The Complete Ecotopia, Ernest Callenbach (Heyday, Berkeley, California)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED; here are some bits that stood out for me …

from Ecotopia (1975)

“to have a driver on board to collect fares would cost more than the fares could produce” 14

[re public bicycles] “it is cheaper to lose a few bicycles than to provide more taxies or minibuses” 15

[re nitrogen-fixing crops, crop rotation, manure eliminating need for chemical fertilizers] 20

“They were literally sick of bad air, chemicalized foods, lunatic advertising.” 50

“Americans are … accustomed to believe that only economic and population growth can lead to improvement in life.”  67

So insane.  Why would they think that unlimited population growth is feasible?  Especially when the men regularly justify killing animals on the basis of ‘culling’ the herd?

from Ecotopia Emerging (1981)

“[In the 1970s] Federal funds shored up failing automobile corporations—which had proved unable to compete with Japanese firms in produce gas-efficient cars—instead of diverting them toward production of buses, trains, and other low-energy means of transportation.”  186

As a result, the U.S. (and Canada) is so far behind the rest of the world in this regard. No wonder they cling to their cars; they haven’t developed any alternatives.  And they’ll cling to their cars, and their oil, until they’ve taken the whole planet down with them in CO2 emissions, heat waves, and fires.

Love the “No More!” list (p213-5); all so obvious, justifications so clear, and yet we’re nowhere near …

“Few Americans had had the eye-opening experience of car-free environments in parts of European cities or in the pedestrian malls that had been created in a few American cities.”  214

Yes, they so arrogantly believe they are the best country in the world; amazing, since most of them can’t even name five other countries.  (Hell, many of them can’t even name ten other states in their own country.)

“We … think the economy should be made to serve the people, not the other way around.  Our quality of life does not depend merely on the amount of goods we have access to.  It depends on … All these are ‘goods’ that cannot be bought.” 271

“Nor does the Gross National Product measure only truly useful goods.  A car crash, for instance, increases the GNP [and so is considered a good thing; similarly, people who get cancer because they increase medical-care expenditures…].” 271

So very insane.

“Americans have been consuming far more than our reasonable share of the resources in materials and energy which exist on the earth—40 percent of them, though we have only six percent of the people …” 272

And when their neighbor, with 1/10 of that 6% population, does not consume as much—we buy much less from the U.S. than they buy from us—we’re chastised, nay, penalized.  Instead of admired for our responsible consumption.  (Quite apart from why would they even expect us to buy as much as they do?)

“In the first half of the eighties, the net outflow of dollars to pay OPEC nations for oil amounted to the value of half the stocks and bonds listed on the New York Stock Exchange … the country had given away in order to maintain its car habit half of all the productive machinery, laboratories, land, buildings, transportation facilities, and food production resources accumulated by its corporations over the previous 200 years.” 336

“but they also cleared the land simply because trees constituted the hateful wilderness, which they felt it was their God-given mission to subdue.”  345

Explains a puzzling comment by a parent to a child after the child had helped with the leafblower to clear the leaves away: “There!  All clean!”

Clean?  Leaves are ‘dirty’?

“The land lost the absorbency it had had when forested, so run-off became rapid and great floods were common. … By the seventies, for each bushel of corn grown in Iowa, six bushels of soil eroded away; in eastern Washington, 20 pounds of topsoil were lost for every pound of wheat produced. … Rebuilding the soil, if feasible at all, would required decades of devoted effort.”  346

“Some argued that anti-car measures infringed on their personal freedom, which they equated with the untrammeled right to drive wherever and whenever and whatever they pleased.”  395

from Epistle to the Ecotopians (2012)

https://mondediplo.com/openpage/epistle-to-the-ecotopians

“Barring unprecedented revolutionary pressures, this is the actual future we face in the United States, too.  … ” 535-6

Two pages of accurate prediction.  Not so amazing.  The writing was on the wall.  But so many Americans can’t read.  And refuse to listen to those who can.  Again, the arrogance.

For example, “The U.S. … will stand out as the best-armed Third World country, its population ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-educated, ill-cared for in health, and increasingly poverty-stricken….”

Well, except for the 6 people who have become billionaires by blocking food, housing, education, and healthcare …

The Year of the Bad Decision, Charles Sobczak (2013)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.  Nay, REQUIRED READING.

The final trigger imagined by Sobczak may not come to pass, but the outcome will be the same.

