The Elephant In the Room: Addressing Climate Change Means Rationing

World War II rationing posters. If no one questions the goal, no one will question means like these.

by Thomas Neuburger

I could make this complicated or simple. Let's make it simple. We've dithered so long in addressing climate change, that to address it effectively means not just a radical restructuring of the entire economy, it also means energy rationing.

A few writers are starting to get this fact, and get at it in their work. Some "rationing will be needed" articles are of the "let me prove it to you with data" type. I'd like to take a different approach in this piece. This will be an "if you've got a massive water leak, you're going to get wet" type of piece — an appeal to the obvious, in other words. Either approach will have the same result — it will arrive at the r-word despite (and because) of the reaction that word causes.

After all, it's entirely likely that one of the chief reasons people are not addressing climate change effectively — aside from the political and propaganda power of corporate America — is that once people start thinking about the problem, they quickly conclude what we're about to conclude, that a crash conversion to zero-carbon energy means "goodbye big-screen lifestyle," at least for a while.

Let's look at something written in 2016 by Stan Cox, "If There’s a World War II-Style Climate Mobilization, It has to Go All the Way—and Then Some." His intro, which I won't quote, states the obvious: that the climate is deteriorating at an accelerating pace, and addressing this problem will take a "World War II"-style mobilization.

This is true as far as it goes, but the UN and most climate scientists also say that the rate of decarbonization required is greater than can be achieved with just a simple (and comfortably paced) retrofit of the energy economy.

Consider this contradiction, from the Greenpeace info sheet on the latest IPCC Special Report (quoted here: "IPCC Releases Climate Report — First Thoughts").

• With countries’ current climate targets we are heading for well above 3°C.
• To get below 1.5°C global CO2 emissions would need to be halved by 2030 and reach net zero by mid-century at the latest, with substantial reductions in other gases.

According to Dr. Michael Mann and others, our business-as-usual behavior will push global atmospheric warming beyond +2 degrees Celsius in the mid 2030s (my own estimate is much more pessimistic), while UN Paris agreement "promises," or targets, have global carbon emissions rising throughout that period.

As a result, the IPCC Special Report calls for global carbon emissions to, in effect, "fall off a cliff" — end, or at least start to end, almost immediately. This, of course, means ending the fossil fuel industry completely and forever.

But let's forget about the unlikelihood of that happening. Let's say we actually tried to do this — that in 2021 a radical, FDR-style president and an awakened and, yes, panicked public committed to an actual crash conversion to 100% renewable energy. What would that mean for the consumer economy? Would that big screen, smart phone lifestyle, the one the energy industry ads say is at risk, actually be at risk?

This is where the answer gets obvious. Of course it will be at risk. If protecting people's ability to spend endlessly on consumer products is society's highest priority, then a crash-course energy conversion will be slowed to whatever speed it must be. But if averting the global climate crisis is the highest priority, of course the consumer economy will take a back seat, to whatever extent it must.

Which is exactly what occurred during World War II.

Stan Cox on what that implies:

The necessity for the consumer economy to get by on a lower input of energy and other resources while achieving sufficiency for all brings us back to the World War II model. If we’re to emulate the “Greatest Generation,” we can’t do a halfway job of it, focusing solely on “green” production; we have to build a fairer economy as well.

So far, I have seen only one effective strategy for doing that: a “Victory Plan” recently drawn up by Ezra Silk, a co-founder of The Climate Mobilization movement. (It can be downloaded here.) The document, radical and at the same time realistic and practical, calls for reworking the government and economy even more thoroughly than during World War II, in order to cut America’s net greenhouse emissions down to zero by 2025 while also reversing degradation of ecosystems and halting the mass extinction of species.

Necessary steps will include phasing out fossil-fuel use within a decade; directing a large share of our energy, materials, and labor toward building a renewable energy sector and a high speed rail network; restoring our forests, grasslands, and croplands so that we are putting more carbon into the soil and less into the atmosphere; deeply cutting meat and dairy consumption; and converting a large portion of the U.S. military into a kind of climate mobilization force.

All of that will require a national reallocation of resources among sectors of production, one that diverts a significant share of a necessarily declining resource budget into building green infrastructure and leaves the consumer economy a lot less to work with.

