Thomas Piketty

Green Army: Persons of Interest

[Some] animals are more equal than others.

— George Orwell, Animal Farm, 1949.

Equality of Opportunity

Parental income and university access, United States, 2014

Thomas Piketty (1971):
In 2014, the rate of access to higher education (percentage of individuals age 19–21 enrolled in a college, university, or other institution of higher education) was barely 30 percent for children of the poorest 10 percent in the United States and 90 percent for the richest 10 percent.
(Figure I.8, Capital and Ideology, 2020)

The persistence of hyperconcentrated wealth

	Europe		United States
Wealth Cohort	1913	2018	2018
Top 10%	89%	55%	74%
Middle 40%	10%	40%	14%
Bottom 50%	1%	5%	2%
Top 10% : Bottom 50%	445:1	55:1	185:1
Europe = Average of United Kingdom, France, and Sweden.

Thomas Piketty (1971):
The sharp increase of the top decile share, especially in the United States, reflects a gradual and worrisome erosion of the share owned by the rest of the population.
The lack of diffusion of wealth is a central issue for the twenty-first century, which may undermine the confidence of the lower and middle classes in the economic system …
(Figure 13.10, Capital and Ideology, 2020)

Financial assets held in tax havens

Thomas Piketty (1971):
By exploiting anomalies in international financial statistics and breakdowns by country of residence from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Swiss National Bank (SNB), one can estimate that the share of financial assets held in tax havens is:

• 4 percent for the United States,
• 10 percent for Europe, and
• 50 percent for Russia.

These figures exclude nonfinancial assets (such as real estate) and financial assets unreported to BIS and SNB, and should be considered minimum estimates.
(Figure 12.5, Capital and Ideology, 2020, emphasis added)

The fall of the bottom 50 percent share of total income in the United States, 1960–2015

Thomas Piketty (1971):
The share of the bottom 50 percent of the income distribution fell from about 20 percent of total income in the United States in the 1970s to 12–13 percent in the 2010s.
During the same period, the top centile share rose from 11 percent to 20–21 percent.
(Figure 11.5, Capital and Ideology, 2020)

Low and high incomes in the United States, 1960–2015

Thomas Piketty (1971):
It is now well known that the explosion of inequality in the United States since 1980 was due to an unprecedented increase in very high incomes, especially the famous '1 percent'. …
In 1970, the average income of the poorest 50 percent was $15,200 per year per adult, and that of the richest 1 percent was $403,000, for a ratio of 1 to 26.
In 2015, the average income of the poorest 50 percent was $16,200 and that of the richest 1 percent was $1,305,000, for a ratio of 1 to 81.
All amounts are in 2015 dollars. …

[One] of the main consequences of the extremely high marginal rates (70–90 percent) on top incomes between 1930 and 1980, especially in the United States and United Kingdom, was to put an end to the most extravagant executive pay.
By contrast, the sharp reduction of top tax rates in the 1980s strongly contributed to the skyrocketing of executive pay.
Indeed, if one looks at the evolution of executive pay in listed companies in all the developed countries since 1980, one finds that variations in tax rates explain much of the variation in executive pay — much more than other factors such as sector of activity, firm size, or performance. …
In the 1950s and 1960s, the top executives of major British and American firms had little interest in fighting for huge raises … because 80–90 percent of any raise would have gone directly to the government.
In the 1980s, however, the nature of the game changed completely.
The evidence suggests that executives began to devote considerable effort to persuading others that enormous raises were warranted, which was not always difficult to do, since it is hard to measure how much any individual executive contributes to the firm’s success.
What is more, compensation committees were often constituted in a rather incestuous fashion.
This also explains why it is so difficult to find any statistically significant correlation between executive pay and firm performance (or productivity). …

In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States had by far the highest minimum wage in the world.
In 1968–1970 the federal minimum wage was more than $10 an hour in today’s dollars.
Since 1980, however, the failure to raise the minimum wage regularly gradually eroded its value in real terms: in 2019 it was only $7.20, representing a 30 percent decline in purchasing power over half a century — remarkable for a country at peace and growing economically. …
Many works have shown that the drop in the minimum wage in the United States contributed strongly to the declining position of low-wage workers since the 1980s in a general climate of decreased worker bargaining power.
(Figure 11.7, Capital and Ideology, 2020)

Inequality of labor income and capital ownership across time and space (Adapted from Tables 7.2 and 7.3, Capital in the Twenty First Century, pp 248-9)
	Total Income (income from labor and capital)			Wealth (capital ownership)
	Europe		US	Europe		US
Class (Percentile)	1910	2010	2010	1910	2010	2010
Top 10% (P90-100)	50%	35%	50%	90%	60%	70%
Dominant 1% (P99-100)	20%	10%	20%	50%	25%	35%
Well-off 9% (P90-99)	30%	25%	30%	40%	35%	35%
Middle 40% (P50-90)	30%	40%	30%	5%	35%	25%
Bottom 50% (P0-50)	20%	25%	20%	5%	5%	5%
	Ratio between the Dominant 1% and the Bottom 50%
	50:1	20:1	50:1	500:1	250:1	350:1
	Ratio between the Top 10% and the Bottom 50%
	12.5:1	7:1	12.5:1	90:1	60:1	70:1

peaceandlonglife:
Figures are approximate and deliberately rounded off.
The disparity of total income in the US in 2010 is comparable to that in Europe in 1910.
Between 1910 and 1970, 25% of national wealth was transferred from the top 1% to the middle 40% as a result of:

• wartime destruction,
• progressive tax policies and
• exceptional post-war growth (p 356).

Assuming US wealth inequality was comparable to that Europe in 1910, it would appear that in the US since 1970, the top 1% has managed to claw back two fifths (10%) of that 25% from the middle classes.
Wealth inequality lags behind income inequality because it takes time for wealth to accumulate.
The wealth share of the top 10% in the US (%70) has not yet reached the peak in Europe in 1910 (90%); but, given the rising income disparity, it is only a matter of time before it catches up.
In the meantime, the relative shares of income (20%) and wealth (5%) of the bottom 50% have remained the same for over a century.

