The Elites Know the Scope of Change Needed to Avoid Evvironmental Calamity Crashes Capitalism

Today's best comes from the Archdruid - John Michael Greer - titled 'Too Little, Too Late' . In it Greer explains why the end product of COP21  is a further shoving of "industrial civilization on its one-way trip to history’s compost bin".

Greer's best paragraph sums up the situation quite well IMO: "The core issues up for debate at the Paris meeting were the same that have been rehashed endlessly at previous climate conferences. The consequences of continuing to treat the atmosphere as a gaseous sewer for humanity’s pollutants are becoming increasingly hard to ignore, but nearly everything that defines a modern industrial economy as “modern” and “industrial” produces greenhouse gases, and the continued growth of the world’s modern industrial economies remains the keystone of economic policy around the world. The goal pursued by negotiators at this and previous climate conferences, then, is to find some way to do something about anthropogenic global warming that won’t place any kind of restrictions on economic growth."

When looking at why, our governments and media refuse to look at any solutions that don't genuflect to the delusion of endless growth it's clear that to do so would be career suicide. Both governments and the mainstream media [MSM] are captured by the corporations both through their 'donations' to parties that don't seriously rock the capitalist boat and through the fear of a barrage of negative advertising by those corporate powers if they did actually say anything meaningful about the inevitable collapse our current gluttony will result in.

Furthermore the govts and MSM are also captured by their middle class's [every country has a group of powerful interests who benefit in the short term at least from business as usual] unreal expectations of endless more and the refusal of almost everyone to even consider wanting less. The fact is that the scope of change necessary to reverse the environmental calamity our consumer culture has created would crash capitalism and along with it all market based imaginary wealth.

In his essay Greer invokes the Titanic metaphor saying in comparison with COP21: "...after a great deal of debate, the passengers aboard the Titanic voted to impose modest limits sometime soon on the rate at which water is pouring into the doomed ship’s hull." But IMO, as seen in the picture above, the Titanic metaphor more aptly applies to the implications of class division.

On the actual Titanic the leadership made sure the band playing kept playing lest the passengers think something was REALLY wrong. So too on our metaphoric Titanic our elites understand that no good can come from standing up and saying it's all over thereby causing a global panic. Instead our elites, like the real Titanic's 1st Class passengers, are quietly climbing into their lifeboats while the band plays on. i agree with Greer that it's too late and expensive at this point for anything meaningful to be done about environmental collapse that dwells within the realm of the capitalist myth.  We're not teetering on the brink of disaster, we're well over it, the band kept playing on the Titanic, even as it sank, so no one would panic, especially not those passengers, who like us, locked into steerage.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the real world elites are buying time and making arrangements including locking us in steerage so as to insure we go down with the ship while they - the wealthy and their ilk - take the few available lifeboat seats - private islands, mountaintop retreats, lavish bunkers or maybe on Mars - that might be able to grow food in the future and are currently being stocked up while we debate and their storm troopers protect them.

The modern tune has verses about how 100% renewables will save us, how nuclear energy will save us, how divestment from fossil fuels will save us or how "God" will save us and how unenforceable promises will save us. They are all crap designed to hypnotize us into voluntarily assuming our places in steerage.

Fear Stalks N. America as Trump's Support Shows, Here's an Antidote That 'Changes Everything'

A few days ago the CBC published the article 'Canadians see Donald Trump's Muslim-ban idea not so differently from Americans, polls indicate' which explained that a poll by the Angus Reid Institute found that 33 per cent of Canadians strongly or moderately agree with Trump's call for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." and a Post-ABC poll run at the same time concludes suggests that Trump's ban is supported 36 per cent of Americans. The respective polls also said that 59% of Republicans innthe US and 52% of Conservatives in Canada supported it.

Perhaps Canadian and American politics aren't so different after all. Apparently the residents of both countries not only share certain demographic and geographic realities but certain cultural and psychological traits too. Donald Trump is currently running away with the Republican nomination race in America because his bigoted fear mongering strikes a chord among the right-wing, especially the Evangelicals that dominate both the US Republican and Canadian Conservative parties.

Fear is a powerful evolutionary response that is hardwired into our reptilian brain by millions of years of experience. Fear has many uses, it can keep us out of danger and out of the jaws of predators. Fear is such a successful trait that it has been conserved by evolution since the mud first looked up. Fear's is so ancient, that our responses bypass the relatively slower decision making process of reason.