And the kicker (emphasis added):

We know from wartime experience that with resources diverted away from the consumer economy, shrinking supply will collide with still-high demand, bringing the threat of runaway inflation. Price controls will be essential, but with goods in short supply at reasonable prices, we will have to move quickly to prevent severe shortages, hoarding, and “rationing by queueing.” As in the 1940s, that will require fair-shares rationing.

I'll let you read the article to see the implications of that last sentence.

The bottom line, of course, is that these are indeed the options — comfort for us now, followed by death and misery for all generations to come. Or rationing and planning now, to secure a safer future for our children and grandchildren. This is the choice this generation is facing, and I firmly believe, in the back of their minds, people do know.

This is a profound moment in human history. What we face today is not just a practical, existential choice, but a deeply moral, almost Dantesque one as well. We're on the verge of committing mass murder, this generation. And for what?
  

Violence and the State: A Prelude

by Gaius Publius

Every national instance of Rule by the Rich is accompanied by a great deal of violence, inflicted on the many by the few.

—Yours truly (paraphrased)

As you ponder the criticism of the Antifa ("anti-fascist") movement for engaging in violent tactics in Berkeley, consider the following.

▪ This is violence.

"The scene in Berkeley on Sunday" (source). Photo: Marcus Yam/LA Times via Getty Images

▪ This is violence.

To justify Bush's numerous rights violations, at home and abroad, James Comey turned Jose Padilla's brain "to jello" (image source).

According to Rick Perlstein:

James Comey, currently sailing smoothly through Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for confirmation as chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was ... in charge, and proudly so, of a “terrorism” case that began with a detention without charges, continued with made-up and spurious charges, and ended with a conviction won against an American [Jose Padilla] whose treatment during confinement (on the American mainland) turned his brain to jello...

▪ This is violence.

"The 350-acre Horse Prairie Fire is burning outside of Olalla [Oregon] on Saturday night and is zero percent contained" (source). Photo courtesy of Kyle Reed

A look at the headlines:

Los Angeles wildfires: City battles 'largest fire in history'

British Columbia is having its worst wildfire season in recorded history.

After burning for months, Montana looks like a fiery apocalypse.

Rain in Seattle is normal. Raining ash, however, is not.

We are in, to quote Randall Amster, a "new normal of destabilization," created by a political world in which both parties, Democrats and Republicans alike, out of service to fossil fuel billionaires and the companies they control, refuse in varying degrees to treat global warming as already a national emergency, one that requires, first and foremost, a transition to zero use of fossil fuels at the fastest possible rate if we hope in any way to alter the deadly and destructive path of what's already started happening to us.

▪ And this is violence.

"An alternate transportation network of private buses—fully equipped with wifi—thus threads daily through San Francisco, picking up workers at unmarked bus stops (though many coexist in digital space), carrying them southward via the commuter lanes of the 101 and 280 freeways, and eventually delivers them to their campuses" (source).

According to the SF Examiner, "Right now the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency charges companies serving multi-billion dollar technology companies $3.67 per stop event, what some critics have called a 'pittance.'"

The city gets a pittance for each "stop event" by these private busses, while the city's non-high-tech-connected citizens get no right at all to ride them. A two-tiered world of transportation, in other words, sanctioned and welcomed by government and financed in large part by tax dollars.

One more wealth transfer among a great many. A gift given to the few (our "future-seeing" high tech billionaires) to sweeten their bottom lines by making their jobs as attractive to their workers as possible. A gift paid from the pockets of the many to whom the service is unavailable.

The Violence of the State

Every national instance of Rule by the Rich is accompanied by a great deal of violence, inflicted on the many by the few.

Consider just the examples above.

The violence of torture and death, inflicted at home and abroad, by the state on the innocent, all so the state can appear to be something it's not, all so its ruling elites can stay in power.

The violence of climate chaos, inflicted by a national government which for decades has refused to act in any real way to lessen the coming costly horrible climate blows. (Of all major candidates, only Sanders was serious about climate mitigation.)

The violence of near-slavish service to increasing income inequality, again by both parties, a service that brought us the failed revolt we now call the 2016 election and its disastrous aftermath — a revolt, by the way, which is not going away no matter which party takes power.

Consider all this as you ponder the critics of the Antifa ("anti-fascist") movement and the call by those same elites (example: Nancy Pelosi in the quote above) for a return to the state-only violence they call "order."