James McPherson (1936):
In the largest American cities [in] the 1840s, the wealthiest 5% … owned about 70% of the taxable property, while the poorest half owned almost nothing.
[In] the nation as a whole by 1860 the top 5% of free adult males owned 53% of the wealth and the bottom half owned only 1%.
(Battle Cry of Freedom, 2nd Edition, Oxford University Press, 2003, p 21)

The growth rate of top global wealth: Real rate of return on capital as a function of size of fortune (Adapted from Table 12.1, Capital in the Twenty First Century, p 435)
Wealth Holders	1980s	2010	Average annual growth rate (1987-2013)
Top 1 in 100 million	30	45	6.8%
Top 1 in 20 million	150	225	6.4%
Average adult	3 billion	4.5 billion	2.1%

The Great Divergence

Share of the richest 10% of the American population in total income.
(Based on Piketty and Saez, Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(1), 2003, pp 1–39)

Paul Krugman (1953):
[America is] no longer a middle-class society in which the benefits of economic growth are widely shared:
[Between] 1979 and 2005

• the real income of the median household rose only 13%, [while]
• the income of the richest 0.1% [rose 296%.]

On the political side, you might have expected rising inequality to produce a populist backlash.
Instead, however, the era of rising inequality has also been the era of “movement conservatism" [during which] taxes on the rich have fallen, and the holes in the safety net have gotten bigger, even as inequality has soared.
(Introducing This Blog, NYT, 18 September 2007)

John Quiggin (1956):
The top 0.01% … doubled their share of [US national] income between 2000 and 2007, from 3% of all income to 6% …
This group of around 15,000 households earned more than the the bottom quarter of the population — around 75 million people.
(p 141)

Since 2000, [US] median household incomes have [fallen over a full business cycle for] the first time in modern history …
(Zombie Economics, Princeton University Press, 2012, p 157)

Thomas Hungerford:
[The] share of income accruing to the top 0.1% of US families increased from 4.2% in 1945 to 12.3% in 2007.
[And, while] changes over the past 65 years in the top marginal tax rate and the top capital gains tax do not appear correlated with economic growth [they have been] associated with the increasing concentration of income.
(Taxes and the Economy: An Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945, Congressional Research Service R42729, September 14 2012)

Peter Singer (1946):
[Under Ronald Reagan,] 60% of the growth in the average after-tax income of all American families between 1977 and 1989 went to the richest 1% of families [ie those with] average annual income of at least $310,000 a year, for a household of four.
(How Are We to Live?, 1993, p 97)

Robert Wade (1944):
The highest-earning 1% of Americans doubled their share of aggregate income … from 8% in 1980 to over 18% in 2007 [excluding capital gains.]
The top 0.1% (about 150,000 taxpayers) quadrupled their share, from 2% to 8%.
Including capital gains [the income share of the] top 1% [reached 23%] by 2007.
During the seven-year economic expansion of the Clinton administration, the top 1% captured 45% of the total growth in pre-tax income …
[While] during the four-year expansion of the Bush administration the top 1% captured 73% …
During the seven-year economic expansion of the Clinton administration, the top 1% captured 45% of the total growth in pre-tax income; while during the four-year expansion of the Bush administration the top 1% captured 73% …
(John Ravenhill, Global Political Economy, 3rd Edition, Oxford University Press, 2010, p 396)

Nate Silver (1978):
[US Senators:]

• who often gain access to inside information about a company while they are lobbied and
• who also have some ability to influence the fate of companies through legislation,

return a profit on their investments that beats the market average by [nearly one percentage point per month.]
(The Signal and the Noise, 2012, p 342)

Mark Twain | Samuel Clements (1835 - 1910):
It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone or and other important thing — and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859):
We may naturally believe that it is not the singular prosperity of the few, but the greater well-being of all, which is most pleasing in the sight of the Creator and Preserver of men. …
A state of equality is perhaps less elevated, but it is more just; and its justice constitutes its greatness and its beauty.
(Democracy in America, 1835, Bantam, 2011, p 878)

Thomas Piketty (1971)

OWNERSHIP SOCIETY (sometimes called proprietarian society):
A social order based on a quasi-religious defense of property rights as the sine qua non of social and political stability.
Ownership societies flourished in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. …
Proprietarian ideology is the ideology of ownership society, based on the sacralization of property rights.

[In] 1880 nearly 80% of the land in the United Kingdom was … owned by 7,000 noble families (less than 0.1% of the population), with more than half belonging to just 250 families (0.01% of the population), a tiny group that largely coincided with the hereditary peers who sat in the House of Lords. …

[The] House of Lords played a clearly dominant role in British becameralism until the last third of the nineteeth century. …
Specifically, all laws had to be approved in identical terms by both houses, effectively conferring a veto power over all legislation, including fiscal and budgetary matters and anything to do with property rights, on the House of Lords (and thus on a few hundred hereditary peers). …

In the early 1860s, roughly 75 percent of the seats in the House of Commons were still occupied by members of the [landed] aristocracy, which accounted for less than 0.5 percent of the British population at the time. …
[Before the] secret ballot was … introduced [in] 1872 … each individual vote was announced publicly and recorded …
Hence it was not easy for voters to make political choices that went against the wishes of their landlords or employers. …
The local member of Parliament (MP) was reelected in election after election and often in generation after generation.
In 1860 the House of Commons was still profoundly aristocratic and oligarchic. …

[The] famous Black Act of 1723 … stipulated the death penalty for anyone caught pilfering wood or poaching game on land they did not own.
Humble folk had taken to blackening their faces and trying their luck by night, and landlords in the House of Lords and their allies in the House of Commons were determined to prevent this.
Anyone who killed a deer, cut down a tree, poached fish from a breeding pond, pulled up plants, or abetted or incited such activity fell under the shadow of the act and could be sentenced to death by hanging without trial of any kind.
Initially intended to expire after three years, the law was renewed and reinforced over the next century until these acts of rebellion ceased and the proprietarian order was restored. …

Universal male suffrage was established in 1918, and the vote was finally extended to women in 1928.
This final phase of reform also witnessed the first decisive successes of the Labour Party.

