We’ve been taking the wrong approach to communicating about climate change. I get that the situation is dire. Really dire. But it goes way beyond the fact that every year is the hottest year on record, sea levels are rising, drought is forcing millions into refugee status, the Great Barrier Reef is almost dead, the oceans are 26 percent more acidic than preindustrial levels, our topsoil will be gone in less than 60 years, and we’re already at least 1.5 degrees Celsius toward the two degrees said to herald a real catastrophe. That’s all bad. The reality is actually worse.

By any rational analysis, civilization as we know it is on the brink of true disaster. And despite their outward messaging, even climate-denying, anti-scientific, messianic nations like the United States are quietly preparing for the coming storm. No, they’re not looking at how to mitigate climate change, but how to prepare for its inevitability. We’re building walls — not to keep out today’s immigrants, but to block tomorrow’s climate refugees. We’re being trained by our president and other leaders in the dark art of seeing people from other nations as less than human — a trick that will make it easier to watch as flooding and other climate catastrophes wipe out millions. “At least it’s them and not us,” we’ll be able to tell ourselves. This sort of alienation verging on sociopathy takes time to develop. But we’re working on it.

These are the sorts of things people do when they feel powerless to effect any change. They see the future as fixed — as something to predict and prepare for — but utterly impervious to their intervention. It’s the posture toward the future assumed by most corporations. They hire futurists and scenario planners to tell them what is most likely to happen 10, 20, or 50 years from now so they can invest in whatever is going to be valuable in that environment. Back in the 1980s, the futurists started talking about the coming water crisis. That’s what turned water into a private commodity — accelerating and worsening the very crisis they predicted.

Likewise, any futurist worth their coverage in Wired is telling their corporate clients about the coming global climate crisis in stirring detail: which regions will be underwater; how temperature changes are likely to effect social unrest, politics, and violence levels; how and where the populations of Africa and Southeast Asia will migrate; and so on.

We’ve won the communications battle in the sense that the rich and powerful now accept the reality of climate change and are actively betting on it happening. They believe us. But we’re losing the war in that they don’t believe the crisis can be averted. As speculators, they’re more committed to betting on the most likely future instead of investing in the future they’d like to see happen. In the finance world, betting on what you hope for is derided as “emotional investing.” One is supposed to bet only on existing probabilities — not on one’s genuine goals or dreams. And this mentality is self-perpetuating. The more we invest in the inevitability of climate disaster, the more assuredly we bring it on and the more devastating a future we are creating for ourselves.

If we’re going to get business on our side (after which government is sure to follow), we have to convince them that the most likely future scenario is one where the whole world tries to get in on the bet that we can avert climate change. Or at least we can mitigate its effects. Slow it down. Build more resilience. We have to show that the world is on board and ready to do and pay for what is necessary to keep the planet livable for the vast majority of species.

As a thinker who is often mistaken for a futurist, the last thing I should be doing is standing in front of people and telling them how many millions or billions of people may die, how mass migrations will threaten the sanctity of nation-states, or how the oceans are on the brink of death. Because then my audiences will start betting on those outcomes.

No, the people who needed to hear the alarm bells have heard them. Those who didn’t — who couldn’t — respond to the warnings with anything but self-interested bets on shotguns, iodine tablets, water futures, and land in New Zealand? They need to hear a different message. They need to hear that climate change is about to be defeated. If they don’t get in on climate remediation now, on the ground floor, they’ll miss the opportunity. This is the chance to invest in organic agriculture and to sell short on Monsanto and Big Agra. This is the time to go all in on solar, wind, and geothermal.

And once they do — once the big money is really in — just watch as Wall Street starts lobbying for the Green New Deal proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others. Net-zero greenhouse emissions is not a pipe dream, but a plausible, positive, attainable goal.

Let’s start talking about our collective sustainable future in ways that make people bet on it.

Photo by tim_gorman

The post Selling the Green New Deal With Positivity appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Read their whitepaper draft. Additionally, here is Regen.network’s website and the following text, written by Gregory Landua is reposted from their Medium account:

Implicate Intersections: The Global Weirding

The Emerging Crisis of Trust

Gregory Landua: Centralized failures of management of resources resulting in cascading ecosystem failures, increases in surveillance of citizens by unaccountable agencies as well as corporate actors, behavior and social manipulationthrough media and social media, and engineered mistrust intersect to form a general crisis of trust. Even trust in neighbors is undermined as polarized views and media is used to divide and conquer. This all forms into the necessity of revisiting trust as a fundamental layer for social interactions and the basis of our social contract. Regen.network is built to grow the capacity to focus on common interests and empower all stakeholders to hold those resources in trust as stewards of both outcomes and verification of those outcomes, providing a remedy to the generalized malaise of rightful distrust of centralized, opaque and degenerative governmental, economic and social structures.

