Why This Lifelong Environmentalist is 97% Sure That "Climate Change...

Often in conversation with people that I find knowledgeable & aware on SO many topics, the overly-simplified debate around "climate change" is the E-brake, bringing a screeching halt if those folks are the kind who get emotionally attached to their beliefs (as most people are.) This same topic, and my strong disagreement with the mainstream story of it, has led to many hours of note taking, video sharing, and non-stop questions for those who enjoy the search for truth, wherever it leads.

Earlier today, I replied to @revisesociology's recent post, answering the TribeSteemUp bi-weekly question. His post was exploring how belief in man made climate change has increased over recent years, largely as a result of disasters. My reply started with:

Well of course there is; the media pounds home this propaganda 24/7, it's in the schools, every celebrity pushes it every chance they get (from their multimillion dollar, small town's worth of electricity using homes... or their private jets), and the corporate media (whether "news" or "social") actively hide anything that doesn't agree with the fear-mongering.

I went on to hit a few of what I feel are key, under-discussed points in the "climate discussions," and dropping a few links, because I was in something of a hurry, and because that's how I roll. When I got home, I started writing out a much deeper response, including how I developed to where I am now, having been a believer (though not overly educated) the idea that humans are bad for the earth for many years, with all the beliefs that go along with that.

That comment quickly became over 1500 words long, and by the time I got to a good stopping point, I realized I needed to turn it into a full post as well. Here's that post; I hope you enjoy! Not really. I hope you find yourself asking questions, question the answers you've believed, and maybe a little pissed off at the end of this.

An Environmentalist All My Life

For most of my life, I definitely leaned towards the deep green end of things. Highly anti-capitalist, essentially authoritarian (I definitely had ideas about "If things were just run like this instead"), and effectively anti-life.

I spent many bits of my early childhood with my dad, out near the Oregon Coast, spending our time hiking, sitting by rivers, and soaking in nature. He taught me that the only way to go "hunting" was with a camera, that we should care for the animals & environment around us, and that there's really nothing better than time spent in nature.

I was in the Boy Scouts for most of my childhood, starting with Cub Scouts, through Webelos, finally quitting the summer before freshman year of high school, holding the rank of Life (1 away from Eagle, the highest rank.) Needless to say that involved a LOT of camping, a lot of time orienteering, a lot of getting to know the land even better... at least in a more technical way.

At the same time, I spent most of the first 25 years of my life suffering from serious depression. Addiction was a near-constant, often in the form of video games, movies, books, and caffeine in my youth, slowly evolving to add sex, work, drugs, and alcohol. I didn't realize it until the very end of that time, but I was also highly addicted to processed "food." Insomnia, suicide attempts, and overdosing (especially alcohol poisoning) were all quite common.

So, between that blend of "Life sucks for me, and it looks like humanity's pretty much fucking things up," being fully indoctrinated with the idea that it's somehow OK for one person (more commonly group of people) to force others to behave in a certain way as long as it's the smarter/"better" way, and being reminded constantly how terrible the corporate/colonizer mentality is (Fern Gully, Captain Planet, etc.), AND of course believing that the Earth was overpopulated with humans, I was fully on-board with "Anthropogenic Global Warming", followed by the looming disasters of "Climate Change" when the apocalypse re-branded itself.

By the middle of high school, I had already learned just how stuck the system was; I had some teachers intelligent & honest enough to disillusion me to the idea that people "running" things were ever going to make the world better. Between all those years of "American History" class, and the adults in my life all seeming to have an attitude of how this is just the way things are, I decided to consciously avoid the outside world. September 11th, 2001 was probably the last time I watched anything on the news for a decade, and that's just because they forced us to ALL day at school that day, and the next.

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After a reality-shattering experience with Psilocybe Azurescens at the end of 2011, followed by a job that gave me access to all the juices & kombucha I could want, and getting my medical marijuana card, I started to be curious about the outside world again. I took to the internet, conversations at dispensaries, and reading tons of online articles. Thanks to the Zeitgeist trilogy (1, 2, 3), Who Killed The Electric Car (and its sequel), Owned & Operated, Occupied Cascadia, et al., I realized just how totally hopeless the "system" that humanity has been running for at least the last couple hundred years is. Luckily, at the same time I discovered folks like Peter Joseph, Stefan Molyneux (before he went off the deep end), Jacque Fresco, Charles Eisensten, and many others, who were telling stories of how the world could be different. Finally, people who were speaking and writing about how this isn't the only way for life to be, something I knew in my heart, but had only ever found in the Sci-Fi & fantasy of my youth.

Over the next couple years, I ravenously devoured anarchist philosophy, spiritual & social teachings from around the world, and everything I could find about not well known (and some truly suppressed) technologies that I thought had the potential to change everything (3D printing, the concept of open-source, permaculture, etc.)

Besides changing to an organic, vegan diet, focusing on as much local food as possible (thankfully easy in Cascadia), and generally being more mindful of how I treated my body (which greatly reflects on how we treat the planet), I moved away from buying new clothes, or even buying clothes, I sold my car and biked 5-10 miles each way to work, and basically just focused on having as little impact as possible. I must mention that I had never been paying taxes, which is by far the most harmful thing that the average person actually does in their lives.