The [Swedish] social democrats of the SAP came to power in the early 1920s …
The party subsequently held power more or less permanently from 1932 to 2006, and this long period in government allowed it to develop a very sophisticated welfare and tax system, which in turn achieved one of the lowest levels of inequality ever observed anywhere.
[Prior to] the early twentieth century, Sweden was a profoundly inegalitarian country …

[In] Sweden from 1865 to 1911 … the number of votes each voter could cast depended on the size of that voter’s tax payments, property, and income.
The men sufficiently wealthy to vote in elections for the lower house were divided into forty-odd groups, and each group was assigned a different electoral weight.
Specifically, each member of the least wealthy group could cast one vote, while each member of the wealthiest group could cast as many as fifty-four votes.

A similar system applied to municipal elections … with the additional wrinkle that corporations also had the right to vote in local elections, again casting a number of ballots that depended on their tax payments, property, and profits.
No voter in an urban municipal election, whether a private individual or a corporation, could cast more than one hundred ballots.
In rural towns, however, there was no such ceiling; indeed, in the municipal elections of 1871, there were 54 rural towns in Sweden where one voter cast more than 50% of the votes. …

[Yet] in the space of a few years Sweden moved from the most extreme hyper-inegalitarian proprietarian system … to a quintessential egalitarian social-democratic society once the SAP came to power in the 1920s …

People sometimes imagine that each culture or civilization has some “essence” that makes it naturally egalitarian or inegalitarian. …
In fact, everything depends on the rules and institutions that each human society establishes, and things can change very quickly depending on the balance of political and ideological power among contending social groups as well as on the logic of events and on unstable historical trajectories …
Sweden reminds us that equality is always a fragile sociopolitical construct, and nothing can be considered permanent: what was transformed in the past by institutions and the mobilization of political movements and ideologies can be transformed again by similar means, for better or for worse.

In 1885, Sweden still had a law on the books allowing anyone without either a job or sufficient property to live on to be arrested and sentenced to a term of forced labor. …

In 2015, a clear political decision was made to humiliate Greece, which in the eyes of European (and especially German and French) authorities had elected a “radical left” party, Syriza (a coalition of communist, socialist, and green parties to the left of Pasok, the Greek socialist party, which had been discredited by having held power between 2009 and 2012 at the height of the financial crisis).
Having won the election, Syriza sought to soften the terms of the austerity policy imposed on Greece by Europe’s leaders.
But to avoid handing Syriza a symbolic victory, which European leaders feared might lead to a contagious spread of left-wing resistance (especially in Spain, where Podemos was on the rise), they decided to force the new Greek government to accept an even harsher austerity policy …

(Capital and Ideology, Chapter 5, 2019)

Michael Lewis

Green Army: Persons of Interest

Mark Baum:
[In] a few years people are going to be doing what they always do when the economy tanks: they will be blaming immigrants and poor people.
(The Big Short, 2015)

Charlie Munger [Vice-chairman, Berkshire Hathaway]:
[High frequency trading is] the functional equivalent of letting a lot of rats into a granary [— it does] the rest of the civilization no good at all.
(Investors Conference, 2014)

Michael Lewis:
Financial intermediation is a tax on capital …
[It’s] the toll paid by both the people who have it and the people who put it to productive use.
[It is, in effect, a private Tobin tax.]
(Flash Boys, 2014, p 109)

Fair Trading Versus Free Riding

In 2014, [one] money manager bought and sold roughly $80 billion in US stocks.
The teachers and firefighters and other middle-class investors whose pensions it managed were collectively paying a tax of roughly $240 million a year for the benefit of interacting with high-frequency traders in unfair markets. …

The big banks and the exchanges have a clear responsibility to protect investors — to handle investor stock-market orders in the best possible way, and to create a fair marketplace.
Instead, they’ve been paid to compromise investors’ interests while pretending to guard those interests. …

[There] is now a minority [of Wall Street dissidents] trying to fix the [system:]

• their new stock market [IEX] is flourishing;
• their company is profitable;
• Goldman Sachs remains their biggest single source of volume; [and]
• they still seem to be on their way to changing the world.

All they need is a little help from the silent majority.

(Flash Boys: One Year Later, Vanity Fair, March 2015, emphasis added)

Big Ideas

ABC Radio National

Tony Abbott (1957):
Nauru is humane, cost effective and it's proven.
(Nauru turns on charm for visiting Abbott, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 June 2011)

Gillian Triggs (1940) [President, Australian Human Rights Commission]:
As of February [2017:]

• 1,400 (approximately) continue to be detained in indefinite immigration detention in Australia.
• 378 detainees, including 45 children remain in Nauru, [and]
• 837 adult men remain, and have remained for years, on Manus.

The average time in detention is about 490 to 500 days but many have been detained for years.
When I was at Villawood, just a few days ago, I didn't meet anybody under 4 years in detention and one woman … had been detained for 7 years …
The countries of origin, of most asylum seekers and refugees, are predominantly Muslim nations: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Iran …
Religious persecution is one of the five grounds on which people can seek protection under the refugee convention. …
It is notable that Australia is the only common law country in the world that does not have a bill or charter of rights.
(Islamophobia and human rights, 18 July 2017)

John Winston Howard (1939) [Prime Minister of Australia, 1996-2007]:
[If] you try to institute a bill of rights, you run the danger of limiting, rather than expanding freedoms …
All you'll do is open up yet another avenue for lawyers to make a lot of money being human-rights … practitioners.
(Jon Faine, ABC Local Radio, Melbourne, 25 August 2000)

David Marr (1947):
[In February 2007, 85 Sri Lankan] men were brought in by barge from HMAS Success and herded onto Christmas Island's only wharf. …
Keeping the press at bay has remained a top priority in all the operations that have followed to scoop up boat people wherever they appear and detain them on Christmas Island.
(p 41)

According to the Australian government these people are not prisoners.
They've committed no crimes. …
(p 42)

The Immigration Department was playing its usual cat-and-mouse game: asylum seekers can only have a lawyer if they ask for one, and they have to ask for one by name.
Holding them incommunicado for as long as possible is about denying them a voice in both the press and refugee processing.
Good people take their careers in their hands to smuggle lawyers' names to asylum seekers.
(His Master's Voice, Quarterly Essay, Issue 26, 2007, p 44)

Lionel Shriver (1957):
My politics … are libertarian …
I don't like being told what to do.
Actually, deep down inside, I'm a 10 year old child with a problem with temper tantrums.
(Lionel Shriver on free speech, identity and the future of the US, 19 September 2016)

Bryan Stevenson [Professor of Law, New York University]:
Each of us is better than the worst thing we've ever done.
(The fight for racial justice in America, 19 March 2015)

Augustine (354 – 430):
The good Christian should be wary of mathematics and all those who make empty prophesies.
The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the Devil to darken the spirit and confine Man to the bonds of Hell.

