Back in 1993, when I discovered that our home in New Jersey had caught fire, caused by a defect in the brand new car that I had bought the previous evening, my only thought was to get our precious children to safety. I didn’t stop to make my coffee, or read my newspaper, which were my normal morning routines, or even look for my wallet and our important papers, before I hit the alarm and ran out with our children. The fire department responded within minutes to put out the fire and our home insurance helped us rebuild our home and restore our disrupted lives.

Our planetary home is now on fire. There are six fires raging on Earth, every one of which will definitely kill life as we know it, if we don’t put it out. Climate change has been rated as the fourth largest fire on the planet, not the largest and yet, it is the only one that our leaders seem to be concerned about. Even regarding climate change, they seem to be trying to figure how to continue our normal routines, instead of taking appropriate action to put out the fires and preserve that which is truly precious.

In a far-ranging conversation with Dan Miller on the Climate Chat podcast, climate scientist Kevin Anderson took the UN IPCC’s Working Group 3 to task for running a scam with its Net Zero framing. They are using imaginary future carbon capture technologies to allow Integrated Assessment models to claim global temperatures will stabilize eventually despite the present course of global inaction. He rightly called out climate scientists for not speaking out on this scam, since their silence lends legitimacy to such claims.

Indeed, the UN IPCC Working Group 3 is running a scam with its Net Zero framing, allowing countries and corporations to claim carbon neutrality by some future date, even as their greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow. However, Dr. Anderson absolved IPCC Working Group 1, which actually has been running a far bigger scam for far longer with its greenhouse gas emissions accounting conventions. This scam allows the animal agriculture industry to claim that cutting down half the trees on the planet had nothing to do with climate change.

The discrepancies are brazen in IPCC emissions accounting conventions. As a systems engineer, I am appalled that various greenhouse gas emissions sources from the animal agriculture industry are being ignored or neglected in the accounting conventions. The greenhouse gas emissions from animal respiration, pasture maintenance fires, bottom trawling of the oceans and the loss of phytoplankton populations from industrial fishing are being simply omitted in the calculations, while huge discounts are being taken on land use change emissions.

In Working Group 1, those who consume the most meat, dairy, fish and eggs from rich countries were likely making the decisions on what to count and what not to count and how to discount greenhouse gas emissions. The silence of climate scientists on these machinations has lent legitimacy to the UN routinely hiding the Cow in the Room, allowing everyone to pretend that the horrific Killing machine that we are operating on Mother Earth has nothing to do with her dying in front of our eyes.

We live in a planet, call it Planet A, where the objective of the UN process is to preserve civilization as we know it, specifically to preserve the lifestyles of those with the most power and wealth. As long as that is our global objective, we will continue to witness scam after scam. Civilization as we know it is a competitive enterprise in which we fight with each other to grab the resources of the planet for ourselves and our kith and kin. All is fair in love and war, we are told. In this civilization, we may even have started World War III to redress past grievances, even some grievances perpetrated centuries ago.

Imagine we switch to a more sensible Planet B where our global objective is to restore life as we knew it, not preserve civilization as we know it. Let’s say that we recognized we have completed the Climate Heating phase of our existence and we are moving on to our Climate Healing phase. Then, we will collaborate with each other to restore the Temples of Nature and honestly address the present ecological crises with engineering integrity, instead of fighting with each other to restore temples on rocks and redress past grievances. The tale of two metros shows that such a switch from a Planet A mindset to a Planet B mindset has happened before, right here on Planet Earth.

Since I have absolute faith in humanity, let me speculate on how we will switch from our present Planet A mindset to the more sensible Planet B mindset before 2026. Perhaps many billionaire beach houses will be destroyed by landslides, wildfires and floods and then our governments will wake up. On the other hand, since billionaires have plenty of houses and they can keep moving from one house to another, that might not happen fast enough.

Perhaps ordinary people with knowledge, time and resources may find compassion in their hearts for the poor people who are dying or migrating due to climate change and for the many innocent species who are going extinct. We may then stop waiting for governments and take urgent action to restore that which is truly precious on this beautiful planet, like our children and grandchildren. After all, as Dr. Anderson said, this is the time to “do everything that you can possibly do and then a lot more.”

What might that action be, you ask? Please stay tuned for future blogs in this Planet B series and also join us for our upcoming V-COP17, Vegan Convergence Of the Peoples #17, Apr 27-28 to get engaged. I’m also teaching a course on the gospel of action, the Bhagavad Gita from an Ecological Perspective, to help people choose that right action.

On a personal note, I have edited the Prologue to my first book, Carbon Dharma: The Occupation of Butterflies, to delete a paragraph in order to minimize present trauma caused to our precious children. I humbly request all those who have copies of this book to redact the relevant paragraph in your copy.

I beg forgiveness from our children and all those that I have caused trauma during my time on this planet.

With much love,
Sailesh on behalf of the Climate Healers Core team.
(Alison, Anne, BJ, Carl, Dakota, Dani, Deborah, Debra, Gabriele, Giva, Jamen, Kelly, Ken, Kimaya, Krish, Lisa, Liz, Maggie, Marco, Paige, Pareen, Paul, Ray, Sailesh, Sarah, Shankar, Stacey, Suzanne, Tami and Vega, the Cow and Climate Healer and her Veguitas)