party might also support a basic guaranteed income and lifelong publicly funded education at the college level.

This education should include required courses in environmental and population related education.

These two programs could support an end to economic growth, especially economic growth focused on the pursuit of more and more things.

16) The new party should also seek to combat the false religion of technology that assumes that technology will always solve the problems caused by ongoing population growth and economic growth.

17) The new political party should also do a much better job than the so-called Democratic Party explaining the absolutely dire nature of our current situation in the United States and for humanity and the biosphere with a second term for Donald Trump. The immunity decision saying that he could not be held to account for crimes committed while he was President was an extremely grave malfunctioning of the Supreme Court. This man backed an insurrection against the freely chosen government of the people of the United States. This decision was like a dagger plunged into the living heart of the Constitution itself.

In addition, Trump’s view of reality, including his view that climate change is a hoax, and his unconstitutional executive actions are an ongoing attack on our fundamental natural rights to life,

liberty and the pursuit of happiness for which we fought the revolution.

18) In addition to trying to get the new party on the ballot before the primaries for the mid-terms in as many states as possible we need to find ways to fight the continued buildup of greenhouse gases in the

atmosphere bringing about climate change. We need to promote the idea that Earth cannot wait for the

mid-terms although we need to do as much as possible as soon as possible within our inherited government from the eighteenth century.

We need to also make it understood that we cannot rely on the two existing major political parties to do what we will have to do ourselves.

19) The new political party should lead the way in examining how reality is defined for all of us, including how the uses of the spectrum of electromagnetic energy have been regulated in the United States over the past one hundred years. I am thinking here primarily of how electromagnetic energy and electronics have been used by commercial interests for mass communications. This includes radio, television and the internet. The use of electricity for power production is a separate issue, but that too should be regulated.

I am also thinking of how extensive economic inequality has allowed the super-rich, the well-to-do, and very large businesses to profoundly shape the range of choices about our society that we all pay attention to and that almost everyone is at least potentially exposed to and how we conceive of those choices.

20) The new political party should also develop a much more comprehensive plan for slowing down and bringing any further climate change to an end than anything the Democratic or Republican parties have had to offer. And the Republican Party currently denies the reality of the problem. This comprehensive plan should be about more than simply changing the source of the energy we use from fossil fuels to other sources. It would be based on a comprehensive view of all of the uses of energy that we engage in and minimizing our total energy use from any source and thus the impact of our energy use on the rest of the biosphere.

21) We need to make clear that any candidates for office in the United States who deny the reality of the problem of climate change caused by the widespread use of fossil fuels or who fail to recognize population growth and economic growth as the fundamental underlying causes of our environmental problems are attacking the very ability of the American people and all of humanity and much of the rest of life on earth to survive and have any kind of a future at all. Such candidates and such office holders with such views should be considered as unqualified and should not be allowed to run for office. The new party will have to promote and get established a new constitution to make this possible. This will require a lot of education of the American people. This will be a more truly representative democracy than what we have now.

Please read this blog post through from beginning to end if you have not already done so. Pay attention to exactly what I have said. And think about what I say here if I have challenged any unexamined assumptions about immigration or how to protect the environment that you may have. Read as many of the other posts on this blog as you can find time to read. I know they are long. Read a little at a time. Also watch the videos I have put up on YouTube. Look up some of the sources I have listed in the post called “Select Bibliography” and read them.

Please make a comment and tell me what you think, even if you don’t have much to say. You can tell me if you agree with me at least in part. If you don’t tell me why you think so. Or ask a question. Please do not attack me or anyone else personally.

Different people will be willing to engage in different degrees and kinds of risks to help solve these problems. This is what you are fighting for: any kind of decent future for everyone now alive; the future of all the generations of human children that there will ever be; the future of the biosphere made up of all the species and ecosystems that took 3.7 billion years to evolve.

For some the risks they may be willing to take may be to read this blog and maybe tell others about it. For others they may be willing to donate money to help me with my own personal survival needs and to effectively promote this blog and the idea of a new political party that will fight for the whole biosphere and to found a new civilization that will be able to live in harmony with it.

A link to a fundraising platform is below. Donations of $25 or $50 or even $5 or $10 would be very helpful.

For some, a courageous minority perhaps, taking risks for life on Earth may mean being willing to risk everything, including their lives. Make no mistake, fighting for the ability of the American people to see the truth about our planet and why it is in trouble requires tremendous courage. Far too many Americans in positions of power and comfort and privilege don’t want that to happen. They are either actually afraid of the truth, or they have their egos and much more invested in a false or incomplete picture of reality.

If there is anything or anybody in this world that you love and care about, please help me help you help all of us to secure the future for all of us.

Please donate if you can through the two method described below.

The link to donate through gofundme.com is the following:

https://www.gofundme.com/promote-a-political-party-for-the-planet.

Copyright 2025 by Richard E. Garner, Jr All rights reserved

12/18/2025

Hello again. My name again is Richard Garner. I started this blog more than six years ago as one possible way to begin creating the intellectual, moral and political foundations for a new political party and to open up a path in American society for doing exactly that, creating a new political party that will help the American people and eventually all of humanity pass our final exam as a species of sentient life in this vast mysterious universe. This final exam for our species essentially consists facing up to and acting effectively on our world environmental crisis with its two fundamental underlying causes, human population growth and economic growth. We, the people of the United States have been failing this final exam over and over and over again over the past fifty years, and all of the other peoples of the world have been failing this exam right along with us.

I have not done a whole lot to promote this blog and make other people aware of it so far. I have had many obstacles to overcome. I have found it necessary to develop the content more. I plan to do much more to promote this blog and find other ways to promote the idea of a new political party to address our fundamental environmental problems in the immediate future.

In high school I was the valedictorian of my class and a state scholarship winner. I was already starting to become aware of the problem of human population growth years before I heard of the organization called Zero Population Growth in 1970. I am a seventy-seven year old man. I have been studying what science and the scientific method are since I was only eight years old. I mention these things because many people might think that if important scientists, or scientists who have the news media reporting what they have to say about various subjects, like climate change or biodiversity are not speaking up clearly and authoritatively about population growth and economic growth as problems threatening human survival and the survival of wildlife and the ecosystems of the earth, then how can there really be any crisis caused by them?

Scientists are human beings, subject to political pressure like everyone else. And many scientists have been speaking up about population growth and economic growth. There is a large body of work by different scientists and scholars that has been done over the last half century explaining these problems. In any case, all arguments from authority, arguments based on who says something are logically fallacious. Ordinary people do not need a scientist to tell them that these problems are real. The calculus is simple. The more humans there are, the more likely that there will be fewer members of the many species of wildlife and the less undeveloped land there will be for habitat for that wildlife. Some people may spend time and resources trying to restore lost habitat and on conservation and rewilding efforts, However, our human population is already so large, and our economies so large and growing, and there is still so much population growth coming in the future if we do not act to slow it down and bring it to a halt, that these efforts are almost certain to be completely overwhelmed.

In the 1990s I was the President, Program Chair and Treasurer of the San Diego chapter of Zero Population Growth. I faced a quandary. I was concerned about human population growth. However, I also had liberal political opinions. Many of the people in my ZPG chapter wanted to pursue solutions to the problem of population growth in the United States through the framework of political conservatism or so it seemed. I was uncomfortable with this approach. I regret that to some degree I may have contributed to the spread of the idea that concern about immigration to the United States originates only in racism. This was and is a false idea.