Robert Manne

Green Army: Persons of Interest

Robert Manne (1947)

Just as stagflation fatally undermined the Keynesian social-democratic consensus, so too will the combination of the Great Recession and the growing recognition of the destructive role played by neo-liberalism in inhibiting an effective response to catastrophic climate change eventually discredit the idea at the heart of neo-liberalism: the faith in the magic of the free market. …
[However, there] are two important differences between the circumstances surrounding the end of the Keynesian era in the late 1970s and the present unravelling of neo-liberalism.
When the Keynesian consensus collapsed, a party-in-waiting existed, ready to seize its chance.
No equivalent anti-neo-liberal party exists today.
Old-style socialism is dead.
Left-of-centre neo-Keynesians are far less ideological, far more divided and far more cautious than their neo-liberal adversaries.

Even more importantly, at the moment of the neo-liberal collapse, humanity confronts the diabolical problem of climate change.
Those who inherit the post-neo-liberal world will be obliged not merely to strive to reconcile the hope for renewed prosperity with the quest for domestic and global social justice.
They will also be obliged to reconcile both these ambitions with the gravest challenge humankind has ever faced.
No one yet knows what the new era will look like or what it will eventually be called.
Only one thing seems, at present, reasonably certain.
At the end of the era of free-market faith, we will be in a far better position to turn our attention to the kinds of ethical and environmental questions which, for thirty years, neo-liberalism encouraged us to [ignore.]

(Goodbye to All That?  On the Failure of Neo-Liberalism and the Urgency of Change, 2010, p 36)

The Washington Consensus

Joseph Stiglitz (1943):
[It] is not surprising that policies based on models that depart as far from reality as those underlying the Washington Consensus so often led to failure.
(Nobel Prize Lecture, 8 December 2001)

Niall Ferguson (1964)

… John Williamson's original 1989 formulation [of the Washington Consensus advised policy-makers to:]

1. Impose fiscal discipline;
2. Reform taxation;
3. Liberalize interest rates;
4. Raise spending on health and education;
5. Secure property rights;
6. Privatize state-run industries;
7. Deregulate markets;
8. Adopt a competitive exchange rate;
9. Remove barriers to trade;
10. Remove barriers to foreign direct investment.

(p 308)

One recent study of [economic output] and consumption since 1870 has identified

• 148 crises in which a country experienced a cumulative decline in GDP of at least 10% and
• 87 crises in which consumption suffered a fall of comparable magnitude,

implying a probability of financial disaster of around 3.6% year.
(p 342)

(The Ascent of Money, Penguin, 2008)

Future Climate Changes, Risks and Impacts

IPCC Climate Change 2014

Cumulative emissions of CO2 largely determine global mean surface warming by the late 21st century and beyond.
Projections of greenhouse gas emissions vary over a wide range, depending on both socio-economic development and climate policy. …

Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.
Limiting climate change would require substantial and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions which, together with adaptation, can limit climate change risks.
(p 18)

Surface temperature is projected to rise over the 21st century under all assessed emission scenarios.
It is very likely that heat waves will occur more often and last longer, and that extreme precipitation events will become more intense and frequent in many regions.
The ocean will continue to warm and acidify, and global mean sea level to rise.
(pp 20-1)

Warming caused by CO2 emissions is effectively irreversible over multi-century timescales unless measures are taken to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. …
[Limiting] total human-induced warming … to less than 2°C relative to the period 1861-1880 with a probability of >66% would require total CO2 emissions from all anthropogenic sources since 1870 to be limited to about 2,900 GtCO2 …
About 1,900 … GtCO2 were emitted by 2011, leaving about 1,000 GtCO2 to be consistent with this temperature goal.
Estimated total fossil carbon reserves exceed this remaining amount by a factor of 4 to 7 …

Climate change will amplify existing risks and create new risks for natural and human systems.
Risks are unevenly distributed and are generally greater for disadvantaged people and communities in countries at all levels of development.
Increasing magnitudes of warming increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive, and irreversible impacts for people, species and ecosystems.
Continued high emissions would lead to mostly negative impacts for biodiversity, ecosystem services, and economic development and amplify risks for livelihoods and for food and human security.
(p 24)

Many aspects of climate change and its impacts will continue for centuries, even if anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are stopped.
The risks of abrupt or irreversible changes increase as the magnitude of the warming increases.
(p 31)

Advances, confidence and uncertainty in modelling the Earth’s climate system

Improvements in climate models since the AR4 are evident in simulations of

• continental-scale surface temperature,
• large-scale precipitation,
• the monsoon,
• Arctic sea ice,
• ocean heat content,
• some extreme events,
• the carbon cycle,
• atmospheric chemistry and aerosols,
• the effects of stratospheric ozone, and
• the El Niño-Southern Oscillation.

Climate models reproduce the observed continental-scale surface temperature patterns and multi-decadal trends, including the more rapid warming since the mid 20th century, and the cooling immediately following large volcanic eruptions (very high confidence). …
Confidence in the representation of processes involving clouds and aerosols remains low.

(Box 2.1, p 18)

Figure 1
Yellow indicates that associated impacts are both detectable and attributable to climate change with at least medium confidence.
Red indicates severe and widespread impacts.
Purple … shows that very high risk is indicated by all key risk criteria.

Reasons for concern regarding climate change

Five ‘reasons for concern’ have provided a framework for summarizing key risks since the Third Assessment Report. …
All warming levels in the text … are relative to the 1986–2005 period.
Adding ~0.6°C to these warming levels roughly gives warming relative to the 1850–1900 period, used here as a proxy for pre-industrial times (right-hand scale in figure 1).