Fear's irrational sucess story, though still useful in car accidents or ?, can also be used by others to control us. Those swayed by the rhetoric of fear mongering are easily manipulated by anyone, or any set of ideas, that offers a simple panacea to these fears.

Fear is a powerful force that is created by the each of us internally, it is not an uncontrollable external force. When we feel that sinking feeling in our stomach it's our primitive brain, the limbic system including the hippo-campus and amagadyla, pumping adrenaline through us in aid of our immediate 'fight or flight' mechanism. Though difficult, with practice, a person can learn to ride the power of their fears. Remember the time when water was a frightening place in which to be immersed until you learned to use its buoyancy as a tool?

Unfortunately far to many in Canada, the US and beyond have allowed themselves to be controlled by their fear of 'other'. The antidote to this irrational fear of 'other' is the reality that there is no other, we are all in this together. This antidote to fear has the potential to unite us all - flora, fauna, microbes, minerals, fores and faeries alike - into knowing that we are, as well as being, part of one interconnected whole...this understanding would actually change everything including our irrational fear of others.

Denial of the Real Environmental Costs Created by Christmas' Frenzied Over-Consumption...Dystopic

Yesterday was Super Saturday - the last Saturday before Christmas - and typically the pinnacle of frenzied consumption by North Americans. Year after year Super Saturday is the day when individual's credit card usage peaks regardless of the level of existing debt they have. It's a 'Perfect Storm' of retailer strategy and consumer psychology. Psychologists call it 'intertemporal choice', which in shopping terms pits a concrete reward now (gift) versus abstract consequences later (not being able to pay the bills).

Retailers swamp consumers with sound, color, offers, ads and invitations to buy more stuff. Consumer spending drives the modern capitalist economies of the world and the over-consumption at Christmas demonstrates more clearly than at any other time that our economies operate in a 'sanitized' mode that increasingly removes consumers from the processes of the supply chain. The mall's music and sales disguise the fact that shoppers have simply outsourced the pollution footprint of their over-consumption along with the hard work and emissions to nations such as China.

A large part of what makes shopping so attractive as an activity, not just at Christmas but all times, is that many of the products on display have a large embodied energy content - carbon footprint that we rarely are confronted with the reality of and even more rarely pay the full price of. Embodied content means the cumulative quantity of energy consumed, GHGs emitted and other pollution generated in extraction, manufacturing and delivering to market the raw materials and finished products we buy. These unpaid  externalized costs [in accounting terminology] are the monies that capitalist claim as profit. But these 'here  and now' unpaid costs will be have to paid someday by our descendants one way or another.

To these life cycle product costs a full energy footprint accounting of our retail therapy costs would add the fuel consumed in driving to, as well as the energy needed to run the malls themselves. Then there's other dead-weight losses that a full accounting would include when measuring the real costs of Christmas on the environment , for instance, material gifts are often perceived as white elephants, imposing cost for upkeep and storage and contributing to clutter and landfill.

This dystopia of denial about the real costs of consumer capitalism on the pollution destroying the bioshpere that underlies human existence is the most depressing thing about living in what so often feels like an alien world to me. But i'm heartened when i realize i'm not alone and that there's a way to say enough and join a movement dedicated to living simply - Buy Nothing Christmas, originally an initiative started by Canadian Mennonites and open to everyone with a thirst for change and a desire for action.

Buy Nothing Christmas has been taken up by Adbusters as a perfect extension of their widely popular anti-consumerism cause. Buy Nothing Christmas is a stress-reliever that more people need to hear about and embrace. A person can change their world by simply by changing their mind, and by extension, change the destructive path of the larger populations' denial of their part in the disease of consumer capitalism.

Soil Carbon Sequestration By Organic Farming and Perennial Plants is the Solution to Pollution

All of COP21's solutions to our excessive greenhouse gas buildup centered on techno fixes -solar, wind, CCS scrubbers, geothermal generation, hydro-power, etc - because all of them are money makers for the Bankers and Billionaires' Club in one way or another. All of them have huge amounts of fossil fuels embodied in every phase of their production, shipping, construction and maintenance. All of those stages are financed by backers and generate interest payments and shareholder 'investment' potential.

The one solution overlooked at COP21 surprise, surprise, was the only one that doesn't require huge investments of money or energy inputs - soil carbon sequestration through organic agriculture and perennial plants. The experts in soil conservation, organic farming and perennial grass restoration agree biodiversity and soils rich in organic matter are the best strategy for re-sequesting GHGs...and that these long used and proven approaches can mitigate current environmental damages while creating a cleaner and safer world for future generations.