Whose hands are clean? Whose violence does greater harm?

GP
 

Three Years to Safeguard Our Climate

Why we need to start now to address global warming (source; click to enlarge)

by Gaius Publius

Tick tick tick.

Stefan Rahmstorf is one of the most pre-eminent climate scientists in the world:

Stefan Rahmstorf (born 22 February 1960) is a German oceanographer and climatologist. Since 2000, he has been a Professor of Physics of the Oceans at Potsdam University. He received his Ph.D. in oceanography from Victoria University of Wellington (1990). His work focuses on the role of ocean currents in climate change.^[1] He was one of the lead authors of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.^[1]

Rahmstorf is a co-founder of the blog Real Climate, which has been described by Nature as one of the top-5 science blogs in 2006,^[2] and included among the 15 best environmental websites by Time in 2008.^[3] He also co-founded the German blog KlimaLounge.^[4] KlimaLounge won the 3rd prize of the science blog award of 2013.^[5]

He and a group of fellow scientists have authored an article at the journal Nature (lead author is Christiana Figueres) that includes steps toward "turning the tide of the world’s carbon dioxide by 2020." The title is "Three years to safeguard our climate," and it includes both a warning and a list of practical suggestions to achieving success.

It starts with a warning. While much progress has been made in addressing climate change, according to the authors, including the 2015 Paris climate agreement, "there is still a long way to go to decarbonize the world economy. The political winds are blustery. President Donald Trump has announced that the United States will withdraw from the Paris agreement when it is legally able to do so, in November 2020."

Note first the goal — "decarbonize the world economy." This formulation assumes that transforming the planet — "decarbonizing" the earth — can only take place within the current economic system. Thus, for the authors, the often-heard criticism that "capitalism" or "growth" (or relatedly, "population growth") are among the root causes of the climate crisis that, to all appearances, has already started — that criticism, or those criticisms, don't contain solutions that can address the issue.

Their reasoning should be obvious; even if that large a change were desirable (one can agree or disagree on that), there's not enough time to make it. Transforming a global economic system won't happen in the few years left, unless it's done by a kind of violent change (not necessarily bloody, but by definition hugely disruptive), and that level of disruption will also disrupt any coordinated attempt to address climate change.

The Importance of 2020

How much time is left to us? I wrote in 2012 that in my best (lay person's) estimation, "at most, 5 to 10 years" is all that's left — meaning, we have until about 2022 or so, if we're lucky, to make the major transformation of our CO2 emissions pattern needed to significantly alter our climate future under a "business as usual" scenario. After that time, the worst of the destruction to come will be, to use an apt phrase, "baked in."

As it turns out, Figueres, Rahmstorf, et al agree with that time line (emphasis mine):

The year 2020 is crucially important for another reason, one that has more to do with physics than politics. When it comes to climate, timing is everything. According to an April report¹ (prepared by Carbon Tracker in London, the Climate Action Tracker consortium, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut), should emissions continue to rise beyond 2020, or even remain level, the temperature goals set in Paris become almost unattainable. The UN Sustainable Development Goals that were agreed in 2015 would also be at grave risk.

That’s why we launched Mission 2020 — a collaborative campaign to raise ambition and action across key sectors to bend the greenhouse-gas emissions curve downwards by 2020 (www.mission2020.global).

That's the warning. This puts the writers much more on the side of the author of "The Uninhabitable Earth" than on the side of those who propose half- and quarter-solutions, which nevertheless keep industry profit in place, and who think we can kick can down the road to the next generation, by embarking, for example, on projects like a methane "bridge fuel" infrastructure buildout that won't be a bridge to anything but profit for investors for at least 30 years.

But it also puts the writers in the camp of people like Margaret Klein Salamon, founder of the climate action organization The Climate Mobilization, who argue that if there's still time on the clock, there's always a way to achieve a goal, assuming we have a plan does what's needed to get there. (For more on both "The Uninhabitable Earth" and Klein Salamon's plan for addressing the climate emergency, see our write-up here.)

What's Needed for Success

According to the authors, it's still possible to decarbonize the economy, "still possible to meet the Paris temperature goals if emissions begin to fall by 2020 (see ‘Carbon crunch’) [chart at the top]."