The five reasons for concern are:

1. Unique and threatened systems


2. Extreme weather events
   
   Climate-change-related risks from extreme events, such as heat waves, heavy precipitation and coastal flooding, are already moderate (high confidence). …


3. Distribution of impacts
   
   Risks are unevenly distributed between groups of people and between regions; risks are generally greater for disadvantaged people and communities everywhere.
   Risks are already moderate … particularly for crop production (medium to high confidence). …


4. Global aggregate impacts
   
   Extensive biodiversity loss, with associated loss of ecosystem goods and services, leads to high risks at around 3°C additional warming (high confidence). …


5. Large-scale singular events
   
   [The risks of] abrupt and/or irreversible changes … are moderate between 0 and 1°C additional warming, since there are signs that both warm-water coral reefs and Arctic ecosystems are already experiencing irreversible regime shifts (medium confidence).

(p 29, emphasis added)

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

Green Army: Persons of Interest

Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett:
Over the next generation or so, politics seem likely to be dominated either

• by efforts to prevent runaway global warming or, if they fail,
• by attempts to deal with its consequences.

(The Spirit Level, 2009, p 215)


Richard Wilkinson (1943):
[Status differentiation has] deeply ingrained psychosocial effects.
[Inequality is] not just about poverty [or] unfairness.
Its about a response to social hierarchy, social ranking …
It's also about whether people feel valued or devalued.

[In] the Financial Times 100 companies that go into the share index, the average pay difference between the CEO at the top and the lowest paid full time worker, is about 300 to 1.
There's no more powerful way of telling a whole swathe of the population:

You people are worth almost nothing!
Than to pay you one third of 1% of what the CEO gets.

And then of course we say:

The problem with the poor is low self-esteem!

(Inequality and Progress, Big Ideas, ABC Radio National, 5 February 2014)

Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett

Economic Justice and Security

In the USA, a child is killed by a gun every three hours.
(p 132)

[The] most powerful sources of stress affecting health [are:]

• low social status,
• lack of friends, and
• stress in early life.

(p 39)

Figure 16.2
The widening gap between the incomes of the richest and poorest 10% in the USA 1975 (=1) to 2004.

[Inequality in the USA rose] through the 1980s to a peak in the early 1990s.
The [rest of the 1990s] saw an overall decline … with an upturn since 2000.
[The] downward trends [in violence and teenage births] through the 1990s were consistent with improvements in the relative incomes of people at the very bottom of the income distribution.
(p 142)

[In] 1978 there were over 450,000 people in jail [in the USA.]
[By] 2005 there were over 2 million: [a four-fold increase.]
In the UK, the numbers have doubled since 1990, climbing from around 46,000 to 80,000 in 2007.
(p 145)

[In the US only] 12% of growth in state prisoners between 1980 and 1996 could be put down to increases in criminal offending (dominated by a rise in the drug-related crime).
… 88% of increased imprisonment was due

• to the increasing likelihood that convicted criminals were sent to prison rather than being given non-custodial sentences, and
• to the increased length of prison sentences.

In federal prisons, longer prison sentences are the main reason for the rise in the number of prisoners.
‘Three-strikes’ laws, minimum mandatory sentences and ‘truth-in-sentencing’ laws (ie, no remission) mean that some convicted criminals are receiving long sentences for minor crimes.
In California in 2004, there were 360 people serving life sentences for shoplifting.
(p 147)

The ratio [of the risk of imprisonment of blacks versus whites] is 6.04 for the USA as a whole and rises to 13.15 for New Jersey. …
[In terms of patterns of youth offending:]

• 25% of white youths in America have committed one violent offence by age 17, compared to 36% of African-Americans,
• ethnic rates of property crime are the same, and
• African-American youth commit fewer drug crimes.

[And yet] African-American youth are overwhelmingly more likely

• to be arrested,
• to be detained,
• to be charged,
• to be charged as if an adult and
• to be imprisoned.

The same pattern is true for African-American and Hispanic adults, who are treated more harshly than whites at every stage of judicial proceedings.
Facing the same charges, white defendants are far more likely to have the charges against them reduced, or to be offered ‘diversion’ — a deferment or suspension of prosecution if the offender agrees to certain conditions, such as completing a drug rehabilitation programme.
(p 150)

[In] more equal countries and societies, [it seems that legal frameworks and penal systems] are developed in consultation with experts — criminologists, lawyers, prison psychiatrists and psychologists, etc, and so reflect both theoretical and evidence-based considerations of what works to deter crime and rehabilitate offenders.
[Whereas, in] more unequal countries and states [the policy response is driven by] media and political pressure [to be seen to be] tough on crime … rather than considered reflection on what works and what doesn’t.
(p 155)

[After] slowly increasing from 1950 to 1980, social mobility in the USA declined rapidly, as income differences widened dramatically in the later part of the century.
(p 160)

Future Pathways for Adaptation, Mitigation and Sustainable Development

IPCC Climate Change 2014

Figure 3.1
The relationship between

• risks from climate change [across Reasons For Concern],
• temperature change,
• cumulative CO2 emissions, and
• changes in annual GHG emissions

by 2050.
(p 35)

Effective decision making to limit climate change and its effects can be informed by a wide range of analytical approaches for evaluating expected risks and benefits, recognizing the importance of governance, ethical dimensions, equity, value judgments, economic assessments and diverse perceptions and responses to risk and uncertainty. …

Adaptation and mitigation are complementary strategies for reducing and managing the risks of climate change.
Substantial emissions reductions over the next few decades can

• reduce climate risks in the 21st century and beyond,
• increase prospects for effective adaptation,
• reduce the costs and challenges of mitigation in the longer term, and
• contribute to climate-resilient pathways for sustainable development. …

(p 32)

Without additional mitigation efforts beyond those in place today, and even with adaptation, warming by the end of the 21st century will lead to high to very high risk of severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts globally (high confidence).
Mitigation involves some level of co-benefits and of risks due to adverse side-effects, but these risks do not involve the same possibility of severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts as risks from climate change, increasing the benefits from near-term mitigation efforts.
(p 33)