The problems of population growth, economic growth and a large volume of immigration to the United States have to be faced. Somehow we have to find ways to be dispassionate about the facts of our situation and compassionate about all concerned, and that includes everyone, citizens as well as immigrants. And it most especially includes wildlife and all of the ecosystems of the earth.

Please donate to support me if you can in my efforts to maintain and further develop this blog and push the discussion of a new political party in the United States specifically committed to the protection and preservation of the entire biosphere of life on Earth through to the actual accomplishment of that end as soon as possible.

The link to donate through a gofundme.com account I have set up is the following:

https://www.gofundme.com/promote-a-political-party-for-the-planet.

Copyright 2025 by Richard E. Garner, Jr All rights reserved

Hello, thanks for visiting my blog. The fundraising link below is an updated link and campaign on GoFundMe.com. The previous ones on earlier blog posts expired. If you agree with me that population growth and economic growth are threats to the future of Americans, all of humanity, and much of the rest of life on Earth, and that a new political party could help us find solutions, I could really use your help. If you could donate $25 or $50 or as little as $5 or $10, it would help. I am an almost 75 year old man living on Social Security. I will not get rich off any assistance. I need your help to support myself, and continue to publish this blog, and fight to establish a new political party to transform our government so that it will be firmly committed to protecting and preserving the entire biosphere of life on Earth. Here is the link:

https://www.gofundme.com/fighting-for-the-earth. Thankyou for your time and attention to what I have to say here and thankyou for any financial or other assistance.

by Richard E. Garner, Jr

Once. Or sometimes maybe twice in a day a potential customer would call my Dad’s TV repair shop while I sat there answering the phone for him during the great Oil Embargo from late 1973 to early 1974. People were not getting their TV sets repaired. The Yom Kippur War had occurred in the Middle East in October 1973. As one of the consequences of this war the Arab member nations of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had declared an embargo on the sale of oil to two nations, the United States, and the Netherlands, in retaliation for an airlift of military supplies to Israel during that war. Because of the embargo there were serious shortages of some petroleum products in the United States, like gasoline and home heating oil.

The shortage of gasoline was a serious disruption of daily life in the United States. Both the availability and the price of gasoline were affected. Many gasoline stations frequently had to close. People often had to wait in long lines to buy it.

Because of the impact of the Oil Embargo on the US economy, many people had less discretionary income for things like getting their TV sets repaired when they needed to, and there was great uncertainty about what would happen next.

For my Dad, a man who had grown up during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the consequences of the Embargo were like another economic depression. For the American people, the embargo and its consequences came as a great shock. A way of life based on the automobile and cheap, easily available oil and products made from oil had spread rapidly throughout American society throughout much of the twentieth century. This spread had been especially rapid in the post-World War II period from the end of the war in 1945 up until the time of the Embargo in 1973. Suddenly this great abundance was under threat.

To give President Nixon and many other leaders in American government and business some credit, they did see a problem coming with oil and energy in general at least a few years ahead of the Embargo. However, they mostly misconceived and misunderstood the nature of the problem. President Nixon told Americans that they faced an energy crisis. President Nixon and these other leaders saw the energy crisis as essentially a crisis of energy supply, or the types of energy sources from which we got our energy or what part of the world we got it from.

Energy can become a problem of supply for two reasons:

1. The members of your society approach the exhaustion of your finite supply of your preferred source of energy for useful work. The discovery that the supply of your preferred form of energy is finite and not endless may be rather sudden and unpleasant.
2. The number of people in your society using your preferred form of energy expands rapidly.

Energy can become a problem of use if you start using it to do and to make and to sell more and more things. All these things that you make a rapidly growing use of energy to do will inevitably have a growing impact on nature, which, as previously noted in earlier posts to this blog, is finite. All these uses of energy that are exhausting or approaching the exhaustion of your finite supply will be producing more air pollution, more water pollution, and more toxic substances, or more other kinds of pollution from the new products you are making with your preferred energy source.

At the time of the Oil Embargo of 1973 – 1974, both categories of reasons why energy could be a problem of both supply and use applied to the United States. Americans were using more and more products made from oil or using oil. And there were more and more Americans engaged in these uses of oil.

At the time of the Oil Embargo of 1973-1974 world human population was approaching four billion people. This was an increase of 100% in only fifty years from about two billion in 1925. In the United States human population was over 200 million in the 1970s. It had only been about 150 million a quarter century earlier in 1950. This was an increase of a third or 33 and one-third per cent. ( See https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year and also https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/worldwide-population-throughout-human-history.htm . And for US population figures see the US Statistical Abstract 1980 part 2 – Section 01 at https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1980/compendia/statab/101ed.html )

Much if not most of this rapid population growth in the United States and in the world came because of a rapid increase in the use of fossil fuels. This included natural gas, which was used to make an artificial nitrogen fertilizer that greatly increased agricultural productivity using something called the Haber-Bosch process. It also included the use of oil-based insecticides like DDT to keep the insects that might consume much of the food crops eaten by human beings at bay, and to combat human diseases like malaria. (See Countdown – Our Last Best Hope for a Future on Earth by Alan Weisman, Little, Brown and Co. 2013 Also, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population )  

The discovery and use of antibiotics like penicillin, by lowering the death rate, also contributed significantly to human population growth.

The use of oil brought a whole new way of life to the United States that greatly reduced the physical hardship of life for many people and helped to promote widespread prosperity. (See Energy for Survival – The Alternative to Extinction by Wilson Clark Copyright 1974 by Wilson Clark Anchor Press 1974 – also The Prize – The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power by Daniel Yergin Copyright 1991, 1992 by Daniel Yergin,,Touchstone Simon and Schuster)

The problems of energy supply and energy use that human beings face are involved in all sources and forms of energy that we use, whether from fossil fuels, oil, coal and natural gas, or the renewable, so-called 100% clean sources like solar, wind and waterpower. Anything that we human beings ever do in our activities within the world of nature or the universe involves energy, which scientists define as the ability to do work. And energy, in all its forms, is ruled by two fundamental laws, first, that it cannot be created or destroyed, and second, the second law of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics can be stated in many different ways. The basic idea is that the useful work derived from the transformation of any form of energy into another can never be completely efficient, and some of the energy must be dissipated as useless heat energy that cannot be recovered for further work. These laws profoundly affect how humans will ever be able to solve the World Environmental Crisis. Given a sufficiently large number of human beings and a sufficiently large quantity of energy used, of whatever form or source, nature will be impacted accordingly.

Most of us are familiar with oil spills into oceans, lakes and rivers, and the contamination of groundwater by oil and natural gas and chemicals derived from these. We are also familiar with the pollution of our air and water by products derived from fossil fuels, such as air pollution from automobiles.

The mineral ores from which the key materials for the solar photovoltaic cells for solar panels are made are mined from the earth, just as natural gas is pumped from the ground. Although the suggestion has been made that we try to develop the use of more common materials than rare earths to make solar cells, no matter what materials we use, we will still be making huge impacts on the biosphere through our use of these so-called clean energy sources.