Here's what they propose (emphasis mine):

To prioritize actions, we’ve identified milestones in six sectors. Developed with knowledge leaders, these were reviewed and refined in collaboration with analysts at Yale University, the Climate Action Tracker consortium, Carbon Tracker, the low-carbon coalition We Mean Business, the Partnership on Sustainable, Low Carbon Transport (SLoCaT), advisory firm SYSTEMIQ, the New Climate Economy project and Conservation International.

These goals may be idealistic at best, unrealistic at worst. However, we are in the age of exponential transformation and think that such a focus will unleash ingenuity. By 2020, here’s where the world needs to be:

Energy. [by 2020] Renewables [must] make up at least 30% of the world’s electricity supply — up from 23.7% in 2015 (ref. 8). No coal-fired power plants are approved beyond 2020, and all existing ones are being retired.

Infrastructure. [by 2020] Cities and states [must] have initiated action plans to fully decarbonize buildings and infrastructures by 2050, with funding of $300 billion annually. Cities are upgrading at least 3% of their building stock to zero- or near-zero emissions structures each year⁹.

Transport. [by 2020] Electric vehicles [must] make up at least 15% of new car sales globally, a major increase from the almost 1% market share that battery-powered and plug-in hybrid vehicles now claim. Also required are commitments for a doubling of mass-transit utilization in cities, a 20% increase in fuel efficiencies for heavy-duty vehicles and a 20% decrease in greenhouse-gas emissions from aviation per kilometre travelled.

Land. [by 2020] Land-use policies [must be] enacted that reduce forest destruction and shift to reforestation and afforestation efforts. Current net emissions from deforestation and land-use changes form about 12% of the global total. If these can be cut to zero next decade, and afforestation and reforestation can instead be used to create a carbon sink by 2030, it will help to push total net global emissions to zero, while supporting water supplies and other benefits. Sustainable agricultural practices can reduce emissions and increase CO₂ sequestration in healthy, well-managed soils.

Industry. Heavy industry is developing and publishing plans for increasing efficiencies and cutting emissions, with a goal of halving emissions well before 2050. Carbon-intensive industries — such as iron and steel, cement, chemicals, and oil and gas — currently emit more than one-fifth of the world’s CO₂, excluding their electricity and heat demands.

Finance. The financial sector has rethought how it deploys capital and is mobilizing at least $1 trillion a year for climate action. Most will come from the private sector. [By 2020] Governments, private banks and lenders such as the World Bank need to issue many more ‘green bonds’ to finance climate-mitigation efforts. This would create an annual market that, by 2020, processes more than 10 times the $81 billion of bonds issued in 2016.

Please read the entire piece to get a stronger sense of why the authors are optimistic that the above goals (a) can be met, and (b) will succeed if they are.

Yes, the timeline is short, and while some contend that the time for enough action to be effective has already passed, that's no more certainly true than the opposite. No one can solve a problem without a plan. According to the authors, people who have been involved in the science of addressing global warming, the above plan, if enacted, offers a good chance of success.

GP
 

Telling the Climate Truth — The Pros and the Cons

Cover image from the New York Magazine feature story, "The Uninhabitable Earth."

by Gaius Publius

We need new Cassandras to warn us of new disasters, even though they'll never be believed.

—Richard Clarke (paraphrased)

We aren’t doomed — we are choosing to be doomed by failing to respond adequately to the emergency.

—Margaret Klein Salamon

The recent, major New York Magazine article on the coming "uninhabitable earth" stirred quite a response, both positive and negative. The positive response was, in general, "Finally, someone telling the truth." The negative response was, in general, "But it contains these errors," and "Does it really help to scare people this much?"

The errors are secondary to the article's main point, but the question about climate communication strategy is both long-standing in the climate activism community and important.

If we tell this much truth, are we scaring people into inaction? Or does telling this much truth motivate people more effectively than the message that "we've got until 2050 to get fully in gear" currently does? (Is it even moral not to tell this much truth?)

My own thoughts below (click to go directly to them). First, here's one person's unique perspective on this question. The following is from Margaret Klein Salamon, a clinical psychologist and also the founder of the climate action group The Climate Mobilization (TCM), which advocates for starting a "World War II-scale" emergency mobilization to convert from fossil fuels, and starting it now.

The following is Ms. Klein Salamon's recent letter to her mailing list, also published here. Please read it through as she considers this critical issue — Does telling the climate truth hurt or help? I've highlighted a few key ideas and reformatted the piece just slightly.