Machine Learning

The rise of AI, big data and machine learning is already having huge impacts on society. Many of the impacts are visible in the earlier mentioned crisis of trust and incomplete machine learning algorithms are used to manipulate behavior of citizens as consumers. The larger debate about the safety of AI ranges from Elon Musk’s alarmist stance and public statements that AI should be governed and humans augmented, to enthusiasts who are blindly investing billions of dollars and significant human resources to feed the growth of “artificial” intelligence. Whether or not machine intelligence is truly artificial is not the focus on this conversation, however it warrants further discussion. AI is an important emerging disruption to our reality and, as such, warrants significant design consideration in any Information Technology project. Regen.network aims to grow the capacity of machine learning and attend deeply to the subtle nuances and complexities of ecological dynamics, health and regeneration, and to create a space for a deep human-machine partnership with the biosphere. This dynamic partnership is essential for all three elements of the whole to thrive.

Ecosystem Collapse

The rapid acidification of oceans, increasing rates of soil loss, accelerating loss of biodiversity, warming climate, environmental toxicity, and global scale degeneration of living systems is all emerging faster on a wider scale than humans have had the capacity to deal with. Humans are notoriously bad with exponential foresight and decision making. Apparently calculus is not our strength, and most of us, especially in governance decisions, have very short aims focused into the sharp point of survival instincts gone awry in the form of greed, optimization of financial liquidity at the expense of eco-social health. This collapse is passing our ability to attend to and respond to with centralized and glacial scientific structures. The structure of academic peer review is broken and mostly used to maintain positions of status instead of increase the capacity of the learning community to understand complex systems. The perverse economic and bureaucratic incentives of centralized power must be removed as obstacles and the ability of business, community, and individual initiative must be unleashed to find creative solutions to regenerate ecosystems around the world. Regen.network will start with terrestrial agriculture and expand to other lands, mariculture and ocean management as quickly as the creative genius of communities around the world can be unleashed to solve for peer-to-peer monitoring and verification and baseline calibration solutions for ecosystems.

Money Eats the World

Whether the destructive power of hyper liquidity in financial markets ripping away the foundation of living capital and turning it into financial instruments, or the massive energy weight of running proof of work consensus to avoid coercive centralized currency issuance, it is plain to see that money is literally eating the world. While we believe that the transparent costs of a proof of work cryptocurrency is far preferable to trust we all have in the continue ability of the US military to control the worlds metro-resources that makes the dollar the global currency, Bitcoin’s designed decentralized inefficiency is still world eating. It is less bad, but not good enough, and needless to say it is certainly not regenerative. The imperative to generate a decentralized currency system based on regenerative utility, that is a real use that increases the health of ecosystem through use is essential to a healthy functioning economy, and the maturity of the cryptocurrency and blockchain community which threatens to teeter into a war between crypto kitties and hyper liquid financialization instead of fulfilling the philosophical promised and potential of what the distributed ledger and decentralized economy can bring.

The Distributed Economy

Distributed ledger technology, sharing economy (both real and pseudo-sharing economy), micro transaction networks, token economics, and the new decentralization and distribution of technology and fungibility of decentralized cryptographic network tokens that represent various forms of assets unlock the potential for a new economy optimized for cooperation, evolution of diversified niche economic roles, and massive participation in a non-coercive mutualistic network economy. This emergence is not a minute too soon. Massive experimentation is now underway and many DApps and platforms are being born. Regen.network is designed to be a network and platform that serves to accelerate decentralized innovation to reconnect human economy with living systems and the imperatives for biological and ecological health. This is accomplished by providing the framework for the exchange of verified ecological data as the basic currency for a new regenerative, bioregionally-sourced, global decentralized economy.

Regenerative Agriculture

The growing movement to leverage the potential of soil to sequester carbon including governmental and business initiatives globally, also has deep strategic and ethical imperatives. As noted in the previously published Levels of Regenerative Agriculture white paper (Soloviev, Landua 2016), Regenerative Agriculture goes far beyond simply soil carbon sequestration. Soil Carbon Sequestration represents a regenerative outcome, but all levels of the value stream from soil to the human consumer of a product and back to the soil are part of the regenerative imperative that is now growing into a movement. Individuals and businesses are increasingly motivated to explore how to participate in a co-creative and regenerative economy where human needs are met in style while ecosystem health is increased and the capacity of the system itself and all members of the system to evolve more robust vitality and viability is grown.

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