What I have said so far mostly involves the problems of energy supply. There is also the question of what kinds of things we have been doing with all this energy and what kinds of things we are going to do in the future. As I said, we have been making more and more things and more and more kinds of things. In the post-World War II period running from the end of the war in 1945 until the time of the Embargo in 1973 we became committed as a society to continuing economic growth, which is the steady increase in the total quantity of goods and services produced in our economy from one year to the next.

The oil embargo ended after a relatively brief period, in March of 1974. There were some policies adopted by our government because of the embargo. Efficiency standards for automobiles were put in place. They were required to get an increased number of miles per gallon from gasoline. In addition, a pipeline for the development of oil in Alaska was approved. However, there was no comprehensive policy developed to deal with all the different problems associated with energy supply and use in the 1970s and there has not been since. And our alleged leaders in both of our two major political parties continue to misconceive and misunderstand the problem of energy as almost exclusively a problem of supply. Prior to the oil embargo, in the 1960s and early 1970s a critically important social movement emerged in the United States and much of the world. This was the modern environmental movement. This was sparked at first by some rather obvious things, such as air and water pollution, and the impact of the use of chemical insecticides on wildlife. Some of these things were rather dramatic, such as a river in the eastern United States, the Cuyahoga, catching on fire.

However, the environmental movement quickly became much more theoretical and concerned with the foundations or causes of why there was an environmental crisis. For many years, scientists, scholars, activists in conservation and environmental organizations and ordinary citizens had been becoming steadily more and more concerned about the problem of human population growth and its possible impact on the future of the rest of life on Earth, or the biosphere, as scientists call it.

In 1968 a book written by a biologist named Paul Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich, called The Population Bomb was published. (She was not listed because of the publishing conventions of the time, but she was in fact a co-author.) In this book the Ehrlichs focused on one of the central parts of the problem of human population growth, the problem of keeping everyone adequately fed. They suggested that widespread, dramatic famines in many parts of the world were likely to happen in what was then the near future.

Fortunately, for the sake of the great many lives saved, with the help of improvements in agricultural technology and the development of dwarf varieties of wheat that together were called a “Green Revolution,” these dramatic famines did not happen. However, widespread hunger and malnutrition experienced by hundreds of millions have continued to be an ongoing problem and the future of agricultural productivity is still very much in question and a great many people have drawn the wrong conclusions from a temporary reprieve from a problem of fundamental importance for all of humankind and most of life on Earth. And the impacts of huge, dramatic increases in our human population on the rest of the biosphere continued in the 1970s despite the absence of dramatic, visible famines and they continue to this very day. (See the report by the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization called “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020” www.fao.org/documents/card/en/c/ca9692en . See also below for references to descriptions of the impact of population growth on the rest of the biosphere.)

The Population Bomb was about more than predictions of famines. It was also about the basic logical structure of the problem of population growth for any human society or civilization at any time.

Paul Ehrlich and a couple of other gentlemen founded a grassroots volunteer organization called Zero Population Growth in the wake of the publication of The Population Bomb. For many years this organization has worked to educate Americans about the problem of population growth and to advocate for voluntary, non-coercive measures by the US government to address it. They have emphasized the impact of population growth in many other areas besides just food, such as the impact on habitat for wildlife and endangered species, deforestation, desertification and urban sprawl. (Sadly, I have to report that approximately in 2002 the name of this organization was changed by the President and Board of Directors at the time, without consulting their 70, 000 plus members, but rather other organizations, to Population Connection. The need for a complete end to human population growth and a transition to a slowly declining population is even more urgent now than it was eighteen years ago.)

Clear and comprehensive statements in systematic general terms about why population growth is a problem for all of humankind now in our time have been slow in coming, and when they have come, they have not been as widely disseminated as they should have been. One particularly cogent statement that I am personally aware of was the first Scientists’ Warning to Humanity that appeared in 1992. In this warning an emphasis is placed on the finite nature of the biosphere and our position as human beings of absolute dependence on the well-being and healthy functioning of that biosphere and the negative impact of  a very large number of human beings whose activities inevitably have an effect on the possibility of that healthy functioning (see https://www.ucssusa.org/resources/1992-world-scientists-warning-humanity .)  

I was unaware of this document when I wrote my first post for this blog, https://www.arepublicfortheearth.org. The argument in this warning backs up what I said in my first post. I mention this just in case someone accuses me of plagiarism, and as an illustration of an important point. You do not need to be a professional scientist or have a Ph. D in something like Ecology to understand this problem and be able to reason and communicate about it in a way that is grounded in facts and logic.

After the end of the oil embargo in 1974, both Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter attempted to address what was perceived and understood as the “Energy Crisis.” They did so without success.

The Oil Embargo was not the only shock to the American people and the American economy by events abroad in the 1970s. Towards the end of the 1970s there was a political revolution in Iran, one of the major oil-producing and exporting countries in the Middle East. The flow of oil coming from Iran onto the world market was cut off for an extended period. Most of the staff at the American embassy in Tehran, the capital city of Iran, were taken hostage by Iranians and held for an extended period as well.

Partly because of this second major oil shock to the US economy, the US inflation rate went up to 18%. The inflation rate was brought down by a policy of high interest rates adopted by the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States. Unfortunately, this policy helped to send the US economy into a major recession.

The American people faced many economic, political, and cultural problems in the 1970s, as well as what they were only belatedly becoming aware of, threats to the environment. The post- World War II period from the end of the war in 1945 to approximately the time of the Oil Embargo in 1973 was a time of unprecedented economic prosperity for most Americans, especially most caucasian Americans. This prosperity was largely based on policies promoting economic growth. There was also a high rate of population growth from natural increase in the same period although this was not the result of an explicit government policy.

These policies promoting economic growth included a high level of spending by the federal government, both spending for the military and defense and for social welfare as well. These policies included strong labor unions and laws protecting them, and the willingness of the managers of large companies to accept labor peace by signing contracts with unions guaranteeing their members high rates of pay and benefits, including pensions. It did not, unfortunately, include allowing unions a voice in management decision making about the goals or future of the companies. These policies or circumstances that helped to promote economic growth also included cheap, widely available oil and oil-derived products and other cheap fossil fuels. They also included higher levels of spending by state and local governments. Many colleges and universities expanded to serve much larger student-bodies.

Businesses helped to promote this widespread prosperity by building inexpensive homes for a great expansion of the suburbs.

These policies and circumstances that helped to promote widespread prosperity lasted only a brief time. In 1956, a geologist named M. King Hubbert, working for the Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company, predicted that the US would reach peak oil production in 1970. This meant that the maximum amount of oil that could be pumped out of known reserves in the US would be reached.

Peak oil was indeed reached in 1970, as Hubbert had predicted. This helped to set the stage for the Embargo of 1973.

Another important development was the undermining of the US labor movement by American leaders of manufacturing companies throughout the 1970s and later. These leaders were unsatisfied with their rates of profit for their companies for various reasons. Beginning earlier, but really picking up speed in the 1970s they began the deindustrialization of large areas in the Northeast and the upper Midwest. They began moving their manufacturing facilities from states in the Northeast where labor unions had good contracts providing high wages and benefits to other parts of the country, such as the South, where laws protecting unions were weak or nonexistent. Later they moved their manufacturing facilities out of the country altogether to countries such as Mexico, or elsewhere in Latin America, or Asia. (see The Deindustrializaion of America by Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, Copyright 1982 by Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, Basic Books, Inc.)

