We have very little time left before the changes in our climate become disastrous. We have even less time to make the changes to our political systems that will allow the scale and speed of changes to our energy economy without having to give power to “strongmen” ruling through threats and violence. Once they have that power, it is very difficult to take it back.

Many of our political systems are not reacting quickly enough. Those that are, are reacting the wrong way and shifting towards fascism. We still have time to make a choice to solve the problem of climate change without mass violence, but that window is closing even faster than the window for climate action, because a transfer of power away from politicians beholden to Big Oil must happen before we can move with the speed we need to. This doesn’t mean we can’t make many changes in the interim, but we can’t complete them fast enough without this.

The third part of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change came out this week, showing how urgent it is that we take action and explaining that we can not afford to open any new fossil fuel extraction sources or build more infrastructure. The report holds out some hope: we are very likely to overshoot the 1.5ºC target but by aggressive action we can limit the amount of the overshoot and possibly develop and deploy technology to reverse some of it by removing some greenhouse gases within a few more decades.

Yet in the same week, the Canadian government gave approval for yet another offshore field to be opened up, and Canadian oil and gas production continues to rise, with not only approval but subsidies from various levels of government.

Clearly, they are paying only lip-service to the urgency of the problem. Our current set of politicians in most Eurocentric “democracies” have known about the situation for decades, have done very little and are continuing on the same path. The public continue to vote for them, even though polls show that they are slowly shifting their opinions on the need for action. On the other hand, the rise of far-right movements and parties and the shift further right of existing conservative parties make it harder to achieve any consensus and make it easier for economically liberal parties to maintain enough support for their pro-fossil fuel policies, especially in those countries with substantial deposits of fossil fuels under land and sea under their control.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reiterated as late as 2017 “no country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there”[ https://www.macleans.ca/economy/justin-trudeaus-speech-in-houston-read-a-full-transcript/] and has never withdrawn that statement. Instead, he and the Premiers of the provinces with oil and gas in the ground persist in exercises in spin, by labelling it as “ethical” (“we are more ethical than dictators”) or as “clean” (“we’ve reduced the emissions from extracting and transporting the oil (but not from actually using it)”).

Since the people in power still think like this, we cannot expect them to change. We must remove them and replace the system which has given them power, by one which will engage everyone who can in the changes we need, and removes all power from those who are in the way.

I hope this workbook will help me work towards an understanding of what might work towards this. Even better if it helps others and so help us all move quickly and fix things. Even if it only helps by showing my mistakes, because it’s unlikely I am the only one making them.

I will be shifting my priorities to understanding Eurocentric representative democracy, sovereign states and capitalist economics, which I believe are the biggest obstacles. I have made a start on them in the workshops Sovereign States are a bad idea: Reason for Doubt and First Workshops on Capitalism: Basic Bullshit Detection and I have a draft of initial workshops for democracy which I hope to publish here this week.