The problem with this low impact set of solutions is that they create very little opportunity for the rich to get richer. Science says "The only safe, proven, low-tech and large-scale way to remove of GHGs from the atmosphere is through plant photosynthesis and carbon sequestration." But instead the merchants of industrial agriculture's fossil fuel based fertilizers, the chemical industries pesticide, fungicide and GMOs and the various vultures who finance them and capture the governments that are supposed to regulate in our best interests are the ones that have leverage at all the climate negotiations.

"Healthy soils are critical for global food production. Healthy soils not only are the foundation for food, fuel, fibre and medical products, but also are essential to our ecosystems,  playing a key role in the carbon cycle, storing and filtering water, and improving resilience to floods and droughts." says FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva [Food and Ahgriculture Org. of the UN]

For starters, a spoonful of healthy soil can contain more living organisms than there are people on the planet. In total, these organisms contain more carbon than the atmosphere and all the world’s forests combined. Soil is a living organism, dirt is what corporate ag, turns it into. As Vandana Shiva explains: "Biodiverse organic farms produce more food and higher incomes than industrial monocultures. Mitigating climate change, conserving biodiversity and increasing food security can thus go hand in hand."

The wide variety of perennial plants that evolved in their varied environments over 100s of millions of years can be short-lived (only a few years) or they can be long-lived like trees. They include a wide assortment of plant groups from ferns and liverworts to the highly diverse flowering plants like orchids and grasses.

The roots of perennial grasses, like the Switchgrass above, often account for up to 80 percent of total plant weight. These thrifty perennials, with their long roots hold on to soil, water, and fertilizer which means less of all types of pollution including carbon pollution of the atmosphere. Every year, healthy soil absorbs and converts billions of tons of atmospheric carbon into biomass sequestered in the soil through the process of photosynthesis.

Healthy Soil - Healthy Plants - Healthy Air - Healthy Water - Healthy Planet - Healthy Happy People 

or short term wealth for a few that soon destroys the interconnected biosphere that supports all life.
COP21 and capitalism's captured governments and media lapdogs always choose the latter...
how about you?

Will Canada's Legal Pot Laws Favor Chemical Laden Corporate McBud or Small, Organic and Sun Grown?

Real organic sun powered outdoor pot is the healthiest thing to smoke

Yesterday an old friend from California sent me a link to the 'Emerald Cup in Santa Rosa' and  i'm very glad he did. If, like me, you've never heard of this contest before it's very neat. It started 12 years ago as a way to celebrate the outdoor harvest in Humboldt and Mendocino counties, often referred to as the Emerald Triangle. It's evolved since then into a state wide competition dedicated to selecting the best organic, sun grown pot.

One of the judges included painter Trixie Garcia, daughter of the late Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia who said "It was an honor to be selected as a judge", but acknowledged it was a difficult task to pick a few favorites because all the entries are so good.

i've been a pot grower up here in British Columbia for 40 years and i've always been an organic grower and although i did have to go underground and electric bunker style at times up here in our climate. Even then i always grew organically though i knew that choice meant i'd produce less and have to work much harder. i did it as part of my ongoing attempt to grow my own of as much as possible of everything i put into my body organically including food and marijuana from the garden.

Up here in Canada our new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government are going to legalize pot for recreational use in the next little while. They already have a committee of MPs working on the details who have said Canada is studying and will probably follow the Colorado model or something similar. IMO, that's a mistake because it encourages a corporate type bank financed McBud system.

The reality is that growing McBud style pot doesn't mean only using artificial fertilzers it means using cancer causing pesticides and fungicides to control the very real natural predators that reproduce exponentially in the unreal environment. The knowledge of the amount of chemicals that are incorporated into every toke of corporate McBud from the fertilizers, pesticides and fungicides necessary in the 'controlled environment' style of production will, like it is already for foods, expand very quickly especially as the consumers of legal pot will mostly be non-corporate/lefty-ish folks who are already primed to make those connections.

What will happen after the initial novelty of being able to buy pot legally and smoke it without fear is that the small, organic and sun grown model will emerge from the backyards where it already is very successfully getting folks high.

Like in food production, the banks love and usually insist on an industrial style set of 'best practices' to be followed as part of loaning the money to build the extensive facilities and buy the equipment necessary to mimic the free services that nature provides to the outdoor, sun powered, organic gardener.

So that's why, just as it is with local foods movement, the corporate model will fail up here in BC just as it's already showing signs of failing in Colorado where the tourists still buy the over priced dispensary weed but the locals have, by and large, returned to buying from the same longtime growers they always did or growing their own legally.