Adaptation can reduce the risks of climate change impacts, but there are limits to its effectiveness, especially with greater magnitudes and rates of climate change.
Taking a longer-term perspective, in the context of sustainable development, increases the likelihood that more immediate adaptation actions will also enhance future options and preparedness. …
(p 36)

There are multiple mitigation pathways that are likely to limit warming to below 2°C relative to pre-industrial levels.
Limiting warming to 2.5°C or 3°C involves similar challenges, but less quickly.
These pathways would require substantial emissions reductions over the next few decades, and near zero emissions of CO2 and other long-lived GHGs over by the end of the century.
Implementing such reductions poses substantial technological, economic, social, and institutional challenges, which increase with delays in additional mitigation and if key technologies are not available.
Limiting warming to lower or higher levels involves similar challenges, but on different timescales.
(p 37)

Climate change is a threat to equitable and sustainable development.
Adaptation, mitigation, and sustainable development are closely related, with potential for synergies and trade-offs.
(p 44)

(AR5 Synthesis Report — Longer Report, 2014)

Charles Darwin

Green Army: Persons of Interest

Aristotle (384 – 22 BCE):
[Empedocles (493 – 33 BCE) conjectured that certain] animals survived [because] their chance constitution made them suitable for survival.
[Whereas, other animals] were differently constituted and so were destroyed …
(Physics, Book II: 8)

Erasmus Darwin (1731 – 1802):
As the earth and ocean were probably peopled with vegetable productions long before the existence of animals; and many families of these animals long before other families of them, shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is, and has been, the cause of all organic life? …

Would it be too bold to imagine that, in the great length of time since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind … that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament … possessing the faculty:

• of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and
• of delivering down these improvements by generation to its posterity …

(Zoönomia, Vol 1, 1794)

William Greg (1809 – 81) [Essayist]:
The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits …
[Whereas:] the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him.
Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts — and in a dozen generations five-sixths of the population would be Celts, but five-sixths of the property, of the power, of the intellect, would belong to the one-sixth of Saxons that remained.
In the eternal 'struggle for existence,' it would be the inferior and less favoured race that had prevailed — and prevailed by virtue not of its good qualities but of its faults.
(Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, Chapter 5, 1871)

Elizabeth Stanton (1815 – 1902):
The real difficulty in woman's case is that the whole foundation of the Christian religion rests on her temptation and man's fall, hence the necessity of a Redeemer and a plan of salvation.
As the chief cause of this dire calamity, woman's degradation and subordination were made a necessity.
If, however, we accept the Darwinian theory, that the race has been a gradual growth from the lower to a higher form of life, and that the story of the fall is a myth, we can exonerate the snake, emancipate the woman, and reconstruct a more rational religion for the nineteenth century, and thus escape all the perplexities of the Jewish mythology as of no more importance than those of the Greek, Persian and Egyptian.
(The Woman's Bible, Part II, Comments on the Old and New Testaments from Joshua to Revelation, New York, 1898)

Blanche Z de Baralt:
Women must consider themselves the main agents for the continuity and evolution of the race towards a higher physical, intellectual and spiritual level. …
Education of girls and young women must prepare them for this great mission.
Upon reaching marital age they must have such an elevated and clear notion about it that they should refuse to wed men with inferior physical, intellectual and moral conditions.
(24 December 1911)

Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910):
[My children, the] views you have acquired about Darwinism, evolution and the struggle for existence won't explain to you the meaning of your life and won't give you guidance in your actions, and a life without an explanation of its meaning and importance, and without the unfailing guidance that stems from it is a pitiful existence.
(1 November 1910)

Tom DeLay (1947) [Republican House Majority Leader, 2003–05]:
[The Columbine High School massacre occurred] because our school systems teach our children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionised out of some primordial mud.
(Quoted by Peter Singer, The President of Good and Evil, 2004, p 131)

Charles Darwin (1809 – 82):
As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him.
This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.
(The Descent of Man, 1871)

The state of mind which grand scenes formerly excited in me, and which was intimately connected with a belief in God, did not essentially differ from that which is often called the sense of sublimity; and however difficult it may be to explain the genesis of this sense, it can hardly be advanced as an argument for the existence of God, any more than the powerful though vague and similar feelings excited by music. …

[The] extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe … as the result of blind chance or necessity [compels one] to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man …
This conclusion, [once] strong in my mind [has since,] very gradually [and] with many fluctuations, become weaker.
[Can] the mind of man, which has been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animals, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? …

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I, for one, must be content to remain an Agnostic.
(Autobiography, 1876)

Charles Darwin (1809 – 82)

Journal of Researches (1835)

Considering the small size of [the Galapagos] islands, we feel the more astonished at the number of their aboriginal beings, and at their confined range.
Seeing every height crowned with its crater, and the boundaries of most of the lava-streams still distinct, we are led to believe that within a period, geologically recent, the unbroken ocean was here spread out.
Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact — that mystery of mysteries — the first appearance of new beings on this earth.
(p 44)

The Descent of Man (1871)

[Ignorance] more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge …
[It] is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
(p 234)

During [the Dark Ages] the Holy Inquisition selected with extreme care the freest and boldest men in order to burn or imprison them.
In Spain alone some of the best men — those who doubted and questioned, and without doubting there can be no progress — were eliminated during three centuries at the rate of a thousand a year.
The evil which the Catholic Church has thus effected, though no doubt counterbalanced to a certain, perhaps large extent in other ways, is incalculable …
(p 269)

Recollections of the Development of My Mind and Character (1876)

Religious Belief

[Between 1836 to 1839 I gradually came] to see that the Old Testament, from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign &c &c, & from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.
(p 391)

By further reflecting

• that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported,
• that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become,
• that the men at that time were ignorant & credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible by us,
• that the Gospels can not be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events,
• that they differ in many important details, far too important as it seemed to me to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eye-witnesses

— by such reflections as these … I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation.

[I was at first] very unwilling to give up my belief.
But I found it more & more difficult … to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me.
Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete.
The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, & have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was Correct.