As you read, please keep the terms affect tolerance and affect phobia in mind. She'll clarify the definitions. I'll offer closing comments at the end.

---

Allies—

Last week, David Wallace-Wells published a cover story in New York Magazine, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” on some of the worst-case scenarios that the climate crisis could cause by the end of this century. It describes killer heat waves, crippling agricultural failures, a devastated economy, plagues, resource wars, and more. It has been read more than two million times.

The article has caused a major controversy in the climate community, in part because of some factual errors in the piece — though by and large the piece is an accurate portrayal of worst-case climate catastrophe scenarios. But by far the most significant criticism the piece received was that it was too frightening:

“Importantly, fear does not motivate, and appealing to it is often counter-productive as it tends to distance people from the problem, leading them to disengage, doubt and even dismiss it.” –Michael Mann, writing with Susan Joy Hassol and Tom Toles.

Eric Holthaus tweeted about the consequences of the piece:

A widely-read piece like this that is not suitably grounded in fact may provoke unnecessary panic and anxiety among readers.

And that has real-world consequences. My twitter feed has been filled w people who, after reading DWW's piece, have felt deep anxiety.

There are people who say they are now considering not having kids, partly bc of this. People are losing sleep, reevaluating their lives.

While I think both Mann and Holthaus are brilliant scientists who identified some factual problems in the article, I strongly disagree with their statements about the role of emotions — namely, fear — in climate communications and politics. I am also skeptical of whether climate scientists should be treated as national arbiters of psychological or political questions, in general. I would like to offer my thoughts as a clinical psychologist, and as the founder and director of The Climate Mobilization.

Affect tolerance — the ability to tolerate a wide range of feelings in oneself and others — is a critical psychological skill. On the other hand, affect phobia — the fear of certain feelings in oneself or others — is a major psychological problem, as it causes people to rely heavily on psychological defenses.

Much of the climate movement seems to suffer from affect phobia, which is probably not surprising given that scientific culture aspires to be purely rational, free of emotional influence. Further, the feelings involved in processing the climate crisis—fear, grief, anger, guilt, and helplessness — can be overwhelming. But that doesn’t mean we should try to avoid “making” people feel such things! Experiencing them is a normal, healthy, necessary part of coming to terms with the climate crisis.

I agree with David Roberts that it is OK, indeed imperative, to tell the whole, frightening story. As I argue in The Transformative Power of Climate Truth, it's the job of those of us trying to protect humanity and restore a safe climate to tell the truth about the climate crisis and help people process and channel their own feelings — not to preemptively try to manage and constrain those feelings.

Holthaus writes of people feeling deep anxiety, losing sleep, re-considering their lives due to the article… but this is actually a good thing. Those people are coming out of the trance of denial and starting to confront the reality of our existential emergency. I hope that every single American, every single human experiences such a crisis of conscience. It is the first step to taking substantial action. Our job is not to protect people from the truth or the feelings that accompany it — it’s to protect them from the climate crisis!

I know many of you have been losing sleep and reconsidering your lives in light of the climate crisis for years. We at The Climate Mobilization sure have. TCM exists to make it possible for people to turn that fear into intense dedication and focused action towards a restoring a safe climate.

In my paper, Leading the Public into Emergency Mode—a New Strategy for the Climate Movement, I argue that intense, but not paralyzing, fear combined with maximum hope can actually lead people and groups into a state of peak performance. We can rise to the challenge of our time and dedicate ourselves to become heroic messengers and change-makers.

I do agree with the critique, made by Alex Steffen among others, that dire discussions of the climate crisis should be accompanied with a discussion of solutions. But these solutions have to be up to the task of saving civilization and the natural world. As we know, the only solution that offers effective protection is a maximal intensity effort, grounded in justice, that brings the United States to carbon negative in 10 years or less and begins to remove all the excess carbon from the atmosphere. That's the magic combination for motivating people: telling the truth about the scale of the crisis and the solution.

In Los Angeles, our ally City Councilmember Paul Koretz is advocating a WWII-scale mobilization of Los Angeles to make it carbon neutral by 2025. He understands and talks about the horrific dangers of the climate crisis and is calling for heroic action to counter them. Local activists and community groups are inspired by his challenge.