Other important developments occurred in the 1960s that helped to undermine the economic prosperity of the post-World War II period and the confidence of Americans in their government and its ability to help them with their problems. After the death of President Kennedy, President Johnson pushed a tax cut through Congress. The tax cut did stimulate the economy and help people at the lower end of the economic ladder of employment and income. However, it also helped to stimulate inflation in combination with other things such as a high level of spending on the military because of US involvement in the Vietnam War.

In addition, President Johnson declared a War on Poverty. This was an attempt to help poor people, including many African – Americans, who had been subjected to much discrimination, overcome their disparate circumstances. Unfortunately, the way this attempt to eradicate poverty was developed was not well thought out and brought about much opposition by local politicians and elected officials. So, this attempt to end poverty failed to help poor people in a lasting way (see The Unfinished Journey – Americans since World War II by William H. Chafe Copyright 1986, 1991 by Oxford University Press.)

In addition, US involvement in the Vietnam War, which was opposed by many in the Democratic Party, was identified with the Democratic Party, and helped to weaken it politically.

The Bretton Woods monetary system that was the result of an agreement among the Allied nations towards the end of the World War II, in 1944, at a city of the same name in the United States and had been the system used for world trade by the nations of the word throughout the post-World War II period, had seriously unraveled by the end of the 1960s because of inherent flaws in the system. Under this agreement, the US dollar was the reserve currency for world trade. The US dollar was backed up by gold. Other nations could exchange dollars for gold from the US Treasury which they accumulated from trade and spending by US companies and individuals in their countries. However, the US Treasury did not have an unlimited supply of gold. President Nixon closed the gold window for the exchange of US dollars for gold by central banks of other nations and allowed the US dollar to float on the world market for the exchange of currencies.  This also helped to produce inflation.

These various events and developments helped to produce a shift in public opinion toward conservative political opinions and support for more conservative policies.

Among the intellectual leaders of the US environmental movement an important conceptual discovery was made in the early 1970s. This was the recognition of economic growth as the other major causative factor underlying the world environmental crisis of an endangered biosphere and the distorted unsustainable relationship between humankind and that biosphere. An economist named Herman E. Daly and other scholars began developing something called Steady-State economics. Later this was changed to Ecological Economics. (See Steady-State Economics by Herman E. Daly. Also, see Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications by Herman E. Daly. Also see my blog post “Economic Growth and the Type of Society that the United States Is” on this website: https://www.arepublicfortheearth.org .)

Economic growth is the steady increase in the total quantity of goods and services produced in an economy in a given unit of time, usually a year. Since this cannot happen without an increase in the quantity of matter and energy that are essential inputs into the economic process no matter how efficient the productive process may become and regardless of whether the energy involved comes from fossil fuel sources or some other source, the impact of economic growth on the biosphere or regions of it can be very profound. This is especially true in the context of our contemporary human civilization with our heart-breaking degree of human overpopulation and our huge national and world economies that have altered the climate and that are driving a Sixth Mass extinction of other species of life.

In 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected to the Presidency of the United States. There are many things that can be noted about President Reagan. Two are especially important.

First, he believed very strongly in political and economic conservatism. He believed that government was the cause of the problems that Americans faced. However, he was willing to accept and support compromises with his political opponents to get part of what he wanted.

Second, he was completely hostile even to the recognition of environmental problems, not to mention government intervention in the economy to protect the environment.

Democratic members of Congress and many Republican members of Congress were not hostile to the protection of the environment. However, they did not really understand the substantive nature of the world environmental crisis and how the underlying causes of environmental problems, human population growth and economic growth inevitably create this crisis through their operation on a finite planet with a finite biosphere of life, and so they had no real concept of how to fight someone like Ronald Reagan most effectively.

In the absence of effective leadership and engagement with the world environmental crisis from the federal government in the 1970s and the 1980s, the political fight to protect the environment in the United States mostly took place at the local and state levels. An important focus was trying to prevent or minimize the covering over of land for new residential and commercial buildings. This mostly has not worked, although there have been many temporary victories.

Some environmentalists have said that there can be no permanent victories in the struggle to conserve the environment because the victory you win today may become a defeat tomorrow. However, what we need to realize is that without systemic long-term change, we face the certainty of ultimate complete systemic defeat.

President Reagan failed to deliver on his promises to his working-class supporters. The big tax cuts that he pushed through Congress failed to save US manufacturing jobs. They also, most importantly, failed to protect unionized manufacturing employment. In addition to the deindustrialization that had been occurring in the US in the 1970s and the ongoing process of globalization of the US and world economies union members in manufacturing industries did not do well during Reagan’s presidency partly because he was hostile to the very idea of labor unions. And his supply side economic polices of big tax cuts for the rich and upper income earners and cuts in government spending and regulation of business could not possibly have helped them. They were based on a flawed analysis of what had been going wrong in the American economy and in American life and government in the 1970s and what needed to be done at that point in the early 1980s. Ronald Reagan’s philosophy of economic and political conservatism was a pile of nonsense from the very beginning. It was a pile of nonsense when it first took form in American intellectual and political life in the late nineteenth century and it was then in the 1980s and it still is today. However, the liberalism that the leaders of the Democratic Party in the 1970s and 1980s and the American people had inherited from the post-World War II period did not provide much of a foundation for an effective engagement with the World Environmental Crisis either. The beliefs of the so-called progressives of today also do not provide this foundation.  

In 1992 Bill Clinton was elected President. Clinton pushed the NAFTA and GATT trade agreements through the Congress. Clinton promised that NAFTA, a trade agreement with Mexico and Canada would lead to hundreds of thousands of new good paying jobs for Americans. The reality has been quite different. Many new US jobs have come since the passage of NAFTA. However, for the most part these have not been the high paying unionized jobs in manufacturing that existed before the passage of NAFTA. The passage of NAFTA led to the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs in the US. It also led to the loss of the service jobs that depended on US based manufacturing.

It’s true that the spread of the personal computer and the computerization of the US economy and the rise of the internet and later the cell phone and the smartphone have led to many jobs in fields such as computer programming or software engineering. However, these are mostly not union jobs. And these jobs are also subject to the uncertainties and the lack of security of the globalized US and world economy.

Some economists have pointed to automation in manufacturing as a reason why US based manufacturing jobs have been lost. However, most of this automation has come years after the fact of NAFTA. The impact of NAFTA and the globalization of the US economy have contributed to the political weakness of the Democratic Party as the party of the post-World War II liberal welfare state in its contest with the rigidly ideological Republican Party and the failure of our American civilization to engage with the complex, dangerous reality of the World Environmental Crisis that has been facing us for more than fifty years  (see https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp147/ and https://www.computerworld.com/article/3175715/laid-off-it-workers-worry-us-is-losing-tech-jobs-to-outsourcing.html .)

One critically important impact of the globalization of the US and global economies has largely been overlooked in the discussions of the impact on US jobs and our economy and society. This has been the spread of the resource intensive, energy intensive US way of life around the world.  This has greatly amplified the impact of human activities on the non-human part of the biosphere and contributed to a massive loss of habitat for wildlife and greatly contributed to climate change. This process has taken place in at least two major ways. The first is through the shift of manufacturing facilities from economically well-developed countries like the United States to less developed countries where the workers can be exploited and paid much less than their unionized counterparts and where laws protecting the environment are weak or non-existent. The second is through the growth of consumption of goods and services produced through this same resource-intensive, energy-intensive way of life in these same countries. I do not mean to suggest that there should not have been some increase in the use of resources so that there could be some measure of justice and fairness and a decent way of life for the people living in the less developed world.