One of BC's small growers tending his outdoor manure fed sun powered pot.

What that means, unfortunately, is that many good folks will go into massive debt to the banks because the legal structure will appear to favor corporate McBud then fail financially within a year or two, losing the homes they've put up as collateral, when the novelty wears off. So unless the Canadian government is smart enough to foresee this and instead of following the corporate model adopt a small is beautiful model that would mean lots more jobs for actual people and lots less interest for the bankers, the little guys will have far lower prices and a better organic product even up here in Canuckistan with our less than Emerald Triangle, perfect climate.

i sure hope Trudeau reads The Mud Report, i sure hope lots of good people who think they're gonna make alotta money don't lose their life's savings chasing an empty dream.

James Hansen Pushes the Bullshit Button on the COP21 Deal and It's Pro-Corporate Agenda

The big news is that 195 captured governments and the corporations that own them have a-greed on a 'historic' deal. A deal that has no enforcement mechanism to hold any of them to their meaningless pledges, a deal that exempts the airlines, shipping and the military [the US military alone is the single largest non-state GHG producer].

COP21 is the same hot air that Kyoto was and, unfortunately, the media will spinning it the same way today they did then. 'COP21 deal signed, ending fossil fuel era: experts' by Kevin Grandia and published by the normally sane National Observer is emblematic of the hypnotic Kool-Aid that must have been passed out these past two weeks in Paris. But i'm sure that as the coming days unfold and after the 'experts' get some sleep and put some distance between themselves and the Kool-Aid dispenser, the details of the 'historic' deal be more soberly analysed.

The National Observer references Dr. James Hansen's landmark 1988 speech to Congress condemning the role of fossil fuels in Global Warming, for instance, but somehow forget to mention that just this morning Dr. Hansen called the Paris talks a fraud in his Guardian interview, saying, "It’s a fraud really, a fake,” he says, rubbing his head. “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.”

Hansen's remark 'appear to be the cheapest' refers to the fact that the true full cost of fossil fuels must include all the accounted for damage being done to the environment and the eventual cleanup of those damages...costs that capitalist accounting schemes avoid as externalities. Profit is defined as the difference between the cost of production and the price, but when so much of the long-term costs are avoided it's no wonder that the fossil fuel industries appear wildly profitable when they are far from it.

According to Hansen, the international jamboree is pointless unless greenhouse gas emissions are taxed across the board. He argues that only this will force down emissions quickly enough to avoid the worst ravages of climate change.

In another section of the National Observer article our intrepid Kool-Aid consuming author Kevin Grandia writes "In fact, while this COP 21 was underway here in Paris there was news that global greenhouse gas emissions have peaked and are now falling." Linking to the Nature article which explains how slowing demand for coal in China should produce a drop in total global greenhouse-gas emissions for 2015.

Which is true...but...the demand for coal and all fossil fuels, like all commodities, despite their plummeting prices which should stimulate demand, are steadily dropping and will drop more as the big industrial users slow their production and their demand for all the commodities that go into the stuff consumers are forgoing as well as the energy it takes to run the factories that produce it. It's just another fallacy, another bit of, sleep deprived Kool-Aid induced, spin to equate a small drop in GHG levels in 2015 with anything other than the global recession.

So the question becomes why is global demand for the all the commodities that go into manufactured goods and the shipping of them [Baltic Dry Index] dropping precipitously? The answer is that enough consumers are far enough over their heads in debt that aggregate demand for needless crap is drying up [and that's certainly reflected in the zero to negative interest rates as well].

The global recession is real and like in every recession discretionary demand drops and consumers continue to buy necessities - like bread - but stop buying non-necessities - like Oreos. Consequently commodity prices fall causing degrowth and deflation, the twin evils of the speculator class and the reality that the Bankers and Billionaire's Club members refuse to speak of.

So here we are, the captured governments and media are spewing the bullshit they're told to spew by the elites in the hope that no-one will notice that the best hope the rest of us have for reversing the planetary pollution that will, if not curtailed somehow, destroy our kids futures is galloping on unabated. Another job well done by capitalism, eh.

Muhammad Ali's Gentle Statement Today on Being a Muslim Reminds Me Why He's 'The Greatest'

Muhammad Ali responds to Trump and calls ISIS ‘misguided murderers’

Today Muhammad Ali released a gentle statement regarding a presidential candidate's proposal to ban Muslim immigration to the US. Of course, unless you've been under a rock the last couple of days, you know that the condemnation of Donald Trump's ignorant proposal has been condemned loudly by everyone with a fully functioning brain. Despite this, Trump's poll numbers continued to climb among Republican voters.