Columnist Joe Romm noted that we aren’t doomed — we are choosing to be doomed by failing to respond adequately to the emergency, which would of course entail initiating a WWII-scale response to the climate emergency. Our Victory Plan lays out what policies would look like that, if implemented, would actually protect billions of people and millions of species from decimation. They include:

1) An immediate ban on new fossil fuel infrastructure and a scheduled shut down of all fossil fuels in 10 years;

2) Massive government investment in renewables;

3) Overhauling our agricultural system to make it a huge carbon sink;

4) Fair-shares rationing to reduce demand;

5) A federally-financed job guarantee to eliminate unemployment;

6) A 100% marginal tax on income above $500,000.

Gradualist half measures, such as a gradually phased-in carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, that seem “politically realistic” but have no hope of actually restoring a safe climate, are not adequate to channel people’s fear into productive action.

We know what is physically and morally necessary. It’s our job — as members of the climate emergency movement — to make that politically possible. This will not be easy, emotionally or otherwise. It will take heroic levels of dedication from ordinary people. We hope you join us.

Margaret Klein Salamon, PhD
Founder and Director, The Climate Mobilization

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Gaius again. I largely concur with Ms. Klein Salamon, that "gradualist half measures" which have no hope of achieving the real and only goal — "restoring a safe climate" — won't channel voter and citizen fear into productive action. They will instead, in my view, encourage those voters, those citizens, to continue to pass the climate buck to the next half-generation, unaware that this generation — today's voters and citizens, their own selves — will go over the first part of the climate cliff first.

About her action plan, note points five and six — a jobs guarantee program (MMT theorists have been calling for this for a while) and a 100% tax on all income over $500,000. Like it or not, none of the climate and environment goals can be met without great economic change as well. That may sound like too much of an ask, but remember the World War II analogy. FDR turned the U.S. into a rationed, command economy, a step absolutely necessary to deal with war demands.

Note also that the FDR tax rates to deal with the Depression were massively high by modern (post-Reagan) standards, were increased again during World War II, and stayed high through the Eisenhower administration and into the Kennedy administration.

Source; click to enlarge.)

If something is necessary for success, it must be made part of the plan. In this case, the alternative — and people need to be told this — is accelerating devolution of our species to hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Take your pick — but recall that World War II America chose the effective solution.

The View from the Oh It's You Senator Lounge

Why must we do this now? Because the climate crisis is starting now. Mass migration, in part due to climate change, is starting now. Deaths by weather extremes are increasing as we watch them. The three hottest years on record are the three immediately behind us. We're so close to +2 degrees warming already, we can almost taste it.

So what's in the way? The answer is simple — we have ceded control of climate policy to the greedy and pathological, to climate sexagenarians and octogenarians like Charles and David Koch, who, through the politicians they control (looking at you, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump), are marching to their own graves in triumph, leaving a wrack behind.

Does David Koch care about the world he will see from the grave? Or does he merely wish to enter it having won every battle he fought?

This is clearly pathological behavior on his part. It's therefore up to us to stand up for ourselves — or so it seems to this humble Cassandra — because few of our so-called "leaders," servants to pathological masters, care about us, "the littles," from their comfortable chairs in the Oh It's You Senator lounge.

An Easter Island Solution

Klein Salamon is right; an emergency mobilization is needed. But to get there, we have to gain control of the Titanic, to put our own hands on the wheel. Or, to put it differently, we must depose the village chief and enact our own "Easter Island solution." As I described it earlier:

You're a villager on Easter Island. People are cutting down trees right and left, and many are getting worried. At some point, the number of worried villagers reaches critical mass, and they go as a group to the island chief and say, "Look, we have to stop cutting trees, like now."

The chief, who's also CEO of a wood products company, checks his bottom line and orders the cutting to continue.

Do the villagers walk away? Or do they depose the chief?

There's always a choice ...

You can't change what you don't control — that way madness lies. And this madness, or its best friend, fatal resignation, has a world historical conclusion. Do we seize control of the ship and turn to safer waters? Or let the disaster happen to us all because the hands of the soon-to-die greedy were allowed at the wheel instead?

Do we depose the chief and save the island, or fail to act while action is still possible? Me, I say best depose the chief. After all, these won't be the first chiefs deposed in the arc of history — just the most dangerous.

Mes petits sous,

GP