Not only is it the case that there had to be some increase in the use of resources and some extensions of the benefits of the industrial mode of production to the less economically developed countries, it also needs to be said that for Americans to just try to ignore the less developed world and let the people living there fend for themselves within the so-called “Free Market” would not have been good for the biosphere either, including both its human and non-human parts.

It is a tragic and terrible truth that racism has been a part of American life since our beginnings. It is also a tragic and terrible truth that racism has been a part of our discussion of immigrants and immigration and the making of our immigration policies throughout our history as well. However, in order to evaluate what our immigration policies should or should not be and consider the interests of all concerned, whether citizen or immigrant, and also the interests that are almost always forgotten and neglected in any such discussion, specifically the interests of the non-human life, the animals and plants that will lose habitat inevitably from continuing population growth, including that coming from a large volume of immigration, we need to develop the ability to make fine logical and moral distinctions. It is entirely possible for some people to have racist opinions about immigrants and at the very same time to have legitimate grievances about the impact of a large volume of immigration and specific immigration policies on their lives.  

Many members of the economics profession and many other Americans as well may make the argument that a large volume of immigration has had no significant negative impact on American workers. These arguments are simply not credible. Just taking classical economic theory into account, if you dramatically expand the supply of labor, and a large portion of the labor pool is made up of people who are willing to work for a lot less money because they are here illegally, it is inevitable that that will affect the labor market, including the prevailing wage.

However, putting aside the economic impact on jobs, and that is not the only economic impact of immigration, the impact of a large volume of immigration on the environment, on the non-human part of the biosphere, is the most important short-term and long-term impact of immigration on the United States.

There is something called biodiversity, which is the diversity of other species of life in a region or environment. Continuing population growth, including population growth from a large volume of immigration, both legal as well as undocumented, inevitably reduces habitat for other species. There is a risk that a continuing large volume of immigration will greatly diminish the remaining biodiversity within the United States. And let us be clear. It will do this essentially forever, for the rest of time as it may unfold on this planet. It took nature billions of years to create this life.   It is hard to see how this will not happen. Even with a low fertility rate, with a large volume of immigration year after year, we will have a significant amount of continuing population growth.

Some people may not see the importance of this potentially devastating loss of biodiversity here in the U.S. I refer you to the reference above, the first Scientists’ Warning to Humanity. All of humankind is dependent on a finite biosphere of life, and the healthy functioning of that biosphere. The more biodiversity there continues to be, including here within the United States, the more likely the functioning of the global biosphere will continue to be sufficiently healthy for humankind to be able to continue to live on this planet. With the climate change that has already taken place, the climate change to come, and with this ongoing loss of biodiversity here in the United States and global biodiversity, this healthy functioning is in jeopardy. It also must be said that other species of life have a right to be on this planet that is apart from any consideration of what is in humanity’s interest.

If we are to evaluate thoughtfully what our immigration policies should be in a way that is dispassionate, we need to consider the large numbers that have been involved in immigration into the United States for quite some time. According to figures from the Department of Homeland Security, we have had over one million legal immigrants per year for almost every year for the last twenty years and levels approaching one million a year for the last thirty years and in one of those years almost two million. We have also had a growing volume of legal immigration approaching these levels going back to the mid-1970s. This has been a significant component of our population growth. (See https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2019 for statistics on US legal immigration and https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/population-estimates/unauthorized-resident for estimates of the number of undocumented immigrants living in the US.)

Many arguments are advanced by advocates of a continuing large volume of immigration that fail to see the big picture. Consider the argument that we need more immigrants to care for our aging population, and to shore up our Social Security system. These arguments fail to see that the environment has to be considered as more important than any economic problem. We can care for our elderly and finance the Social Security system and arrange our economy with a stable population. We must do this, although it needs to be said that we can reach a stable population without coercion. Without an environment there will be no economy. 

Our two major political parties, the Democratic and Republican Parties, did respond with a reasonable degree of effectiveness to some of the more obvious environmental problems of the 1960s and 1970s. Under President Nixon, an Environmental Protection Agency was established. A clean water law was passed. A clean air act was passed. A National Environmental Policy Act was passed. An Endangered Species law was passed. However, our two major political parties have been completely oblivious to the underlying causes of the world environmental crisis, human population growth and economic growth.

Two of the major, most widely reported on environmental problems of the early twenty-first century, Climate Change, and the ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction of other species of life are directly related to these two major underlying causes of the World Environmental Crisis, population growth and economic growth.

Let’s consider the first one, climate change. Although it is widely known at this point in history, let’s review what this is: the increase in the global average temperature of the atmosphere and consequent changes in climate because of the pervasive burning and other uses of fossil fuels, coal, oil, and natural gas, by human beings. The problem is not simply the greenhouse gases that get into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, but the greatly increased number of people here in the United States and around the world who are using these fuels and products from these fuels.

The problem was also created in part by the massive assault on the biosphere engaged in by human beings over the past several centuries that greatly reduced the ability of the biosphere to take some of these greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and recycle them into organic material. This process involved the conversion of forests into farmland, and then the conversion of farmland into urban environments, covered over by residential and commercial buildings.

The problem has also been the massive expansion of the number of products and services using oil, and other fossil fuels to further the process of economic growth.

The other major environmental problem that has been somewhat widely reported on in the last twenty years, although not nearly as widely reported on as climate change, is the Sixth Mass Extinction of other species of life that is now occurring. Here again, the two underlying causes of this problem are population growth and economic growth. The expansion of the human population directly competes with the use and availability of habitat for other species. The conversion of forests into farmland reduces habitat for wildlife and the conversion of farmland into urban uses such as housing for humans and commercial buildings and for other business activities also reduces habitat for wildlife. ( see the following article for a discussion of rates of extinction linked to human activities and the background rate of extinction from evolution and the impact of human activities on small-ranged species and a statement of the impact of population growth on biodiversity https://science.sciencemag.org/content/344/6187/1246752 and the following article for a discussion of biological annihilation of populations of other vertebrate species by  the impact of population growth and other human activities and how this pushes these other species towards endangered status https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/E6089 ).

I want to be clear. I am not denying the importance of climate change as a threat to human life and most of life on Earth. Nor am I denying the central importance of the burning of fossil fuels and their use as the immediate cause of climate change. I am simply saying that the ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction of other species of life should be considered as of at least equal moral and political gravity as a threat to human life and life on Earth that simply must be addressed. I am also pointing out how these two underlying causes of the world environmental crisis, population growth and economic growth, have contributed indirectly to the genesis of the problem over the relative long-term of the past several centuries. I do believe that we need to get as close as we can get to a fossil fuel free economy and world civilization as soon as we possibly can. However, simply to think and act as if a mere substitution of renewable energy for fossil fuel derived energy will allow us to continue to have the same kind of society based on endless population and economic growth is false.