Ali's statement in response to Donald Trump's proposal to ban Muslim immigration to the United States:

I am a Muslim and there is nothing Islamic about killing innocent people in Paris, San Bernardino, or anywhere else in the world. True Muslims know that the ruthless violence of so called Islamic Jihadists goes against the very tenets of our religion.

We as Muslims have to stand up to those who use Islam to advance their own personal agenda. They have alienated many from learning about Islam. True Muslims know or should know that it goes against our religion to try and force Islam on anybody.

Speaking as someone who has never been accused of political correctness, I believe that our political leaders should use their position to bring understanding about the religion of Islam and clarify that these misguided murderers have perverted people’s views on what Islam really is.

-----------------------------------------------

As RT reported: This is not the first time Ali has defended Islam from terrorists, either. In a scheduled Reader’s Digest interview on September 11, 2001, he said that the perpetrators of that morning’s attacks in New York and Washington were not true followers of Islam.

“I am angry that the world sees a certain group of Islam followers who caused this destruction, but they are not real Muslims. They are racist fanatics who call themselves Muslims, permitting this murder of thousands,” Ali said in the interview, as cited by the Washington Post.

What the hell is going on in America? Up here in Canada this evening the country awaits the first planeload of Syrian refugees with open arms and tears of joy. The new Prime Minister - Justin Trudeau - is among the crowd at Pearson Airport in Toronto to greet the new arrivals...and i mean among...Trudeau is walks among the people up here not like an Emperor but like everyone else. i am an American citizen, an x-pat, i've lived in Canada since '69 when i chose not to allow the Empire to use my body in it's racist, imperial war in Vietnam.

i have never been more proud of, or thankful for, being allowed to enjoy the sanctuary of Canada than i am this evening as, along with many others, i watch [on TV], wait and feel the genuine goodness of the people here in Canada. And i have never been more ashamed of, or worried about the future of the America i left behind all those decades ago.

Ali is one of my biggest heroes, he stood up to the bigots and war mongers, he inspired thousands of young Americans to stand up, including me, as well. Ali will go down in history as simply 'The Greatest'. Donald Trump will go down in history as an insignificant loser, a blip.

The Only Possible Solution to Global Pollution of All Kinds is to Live Simply and Stop Over-Consuming

COP21 is spinning out headlines about historic promises in the corporate media this week and spurring many well intentioned writers to write moving pieces about how the process is, as always, designed to safeguard the industrial monster's death grip while at the same time never questioning the underlying over-consumption that creates the demands that extractive capitalism destroys the planet to supply.

Yesterday's article 'Apocalyptic Capitalism' by Chris Hedges at Truthdig was, as always, apoplectic. In it he says: "The global elites have no intention of interfering with the profits, or ending government subsidies, for the fossil fuel industry and the extraction industries. They will not curtail extraction or impose hefty carbon taxes to keep fossil fuels in the ground. They will not limit the overconsumption that is the engine of global capitalism." Right on Chris!

Today at Resilience John Foran's essay 'The Insanity of the COP: We Must Adopt a Different Vision' focuses on the verdict of the International Tribunal of the Rights of Nature which was held over two days in a packed auditorium in Paris on December 4 and 5. It's an excellent and careful look at the case made there in the last few days by the Witnesses for Mother Earth in attendance.

And at some point last night Jeremy Corbyn and Naomi Klien spoke to a packed crowd of trade unionists and said "Liberté Is Not Just A Word" Of course, they too, used their oratory skills to explain the terrible situation we all face and concluded: "Now is not the time for small steps”. Then called for mass civil disobedience to break French President François Hollande's ban on demonstrations during the COP21 summit. i'm guessing because all the previous marches by the millions of marchers has been so effective eh.

Naomi's great at calling for marches, so is her cohort Bill McKibben, and marches do make the marchers feel like they've done something, plus they act as pressure relief valve which is why the Bankers and Billionaire's Club usually allow them, i'm sure.

i totally agree the sentiments behind and the hopes expressed by all the articles above and many others, but, as Albert Bates said in 'Revolucíon', they are "long on dirty laundry and short on detergent". The basic economics 100 fact is that demand drives every exchange in every market, the only non-violent solution, and the one that always evades pundits, is too stop consuming needless crap.

