Hopeful Realism: A Climate Manifesto

With scant progress and too much regress, significant climate action is failing to materialize as tipping points toward climate and ecological collapse rapidly approach. Why has the political discourse on climate soured as carbon emissions continue to accelerate, weather events become more life threatening, and as economies continue to grow yet weaken? What can we do to stem the tide of Earth System chaos?

The answers to these urgent questions are both simple and complex. This eBook explains the basic framework for creating new and effective ways to overcome the global predicament we cannot avoid. We have no time to debate with ideological science deniers now. The best time for climate action was decades ago when climate scientists like James Hansen warned us of the emerging climate crisis; the second best time for global climate action is right now.

Despite making ‘green’ promises and setting abstract future targets, all major institutions operationally ignore the climate crisis, even as some admit there is a problem. The purpose of this Climate Manifesto is to point out why these far-reaching changes in our environment now require us to take drastic steps, not just as individuals but also as whole societies. This Climate Manifesto expresses hopeful realism at the end of the industrial era by explaining what we must do, and how to do it.

  • Mobilize to regain our planet’s stability and assure our own survival by stopping our ecosystems and climate from destabilizing further by shrinking the technosphere.
  • Reorganize our economies to work with Nature, not try to overpower it for profit.
  • Understand the technical sources and human failures that continue to produce global threats to life and civility too. If we understand the causes, we can change the effects.
  • Learn and execute strategies to build clean, just economies at human scale that support meaningful lives and wellbeing by transforming society rather than letting it collapse through indifference, panic, or denial.

Unlike victims, survivors of disasters such as being lost in the wilderness, caught in a burning building, or abandoning a sinking sailboat in a squall, accept that they have been thrust into a new reality and that they must behave accordingly. To survive the global crisis today, we must mobilize to destroy the institutions of death by creating new social formations that live in harmony with the only home we will ever have: the Earth System, Gaia.

“Sums up the predicament that we find ourselves in. It is a ray of sanity that cuts through the mountains of greenwashing and feel good ‘solutions’ – that are not solutions at all and actually perpetuate the problem – to lead us on a journey of how we got here and where we must go if we are to keep the planet habitable. It doesn’t dabble in techno-solutions nor hide from the huge amount of change we need, but recognises that this change will be good for us, as well as the planet (certainly compared with the alternative that business as usual will lead to) and that we must all be a part of this change if we are to realise this hopeful vision of the future. A must read for anyone who cares about the future of the only planet known to support life.”

~ Erin Remblance, Freelance Columnist on climate action, modern monetary theory, degrowth, and social change, in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

The book is available now. Buy on Amazon.