I also want to make clear, since I have indicated in what I have said here that there are reasons for thinking that a continuing large volume of immigration, both legal and undocumented into the United States is probably not a good thing, that I do not support former President of the United States Donald Trump and his racist, hateful approach to immigration, and I never did. In fact, I regard the rise of this kind of man to the Presidency of the United States as one of the great catastrophes of American and world history, the full consequences of which may unfold throughout the rest of this century and beyond, unless we act. And the way to act effectively is to go beyond Trump the man to the underlying problems that contributed to his rise.

Even on their own terms, with their ad hoc definition of the World Environmental Crisis as solely about the need to stop using fossil fuels, our two major parties have not been doing very well at all in claiming to be offering leadership or governance to the American people. One party, the Republican Party, is in complete denial about the reality of the problem of climate change and how it is caused by using fossil fuels. The other major party, the Democratic Party, has offered completely inadequate measures for minimizing the global warming and climate change that is happening and securing the human future and the future of the biosphere. (For a partial glimpse of just how inadequate, consider the following article on a UN report on the kind of measures necessary to keep the degree of global warming below 1.5 degrees Centigrade rather than 2 degrees Centigrade, which was the earlier goal at https://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/10/08/37-things-need-know-1-5c-global-warming/.  Also consider the failure of elected officials who are members of the Democratic Party or candidates for the Democratic nominations for various offices including the Presidency to do much more to stand up for the environment in their communications with the public than say they are for more renewable or so-called 100% clean energy. Consider the failure to call for adequate restrictions on fossil fuel use or any kind of energy use period which would start to become feasible once we effectively engage with the problems of population and economic growth.)

In addition, our two major parties have not just accepted but actively promoted the globalization of the US and world economies while ignoring the impact of this globalization on the functioning of American democracy, on American lives, and the world environmental crisis and the future of the planet.

They have also failed to deal adequately with the problems of economic inequality, racism, sexism, healthcare, education, and the ability of Americans to understand their world, make informed choices, and live reasonably free and happy lives.

Both parties are steeped in the past, and the institutions and established ways of thinking of the past and show no sign whatever of the ability or the willingness on the part of their leaders, the elected officials who are members of them, their candidates, or their most active members to confront reality as whole in an open-minded and open-hearted way.

I am not saying that their leaders are bad people. However, power only respects other organized power. The leaders of the two major parties have good intentions, and the two major parties, over the course of the whole of American history, have done much good. However, we simply must have a political party in the United States that will not blink in the face of reality as a whole in a mind-bendingly complex world and put the preservation and protection of life on Earth, including the millions of other species, and the ecosystems of the Earth first as a necessary pre-condition for even the partial achievement of any broad social goal of a good society, such as justice, or ending racism and sexism.

At this point I have only made a brief introduction to a description of some of the most important reasons why we need a new political party here in the United States to protect and preserve the entire biosphere of life on Earth. I have not even touched upon yet a description of what a new type of society should be like. I do not mean something other than a democracy. On the contrary, I mean a more truly democratic society and government. Also, most importantly, this should be a society that is solidly grounded in reality, in an understanding of the nature of life on Earth and how it functions, that is what we need.

In posts to come I hope to describe what the new political party and the new type of society should be like, and what some of the goals of the new political party should be. I will also provide further details about why we need a new political party. I also want to say here that we should not seek to change everything. We should approach the business of political and cultural change with great care and a profound sense of responsibility to everyone in our society and all of humankind and all of life in the present and in the future. There is a great deal about the present and that we have inherited from the past that is worth keeping. We must however make some very fundamental changes in the ways we think and act as they are established in our political order if there is to be any kind of decent future for all Americans, all of humankind, and most of the rest of life on Earth.

On a personal note, I want to say a little about what happened with my Dad and his TV repair shop at the end of the Oil Embargo of 1973-1974. What happened to him was that he solved the financial difficulties that he got into because of the embargo by getting a job as an instructor in electronics repair with a private trade school. Many other Americans were not so fortunate. And you could say that our entire society has not been so fortunate in the way we have come to grips with the larger problems that were behind the embargo and the “Energy Crisis,” We have essentially fled from reality as a whole ever since then.

As I continue to develop and post additional articles on this blog, I hope at some point to have action items on issues at stake here in the U.S. in our society and before our government that I will invite readers to participate in as we continue to discuss the need for a new political party to effectively address the world environmental crisis.

I mentioned earlier that world population crossed the four billion mark about 1974. We are now closing in on having over eight billion people in the world. The U.S. Census Bureau says that world population is now about 7.744 billion. The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division says that world population is now over 7.7 billion and projects that world population will reach almost 10 billion by 2050 and almost 11 billion by 2100. Here in the U. S. our population is now a little over 330 million. This is an increase of over 60 per cent from about 203 million since about 1970. (See the Population Clock at https://www.census.gov. Also see https://populaton.un.org/wpp/Publications/ . The first PDF, the Highlights, has these figures. See also the reference given above for the Statistical Abstract for 1980 published by the US. Census Bureau for figures on American population size and growth.) We Americans, as individual citizens and as a country, need to get moving. The systematic evasion of the issues of population growth and population size over the last fifty years has already had profound consequences for Americans, all humankind, and most of life on Earth. The phenomena of population growth and economic growth and their inevitable consequences need to be brought fully into the open in our democratic discourse without further delay.

I hope I have at least attracted your interest and even more hopefully, that you will support me. Please comment and provide as much detail about what you think as possible while at the same time being brief.  Donations of even modest amounts would be helpful. Even if you do not completely agree with me, if you think that I provide an important point of view, please consider supporting me.

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Copyright 2021 by Richard E. Garner, Jr

By    Richard E. Garner, Jr

A couple of days ago I was drying my clothes in the natural gas powered clothes dryer I have  in the mobile home where I live, and I had to marvel at the fact that after the dryer had stopped and I was taking my clothes out of the dryer, by the time I got to some of my socks in the back of the dryer, after I had taken out some of my t-shirts and other clothes and folded them and put them away by the time I got to them, they were already starting to get a little bit damp again. I remembered what my mother had told me many times when she was alive about the importance of getting my clothes out of the dryer as soon as it stops running. I got to thinking about energy in the universe and our human use of it and the subject of this blog post which is about the idea of a carbon-free economy, some of the problems we might have in making the transition to it, and why the idea itself has shortcomings as a main or sole program of action for solving the world environmental crisis as a whole and securing the future for humankind and life on Earth.  

The idea of a carbon free economy has arisen in recent years in response to the growing, extremely serious threat of climate change. The climate change we are talking about is the increase in the global average temperature of the atmosphere that has been taking place in the recent past. This increased global average temperature is the result of the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere because of human activities. These activities include the massive burning of fossil fuels, coal, oil, and natural gas over the past several centuries, intensive livestock farming, the use of synthetic fertilizers to produce food for our growing human population, and industrial activities and their consequences.

The hope behind the idea of a carbon free economy is that if we can if we can dramatically reduce our use of fossil fuels to power almost everything that we do, we will be able to bring this increase in the global average temperature to a halt and avoid an level of climate change that will make human life on Earth almost, if not completely impossible.