As permaculture founder David Holmgren has argued, the only plausible solution to global warming, at this late date, is the collapse of the global economy.  That, he argued, should be our main goal as activists.  Beyond that, any decisions we may make are meaningless and symbolic and will succeed only in making a few smug environmentalists feel that they are better than everyone else.

The corporate captured governments, regardless of the name of the political party, and the corporate owned MSM are incapable of entertaining, let alone supporting, any idea that doesn't follow the logical impossibility of endless growth because their future entitlements depend on it and because back home the middle class's unreal expectations of endless more material goodies has hypnotized them into never considering wanting less.

To conclude, there another way to live in this world without destroying it - living simply. Living simply leads to action based on personal responsibility - the opposite of materialistic desire. Folks need to stop driving to the mall, stop consuming needless crap breath deeply, tend the garden, marvel in the wonder-filled world, be happy, peaceful and just slow down.

CCS Another Corporate and Government False Hope Solution to Global Warming at COP21 in Paris

Carbon Capture and Sequestration [CCS] once again, zombie like, has risen to haunt the halls of the COP21 conference in Paris as a viable, and profitable solution to our planet's consumer capitalist created environmental woes. The main problem with CCS technology is the use of CCS can reduce CO2 emissions from the stacks of coal power plants by 85–90% or more, but it has no effect on CO2 emissions due to the embodied energy consumed in the increased mining and transport of coal. It will actually increase such emissions of air pollutants per unit of net delivered power and will increase all ecological, land-use, air-pollution, and water-pollution impacts from coal mining, transport, and processing, because the CCS system requires 25% more energy, thus 25% more coal combustion, than does a system without CCS.

As the Financial Times said recently: "Few technologies have had so much money thrown at them for so many years by so many governments and companies, with such feeble results. To date there is just one carbon capture system in commercial operation at a power station, the Boundary Dam coal plant that Canada’s SaskPower utility opened last year. The Boundary Dam plant in Canada, which received $1billion Cdn in subsidies from various governments also signed a 10-year contract to sell its captured CO2 so the gas can be pumped into nearby ageing oilfields to boost waning recovery rates, a process known as enhanced oil recovery [EOR].

In practice, no one is holding their breath given the troubled history of carbon capture. CCS was a hot topic back in 2008 among the promoters of 'clean coal' , then it ran into multiple studies proving, as Grist said in its well researched article, 'We did the math on clean coal, and it doesn’t add up', that without massive government subsidies, even with EOR, couldn't make CCS viable and all agreed using the captured CO2 to produce more oil, which then produces more CO2 when burnt, is hardly the ideal way to tackle climate change.

Another problem is the permanence of storage schemes. Opponents to CCS claim that safe and permanent storage of CO2 cannot be guaranteed and that even very low leakage rates could undermine any climate mitigation effect. EOR maybe the only viable scheme that the fossil fuel giants have come up with to justify CCS but they remain silent on the technique’s potential environmental risks and impacts. In the US, for example, where there are already 12 million oil and gas wells, a quarter of which are abandoned, uncapped and unmonitored, and where the regulatory system is notoriously lax, what is the likelihood that CO2 will stay in the ground?

The reality, as BP found out just before abandoning its $2.3billionUS Salah project in Algeria, one of the few large scale CCS projects in the world, is that it was shut down indefinitely back in 2011 because the CO2 injection itself caused seismic activity that cracked the cap rock which highlighted the challenges of storing the gas indefinitely.

It's easy to see why the manufacturers of CCS systems want to promote their technology [money honey] and of course it makes sense that the oil industry would support the roll out of a technology which allows greater oil extraction. And CSS has always been used as a justification to keep building inefficient, poorly constructed coal fired power stations - the dirtiest possible way of producing electricity ever invented. As George Monbiot says: "We could be stuck with a new generation of coal-burning power stations, approved on the basis of a promise that never materialises, which commit us to massive emissions for 40 years."

But why does the IPCC continue to support this false hope? Because there's no way other than having CCS installed on all coal generation plants globally for the IPCC's climate models to generate the less than 2C rise in temperature they say must be achieved to avoid catastrophic global warming.

So during the next two weeks in Paris we'll hear plenty of hot air about global warming and plenty of booster-ism by the corporate criminals and the government stooges they've captured but nothing about a real solution to carbon sequestration, one that requires almost no subsidies, is safe, secure and lies under our feet - organic agriculture and the restoration of the planet's prairie grasslands. The problem with these simple, doable solutions is that they generate no huge profits for corporations, no skyrocketing stock markets for speculators, no boondoggles for bankers and billionaires and consequently no 'contributions' to politicians over or under the table.