I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, & this would include my Father, Brother & almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.
And this is a damnable doctrine.
(p 392)

The old argument from design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. …
There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings & in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.
Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.
(p 393)

That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes.
Some have attempted to explain this … by imagining that it serves for … moral improvement.
But the number of men in the world is as nothing compared with that of all other sentient beings, & these often suffer greatly without any moral improvement.
[What] advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time? …

At the present day the most usual argument for the existence of an intelligent God is drawn from deep inward conviction & feelings which are experienced by most persons. …
This argument would be a valid one, if all men of all races had the same inward conviction of the existence of one God; but we know that this is very far from being the case.
Therefore I cannot see that such inward convictions & feelings are of any weight as evidence of what really exists.
(p 394-5)

A man who has no assured & ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution & reward, can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses & instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones. …
[And, if] he acts for the good of others, he will receive the approbation of his fellow-men & gain the love of those with whom he lives; & this latter gain undoubtedly is the highest pleasure this earth. …
As for myself I believe that I have acted rightly in steadily following & devoting my life to science.
(p 396)

(Charles Darwin: Evolutionary Writings, 2008)

Adaptation and Mitigation

IPCC Climate Change 2014

Many adaptation and mitigation options can help address climate change, but no single option is sufficient by itself.
Effective implementation depends on policies and cooperation at all scales, and can be enhanced through integrated responses that link mitigation and adaptation with other societal objectives.
(p 46)

The costs of achieving nearly universal access to electricity and clean fuels for cooking and heating [across the developing world] are projected to be between USD 72 to 95 billion per year until 2030 with minimal effects on GHG emissions (limited evidence, medium agreement) and multiple benefits in health and air pollutant reduction (high confidence).
(p 56)

Adaptation options for coral reef systems are generally limited to reducing other stressors, mainly by enhancing water quality and limiting pressures from tourism and fishing, but their efficacy will be severely reduced as thermal stress and ocean acidification increase.
(AR5 Synthesis Report — Longer Report, 2014, p 48)

George Megalogenis

Green Army: Persons of Interest

Robert Manne (1947):
[In the late 90's Les Murray (1938) composed] a poem about Pauline Hanson …

I've seen her tremble
I've seen her whisper
I've felt her power
Burning before me …

(Sorry Business, The Monthly, March 2008)

Geoffrey Wright (1959):
This is not your country.
(Romper Stomper, 1992)

Pauline Hanson (1954):
One People, One Nation, One Flag!
(Maiden Speech, Australian House of Representatives, 10 September 1996)

1930s Political Slogan:
Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!
[One People, One Empire, One Leader!]

Pauline Hanson's One Nation:
We will bring back federalism and restore Australia’s constitution so that our economy is run for the benefit of Australians instead of the UN and unaccountable foreign bodies that have interfered and have choked our economy since the federal government handed power to the International Monetary Fund in 1944. …
We need to exit the UN.
(Economics & Tax Policy, Accessed 26 June 2017)

(Please Explain, Four Corners, ABC Television, 3 April 2017)

Pauline Hanson (1954)

Pauline Hanson's One Nation Senator for Queensland (2014)

Our common oppressors are a class of raceless, placeless, cosmopolitan elites who are exercising almost absolute power over us: like black spiders above the wheels of industry, they are spinning the webs of our destiny.
(Pauline Hanson and George Merritt, Pauline Hanson — The Truth: On Asian Immigration, the Aboriginal Question, the Gun Debate and the Future of Australia, Saint George Publishing, 1997, p 155)

[I want] multiculturalism abolished. …
A truly multicultural country can never be strong or united. …
[At] this stage that I do not consider those people from ethnic backgrounds currently living in Australia anything but first-class citizens, provided of course that they give this country their full, undivided loyalty. …

I am fed up to the back teeth with the inequalities that are being promoted by the government and paid for by the taxpayer under the assumption that Aboriginals are the most disadvantaged people in Australia. …

The Family Law Act … should be repealed. …

The government should cease all foreign aid immediately …

Between 1984 and 1995, 40% of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin.
I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians. …
They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate.

(Maiden Speech, Australian House of Representatives, 10 September 1996)


Now we are in danger of being swamped by Muslims, who bear a culture and ideology that is incompatible with our own.

(Maiden Speech, Australian Senate, 14 September 2016)

John Howard (1939)

25th Prime Minister of Australia (1996 – 2007)

One of the great changes that has come over Australia in the last six months is that people do feel able to speak a little more freely and a little more openly about what they feel.
In a sense the pall of censorship on certain issues has been lifted …
I think there has been a change and I think that's a very good thing.
(Queensland Liberal State Council, 22 September 1996)

By the year 2000, I would like to see an Australian nation that feels comfortable and relaxed about three things:

• I would like to see them comfortable and relaxed about their history;
• I would like to see them comfortable and relaxed about the present; and
• I'd also like to see them comfortable and relaxed about the future.

(Four Corners 55th Anniversary — 1990s, ABC Television, 2016)

… I have to live with the consequences of [the positions I've taken as prime minister,] both now, and into the future.
And, if I ever develop reservations … I hope I would have the grace to keep them to keep them to myself …
(David Marr, His Master's Voice, Quarterly Essay, Issue 26, 2007, p 3)

David Marr (1947)

John Howard [attacked] "black armband" historians and resolutely refused to apologise to the Stolen Generations.
He would stage the Intervention in the Northern Territory as a curtain-raiser for the 2007 election.
This was race politics played by a master.
(The White Queen, Issue 65, March 2017, p 67)

… Howard's government has been the most unscrupulous corrupter of public debate in Australia since the Cold War's worst days back in the 1950s. …
He has a genius for ambiguity [that,] most of the time, keeps [him] just this side of deceit.
But he also lies without shame. …
[He] can admit error, but it is extremely rare.
Apologies are almost unknown.
(p 4)

[Under] Howard, the press has found itself misled, intimidated and starved of information.
On coming to power, Howard set about making sure the tactics he had used so brilliantly to claw down his rivals would not be turned against his government.
There would be minimal tolerance for dissent within the party, the government and the bureaucracy.
The great leaker would stop the leaks.
Senior bureaucrats who survived the purge of the first weeks were instructed to report all calls by journalists to die Prime Minister's press office.
(p 29)