To bring our greenhouse gas emissions to zero, or close to zero, we have been relying on the expansion of the use of renewable energy, or so-called clean energy. Renewable energy includes different ways of making use of the energy in sunlight falling on the Earth, wind energy,

geothermal energy, and other ways of making use of flows of energy that occur in nature, without human intervention

There have been reports that the amount of energy production capacity from renewable sources at the global level is already at one third of total capacity. So, having a goal of 100 per cent of total human uses of energy in the shortest possible time frame doesn’t seem unrealistic ( Joshua S. Hill “Renewable Energy Now Accounts For A Third Of All Global Power Capacity” https://www.cleantechnica.com/2019/04/03/renewable-energy-accounts-for-a-third-of-all-global -power-capacity .)

However, there are problems with the idea of a carbon free economy in the way we have been thinking about it. The primary cause of climate change, the burning of fossil fuels, is not the sole major cause of negative impacts on the biosphere from human activities. In the first place, burning fossil fuels by utility power plants or in residential or commercial buildings or to power our cars or airplanes is not the only kind of use made of these commodities torn from the Earth by human beings. We use fossil fuels, especially oil, to make all kinds of different things that the modern world depends on, like many different kinds of plastics, not just the kind that end up in the ocean. There is plastic in our clothing, in our shoes, our cars, our homes and other buildings. For medical care. For all kinds of packaging. We swim in an ocean of plastic even on the land. Are we ready to go back to clothing made only from cotton, or wool, or linen? What about the types of plastic where a return to the older materials will not be feasible?

Even with the uses of fossil fuels where we burn them have their problems where a simple substitution of renewable energy for a use of fossil fuels is either going to be impractical or it is just not going to be the same. Consider transportation. Consider fossil fuel based commercial air travel. Our American and global human civilizations make an extensive use of fossil fuels to move all kinds of people around the world every day. Why? Are we sane? It takes a tremendous amount of energy to move a pound or a kilogram of mass through the air than over the ground even at a relatively low altitude or low rate of speed. Some of the advocates for a carbon free economy seem to think that we will be able to power this activity with biofuels from growing crops. There are various problems with this including the diversion of land for wildlife to grow the biofuels or the diversion of food crops to being used for a non-food purpose in a world with a growing human population. Also, there is the use of water. And are we going to use fossil fuels to make the nitrogen fertilizer to grow the crops for the biofuels? How are we possibly going to produce enough biofuels to continue this kind of activity on this massive a scale? I don’t see how.

Negative impacts on the biosphere will continue to grow from continuing human population growth and economic growth. And as long as we have these phenomena the ground will continue to shift under our feet as we pursue a carbon free economy. With literally billions more people we will need many more solar panels or wind plants put up somewhere with everything that will entail. And we don’t seem to be thinking about what a mammoth undertaking it will be to make the transition.

At a minimum, no matter what type of energy powers our society, or what kind of society we have, we human beings will always need to eat food. At this point in time most human beings are alive because of the use of a process called the Haber-Bosch process. This is a process for

making nitrogen fertilizer for use in agriculture that involves the burning of natural gas at very high temperatures. There is research underway on various substitutes for this process. However, we already have a very large human population. Current world population is over 7.6 billion and may be as high as 10 billion by the year 2050 ( See https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/world-population-prospects-2017.html .)

(See https://news.berkeley.edu/2014/12/09/organic-conventional-farming-yield-gap/ . )

A complete transition away from this process in a short time will be risky and involve many unknowns.

In addition to the Haber-Bosch process, we are dependent on other fossil fuel-based products for modern agriculture, including chemical insecticides made using oil, and chemical weed killers, also made using oil. The whole centralized food production, marketing and distribution system uses tremendous amounts of energy and involves tremendous amounts of energy waste. Changing this system so that it runs entirely on renewable energy is something that I hope will possible. But it will not be easy.

I have not mentioned the degree to which another aspect of modern agriculture, the raising of livestock for meat and dairy products, also produces greenhouse gases contributing to climate change. The raising of cattle for beef produces an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, methane. The extent of meat eating in the economically developed world, and now around the world because of the globalized economy, is unprecedented in human history. Again, it will not be easy to educate enough people to eat less meat or none to a sufficient extent to make enough of a difference in time to slow down our march towards unacceptable climate change and the production of other negative impacts on the biosphere.

Organic agriculture, which is the production of food without the fossil fuel based tools of fertilizers using the Haber-Bosch process or oil based insecticides and weed killers and with strict attention to maintaining the health and fertility of the soil which fossil fuel based agriculture tends to destroy is no panacea or easy substitute in  world with a growing human population. There is a yield gap between organic and conventional agriculture for different crops and in different regions and in different contexts. There are various estimated of how bad it is in these different contexts. Some estimates range up to 20 per cent. Again, this will not be easily overcome.

Stepping away from agriculture to the urban environment, we encounter other problems in making the transition to a carbon -free economy and protecting the biosphere from the harm caused by human activities. In order to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from the use of fossil fuels for transportation, more dense patterns of housing development are being proposed. This will involve building up rather than out, with more high-rise apartment buildings and condominiums rather than single family homes. And more of this dense housing development will be close enough to public transit to walk. This will protect at least part of the environment in the short term. There will be less urban sprawl. However, this will not eliminate the impact of continuing population growth and economic growth on the environment. Every-thing that people living in a high-rise condominium want and think that they need will have an impact on the environment in its production, marketing and distribution. And the more people that are involved the greater the impact will be.

I don’t want to give the impression that I am against the idea of a carbon-free economy or the desperate, frantic movement to try to make this happen. I am against the exclusive emphasis on climate change as our only major environmental threat to the human future and the future of life on Earth. There are other major threats to the environment from human activities that cry out for attention that deserve to be considered of equal moral gravity. The ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction of other species of life is one of them. The huge amount of population growth that has already taken place in the last one hundred years and the spread of the energy intensive and resource intensive way of life that began here in the United States and in Europe and has been spread around the world through the globalized economy is behind this problem. Continuing human population growth and economic growth will keep it going and may lead to the ultimate tragedy, the complete stripping of Earth’s remaining biodiversity, and possibly our own extinction as well.

We may be able to achieve a 100 per cent carbon free economy. However, this will not by itself save humankind and it will not by itself save life on Earth. In addition to pursuing a carbon free economy as soon as possible, there are other things we need to do. 

1. We need to bring population growth to the very center of American politics in a way that has never been done before. We need to do this in such a way that the reality of pervasive racism in our society does not control or disrupt or suppress the substance of the discussion. And we also need to do it in a such a way that false perceptions of racism or simple misunderstandings do not suppress the substance of the discussion or our effective intellectual, moral or political engagement with the problem. This can be done in a way that values the life of every human on the planet but is also dispassionate about the impacts of phenomena such as a large volume of immigration into any nation-state, whether legal or undocumented on the environment within that nation-state and the lives of the people, citizens and immigrants already living there as well as the large impacts on the fate of humankind and life on Earth.
2. We need to develop a non-coercive national population policy that will seek to bring US population growth to a complete halt and eventually seek to bring about a gradual, slow decline in population over an extended period of time. This policy will have to involve significant reductions in legal as well as undocumented immigration.
3. We need to imagine and build a society that does not require continuing economic growth. 
4. We need to imagine and build a fundamentally different kind of society with a different conception of the nature of the good life.

 I forgot to connect my story of drying my socks with most of what I have said here about a carbon free economy. Natural gas-powered clothes dryers at least have the virtue of the use of energy being as close as possible to the point of end use. Electric clothes dryers will involve transmission line losses and other waste and impacts on the environment, even if the centralized source of energy is renewable.