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Along the way, something kept bugging me: "Climate Change"

Why was it that whenever people talked about "climate change" they were always just talking about carbon? Why were they never talking about Fukushima (or 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl, Project Green Run, or the nuclear waste they regularly just bury underground), The Pacific Trash Island, the urban heat island effect, mass deforestation (I watched clear cuts happen to entire small hills here),and so many other things that I learned about in elementary school, and would obviously have at least as big (and often longer-lasting) effect on our environment.

When talking about droughts, why did nobody mention the bottled water plants & centralized sewage & "treatment" systems that all actively remove water from the natural water cycle?

When talking about cutting emissions, burning less petroleum, reducing waste, why does nobody talk about the military? Amazon? The fact that the average American plate of food has 1400+ miles on it?

Why is CO2, which is absolutely necessary for the life cycle, and which every grower knows makes your plants grow bigger and faster, is somehow the enemy? (it's because every human breathes out CO2, which makes every single human part of the problem, and thus in need of control, reduction, and elimination.)

Most importantly, why is it that the governments & corporations responsible for everything from nuclear meltdowns to Agent Orange & PCBs, from depleted uranium & forced sterilization, from toxic municipal water to GMO food... are the same people who supposedly have the answers for "climate change?"

Once I realized that the exact same organizations & interests behind the military-industrial complex, the surveillance state, the debt-based fiat currency system, the pharmaceuticals, etc. are the organizations behind all of the "solutions" to "climate change," I realized that this was simply a misdirection. A way to use actual harm being done to the ecosystem of which we are a part (for the profit of a few thousand people globally), as a justification for limiting the freedom of everyone else (carbon taxes, like all taxes, don't mean shit to billionaires, and rationing doesn't happen to people with private jets/yachts/islands.)

Between the MANY obvious problems I saw affecting the environment not being mentioned by anyone in the "climate change" discussion (or most "environmentalists"), and the fact that the answers all involve more government, more top-down decision making, more wealth disparity, it started to become clear that "climate change" and the solutions to it are all simply propaganda to trick people into giving away their freedom.

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In Summary

There are a lot of things that I agree with the average environmentalist/climate activist about. Much of the time, my disagreement really boils down more to the "how" than anything, because I don't accept "Just give government more power" as a correct answer, unless the question was about how to reduce freedom, happiness, and health.

Some key things we agree about:

Humanity is just one part of a much larger ecosystem, and because our actions affect the rest of that ecosystem, it is our responsibility to reduce the ways in which we cause harm as much as possible. This is just basic biological/survival common sense: the harm we cause to the environment is harm we are directly causing to ourselves, our descendants, and everyone/everything else.
The idea of a perpetual growth use/waste economy is absolutely idiotic, and even if there were no environmental harms caused by it, we should still be moving towards a more logical, reasonable, systems-based approach to things.
Giant corporations and government agencies tend to lie, either to protect profits, hide the harm they've done, or both. They also both tend not to care even the tiniest bit if their decisions harm one, ten, or a million people... Unless it's going to cost them money/an election.
We should be moving back towards localized, organic farming as much as possible, as quickly as possible. Between our advances in things like aquaponics & vertical farming, technology totally taken for granted like greenhouses & pH testing, and application of systems theory (via permaculture), we can easily provide healthier food, cheaper, with less waste and less travel, for every single human on the planet.

Some questions for you (being anyone who believes that humanity is causing such damage to the ecosystem such that we are on the precipice of a full collapse):

Have you ever heard of Maurice Strong?
Have you read the surveys/papers from which the 97% consensus is drawn?
Are you familiar with the publicly acknowledged, long-running, experiments in geo-engineering that the US and other goverments have been running for decades?
Are you familiar with the term eugenics?
Did you read any of the ClimateGate emails? Even just any articles featuring major excerpts from the leaked emails?
When was the last time that everyone in the news media, the government, and Hollywood celebrities were telling you the same thing... and it was true?
Do you know how much money Al Gore made off "carbon credits" because of the scare his "documentary" caused?
Did you know the Earth was in a phase referred to as "little ice age" up into the 1800s?
Why have none of the horrific, catastrophic claims come true yet, after more decades of alarmists being sure that we're just on the edge of full collapse?

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So, as I mentioned earlier, this started as just a simple reply, where I wanted to lay out my shift in understanding about the environment, what the core environmental issues are that we face, and how we can move forward living in harmony with the Earth and all the beings that make it up. By the time I got done writing, I had cleared 1600 words, and realized I may have gone overboard for a STEEM comment that likely wouldn't be seen by more than one or two people. I did leave that comment, but then pulled out my text, added more hyperlinks, included some images, and made it into a full-fledged post.

If you aren't screaming at me through your computer, calling me a Climate Heretic or some such, and maybe I've piqued your curiosity, then I'd love to direct you to my much more in-depth 2-part series on "Climate Change" from 2018:

If you get through those and want more research links, documentaries, or debates, just let me know and I'll be happy to share what I have.