Some excerpts (with a few comments):

“People no longer talked about the weather—they trembled at it.” 3

“Global warming, or climate change, had lost any pretension of being a liberal hoax or some far-flung meteorological theory decades ago.  There were no more debates, anywhere on Earth, about what was happening.  There were no more heavily financed fossil fuel lobbying groups trying to muddy the issue with an avalanche of misinformation, spewing out endless press releases about sun spots, solar cycles or natural climactic variations.  The argument about whether anthropogenic activities were the leading cause of climate change was over.  Death had ended that debate.” 10

“It would take more than a thousand years for that crucial Atlantic conveyor belt to recover.”  41

And yes, now, as we speak, there is clear evidence it is slowing down:https://climatecosmos.com/climate-science/is-the-oceans-conveyor-belt-on-the-brink-of-collapse-2

“China and India were building coal-fired power plants at the rate of one per week and no one bothered to raise an eyebrow.  The United States refused to talk about climate change, except when the fossil fuel oligarchs denied it existence.  Besides, the policymakers in the U.S. weren’t about to make any energy sacrifices if China and India were free to do what they wanted.” 50

Actually, it looks like China and India are making stunningly large and fast moves away from fossil fuel use:

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/china-opens-worlds-biggest-solar-farm

https://e360.yale.edu/features/india-solar

Neither the U.S. has anything even close to that, and at least in Canada, we have the space!!

“Over time, the 30s became known as the Lost Decade.  The weather had turned from dangerous to deadly, and people began to comprehend the real costs of climate change.” 52

“In 2037, when the Greens banned the construction of coal-fired plants in the U.S. … But by then global temperatures had climbed some fie degrees and other, more alarming feedback loops had been triggered.  Methane belched out of the Canadian and Siberian tundra and bubbled up from the ocean floor.  methane is 20 times worse than CO2 when it comes to warming the Earth.” 69

“Our cows, numbering more than 3 billion in 2030, expelled nearly enough methane to rival the thawing permafrost.”  79

“That year marked the first time the Arctic Ocean was ice-free in 100,000 years.  While climate scientists around the world shouted at the top of their lungs that this was an unprecedented and dangerous benchmark, the oil and gas industry executives celebrated.  With the ice gone, the vast deposits of natural and gas and oil that lay beneath the Arctic Ocean could now be accessed.  …” 107

“That changed when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its eighth assessment report in 2026 [remember, the novel was written in 2013] … It condemned the burning of fossil fuels as being solely responsible for the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere … There were no qualifiers, no caveats—the science had spoken.             Of course, the fossil fuel industry was outraged by the tone as well as the finality of the eighth assessment.  They cried foul, just as they had for the past 60 years.  They insisted we needed to conduct further research to verify the true impact of greenhouse gas emissions to ensure that they were really a part of the problem.            In reality, they only wanted to stall.  They wanted more time to mine and burn coal, to pump another few billion barrels of oil, to frack more natural gas and to line their pockets with the profits.  But it was over.  … People were tired of yearlong tornado seasons, massive Category 5 hurricanes, rising tides, relentless heat waves and flash floods.  People were tired of disasters.”  166

“Did they think they were going to take all their profits and relocate to Mars?” 185

They should watch Don’t Look Up.

“Are we worth it? … Civilization is an environmental horror story.  Mass extinctions, huge swaths of forests cut to stubble, dredged marshes and drained wetlands, wars, overheated atmospheres followed by snowstorms on the Fourth of July …” 187

“Decades of inaction followed the turn of the 21st century, mostly due to the well-coordinated efforts of Big Coal and Big Oil.  They spent billions of dollars in a nonstop campaign to deny and debunk the science of climate change.  They funded political candidates who spent their entire careers trying to convince the American people that the was no sound ‘scientific’ basis for global warming …”  247

Sound familiar?

“We had regressed into a world of flawed research, media campaigns, fraudulent wesites and finger-pointing …”  247

“Because of the 100-year time delay built into the effects of CO2 …”

Today, as I write this, we’re at 427ppm.  (Compared to 338 just two years ago.)

“We’re in a positive feedback spiral that’s proving impossible to pull out of.” 330-2

Sobczak is referring to CO2 increase, which leads to warmer atmosphere, which leads to more ice melting, which leads to an even warmer atmosphere (because ice, being white, would have radiated some of the heat back up and out), so there are more fires, which means more CO2 (Canada’s 2023 fires created more CO2 than do most large nations in a year, with only India, China, and the US surpassing), which leads to warmer, which leads to less ice, which leads to … you get the picture.