A really superior technology was my mother’s old fashioned clothes line, from many years ago.

What happens to the socks after the dryer is turned off tells you a lot about our human relationship to the universe. Once the heat is turned off, some of the water molecules that were driven out go back into the socks. Nature does not care what we do. And it does not care what any of us think. About anything. Nature will endlessly adapt to what we do or don’t do. But the effects of some of these adaptations on human beings will not be pleasant.

Thank you for your time and interest in visiting and reading this blog. Hopefully you read at least this one post all the way through. I hope I made you think even if you do not agree. Leave a comment or question if you wish. If you think what I have written here deserves your support please tell your friends about this blog and if you are in a position to do so, please go to my GoFundMe page and make a donation at

https://www.gofundme.com/golden-web-communications/.

Some Possible Topics for Future Posts:

Before the Final Curtain Rings Down: Why We Need a New Political Party to Effectively Engage the World Environmental Crisis and Improve American Democracy

The International Empire of Business Corporations, Democracy and the Fate of Life on Earth

Starting the World Over Again – What the New Political Party Should Be Like and What Its Goals Should Be

The US Presidential Race, Our Political System, and Our Crisis of Survival and Meaning

Power, Freedom and the Economic Process

The Globalized Economy, Its Impacts on Democracy and Its Threat to Life on Earth

Beyond Socialism and Capitalism

Economic Society and the Good Society

The Unity of Humankind and the Unity of Life on Earth

Into the Universe: the Wonder of Being

Copyright 2019 Richard E. Garner, Jr

By

Richard E. Garner, Jr

Economic growth is defined as an increase in the total quantity of goods and services produced in an economy in a given period of time, usually a year, or a quarter of a year, as reported on by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_growth; also, https://www.bea.gov/news/2019/initial-gross-domestic-product-4th-quarter-and-annual-2018.) Corrections for inflation in the level of prices are worked into some definitions, so that we have “real growth” or “inflation adjusted growth.” We may quibble over how accurately a given system for measuring economic growth does in fact reflect the actual increase in the production of goods and services that has taken place. And some people seem to confuse the system for measuring the phenomenon with the phenomenon itself. And there has been a great deal of debate about other systems that would measure economic activity differently, with less emphasis on material production and more on subjectively perceived benefits, such as welfare or happiness.

However, what is of critical importance is the underlying phenomenon of economic growth, the steady increase from one year to the next in the material production of goods and services. What is also of critical importance to understand is that no matter how efficient we get in the different processes and economic activities that we engage in economic growth will always involve some increases in the total quantities of matter and energy into the overall economic process.

These steady increases in the total quantities of matter and energy that we humans are putting into the economic process are what our finite, limited biosphere of life on Earth ultimately cannot take.

This problem applies to our struggle to avoid an unacceptable level of climate change as well as to everything else. Even if we are successful in transforming our economy so that it is entirely free of the use of fossil fuels, as long as we continue to have economic growth, we will have continued increases in inputs of matter and energy into the economic process.

The transformation of energy from sunlight falling on the Earth into electricity by solar cells might seem to be a perfectly innocent activity that could not possibly impact nature in any harmful way.  This is true as far as contributing to greenhouse gases and the problem of climate change.  However, the minerals that are the source of the semiconductor materials for the solar cells have to be extracted from nature through mining and other activities. In fact, all of the materials for the solar panels and the wires for the transmission lines and all of the materials for the use of renewable energy involves extractions from nature.

We are a long way from the time that this particular activity alone, the use of renewable energy, becomes a problem because of its unseen and unthought about impacts on the natural world. However, as long as we continue to have a society where population growth and economic growth both continue to take place, even this seemingly innocent activity could conceivably become a big part of our problems at some point in the not all that distant future.

Every single activity that we engage in, or that we might ever engage in has the potential for becoming a problem in how it impacts nature given a sufficiently large aggregate level of the quantities of matter and energy involved.

Today we have a system for measuring economic growth called Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. A report on GDP is issued after the end of every quarter and after the end of each year by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and agency of the US government. The most recent report of the BEA states that the initial estimate for US GDP for 2018 was over $20 trillion dollars. They say that real GDP increased 2.9 percent from 2017 to 2018.  https://www.bea.gov/news/2019/initial-gross-domestic-product-4th-quarter-and-annual-2018. These annual increases add up over time. Our US and world economies are quite huge and have a tremendous impact on the natural world.

The political and moral importance of the underlying phenomenon of economic growth extends beyond any system for measuring it. Even if other systems for measuring economic activity seem to do a better job of measuring such things as welfare or happiness, these other systems are unlikely to overshadow the importance of economic growth and its impact on the prospects for the survival and well being of humankind and much of the rest of life on Earth as far into the future as we can see.

The political importance of economic growth flows logically from our core political values and ideals. It flows from our founding fathers’ ideas about the nature of individual political freedom and political power. Our founding fathers thought that freedom essentially consisted in not being taxed, or at least in not being taxed without representation. After the Revolution, any tax was suspect. Only grudgingly, enough power was given to the federal government to protect each individual man from the potential violence of other individual men and all from the threat of violence from other nations.

Throughout our history the good life has been thought of, at first, as the ability of men to use their property as they saw fit, and later as the ability of more and more people to come to this frontier society and pursue the acquisition of more and more things, without limit, and without regard for the impact on nature here in the United States or in the world as a whole.

Building a society that does not need continuing economic growth will not be easy. However, it simply must be done if humankind is to survive and if the complete destruction of the biosphere is to be avoided. This will be among the most difficult things that human beings have ever done. We will need to integrate our efforts to bring economic growth to a gradual halt with efforts to bring population growth to a complete end and with efforts to build a carbon free or as close as possible to a carbon free economy. And we will need to proceed on from there to try to bring about through noncoercive means a slow gradual decline over a long period of time in population size everywhere on the planet. And we will need to build a fundamentally different kind of society that grows from intangible intellectual, moral and spiritual achievements and from improvements in health, education and improved relationships among different groups of human beings and between humankind and the rest of life. This is what we need rather than a society growing endlessly in its physical impact on the Earth through population and economic growth. It[RG1]  will need to be a democratic society, but also a society where the marketplace is no longer the central organizing principle. There may be a way to contain the economic process back within the boundaries of the state in such a way that it does not produce such extensive economic and political inequality and where the biosphere is not threatened, but it is difficult to see now. Whatever type of society we try to build we must remember to ask ourselves, what does the Earth need? What does the rest of life need not just to avoid extinction but to thrive and flourish?

Thankyou for your time and interest. Please come back. Leave a comment if you wish, and if you are in a position to do so, and you think what I have to say here is of value and deserves to be supported, please consider going to my GoFundMe page and leave a donation at https://www.gofundme.com/golden-web-communications.

Some possible topics for future posts include the following:

Some possible problems with a carbon free economy

Why we need a new political party

A new political party for a type of society that is more truly democratic but also fundamentally different

The international empire of business corporations and the fate of humankind

The type of society that we need – a good society in a world of limits

A long-term nonviolent revolution based on love and cold realism

Work, energy, the industrial mode of production and democracy

Power, freedom and the economic process

Beyond socialism and capitalism

Into the universe – the wonder of being

Copyright 2019 by Richard E. Garner, Jr

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