Stories were doled out as rewards.
More than ever under Howard, the press would win access through favourable coverage.
The new communications minister, Richard Alston, was soon lashing the ABC over budgets and bias.
Journalists were locked out of stories - particularly those involving the military and refugees …
(p 30)

Canberra has a taste for punishing dissent by cutting off funds.
The Voltaireans of the Cabinet may be willing to sacrifice their lives for the sake of free speech in Australia, but they don't like paying for it. …

Clive Hamilton & Sarah Maddison:
In Australia, recent years have seen an unprecedented attack upon NGOs, most particularly upon those organisations that disagree with the current federal government's views and values.
The attacks have come both from government itself and from close allies such as the Institute of Public Affairs.
Questions have been raised about NGOs' representativeness, their accountability, their financing, their charitable status and their standing as policy advocates in a liberal democracy such as Australia.
(Silencing Dissent, Allen & Unwin, 2007, p 82)

(p 51)

(His Master's Voice, Quarterly Essay, Issue 26, Black Inc, 2007)

George Megalogenis (1964)

Pauline Hanson's timing was immaculately destructive.
(p 279)

[John] Howard couldn't bring himself to declare his outright opposition to Hanson because he felt he was being bullied by the media. …
[Indeed, he] shared the concerns of her supporters about the pace of cultural change.
He didn't see them as racists.
Yet by refusing to put Hanson in her place, Howard created a monster.
(p 280)

[Howard] was the last on his side to stand up to Pauline Hanson.
(p 300)

Paul Keating (1944):
In a nation of immigrants, John Howard let the racism genie out of the bottle. …
[Events like] the Cronulla riot has in its antecedents the notion that somewhere in officialdom at the top of the country it's all right to think poorly of people who come from a different background to yourself.
This is, I think, a dreadful letdown for the country after it had succeeded so greatly in settling so many people from abroad, in perhaps the most successful multicultural experiment in the Western world.

(p 237)

For years [John Howard] had argued against Australia moving before anyone else in the region [to address climate change.]
[Suddenly, in the lead up to the 2007 election,] he wanted to go first …

John Howard (1939):
Australia will … lead internationally on climate change … in a way that builds support for global action to tackle this enormous global challenge. …
[Our's] will be a world-class emissions trading system, more comprehensive, more rigorously grounded in economics and with better governance than anything in Europe.
Implementing an emissions trading scheme and setting a long-term goal for reducing emissions will be the most momentous economic decisions Australia will take in the next decade.
This emissions trading system … needs to last the whole of the twenty-first century if Australia is to meet our global responsibilities and further build our economic prosperity. …
Significantly reducing emissions will mean higher costs for businesses and households, there is no escaping that and anyone who pretends to do otherwise is not a serious participant in this hugely important public policy debate. …
[If] we get this wrong it will do enormous damage to our economy, to jobs and to the economic wellbeing of ordinary Australians, especially low-income households.
(3 June 2007)

(p 319)

[In December 2009, Tony] Abbott repudiated the Coalition's own 2007 election platform …
In a way this was more brazen than the Senate obstruction in the 1970s.
Back then there was an element of principle involved — the Coalition didn't agree with the Whitlam Program.
Abbott was opposing for the sake of it.
No previous opposition had overturned a policy that both sides had agreed to at the previous election. …

Tony Abbott:
[The argument for action on climate change] is absolute crap.
However, the politics of this are tough for us.
80% of people believe climate change is a real and present danger.
(Pyrenees Advocate, October 2009)

(p 349)

Hawke and Howard are Australian triumphalists, who think there is nothing wrong with the nation as it is.
Keating and Fraser are Australian cosmopolitans, who see room for improvement.
(p 4)

The Australian Moment was thirty-five years in the making, starting with

• the Whitlam government's tariff cut and the formal recognition of China in the early 70s;
• the Fraser government's termination of the White Australia policy with the entry of the Vietnamese refugees in the second half of the 70s;
• the Hawke-Keating government economic reforms between 1983 and 1996; and
• the Howard government's consolidation of those reforms, and the super-charging of the immigration program after 2001.

(p 345)

(The Australian Moment, 2012)

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Green Army: Research and Development

Countries in the tropics and Southern Hemisphere subtropics are projected to experience the largest impacts on economic growth due to climate change should global warming increase from 1.5°C to 2°C (medium confidence).

— Global Warming of 1.5°C SPM, 6 October 2018, p 12.

Climate Change 2014

Severe, Pervasive, and Irreversible Impacts

Climate change will amplify existing risks and create new risks for natural and human systems.
Risks are unevenly distributed and are generally greater for disadvantaged people and communities in countries at all levels of development.
Increasing magnitudes of warming increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive, and irreversible impacts for people, species and ecosystems.
Continued high emissions would lead to mostly negative impacts for biodiversity, ecosystem services, and economic development and amplify risks for livelihoods and for food and human security.
(p 24)

Observed Changes and Their Causes

Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history.
Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems.
(p 5)


Observed Changes in the Climate System

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia.

• The atmosphere and ocean have warmed,
• the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and
• sea level has risen.

(p 6)


Past and recent drivers of climate change

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have increased since the pre-industrial era driven largely by economic and population growth.
From 2000 to 2010 emissions were the highest in history.
Historical emissions have driven atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, to levels that are unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years, leading to an uptake of energy by the climate system.
(p 9)

[Since 2000, the increased] use of coal relative to other energy sources has reversed the long-standing trend in gradual decarbonisation … of the world’s energy supply.
(p 11, emphasis added)


Attribution of climate changes and impacts

The evidence for human influence on the climate system has grown since AR4.
Human influence has been detected

• in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean,
• in changes in the global water cycle,
• in reductions in snow and ice, and
• in global mean sea-level rise …

[Human activity] is extremely likely to have been [the cause of more than half] of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.
In recent decades, changes in climate have caused impacts on natural and human systems on all continents and across the oceans.
Impacts are due to observed climate change, irrespective of its cause, indicating the sensitivity of natural and human systems to changing climate.
(p 12)


Extreme Events

Changes in many extreme weather and climate events have been observed since about 1950.
Some of these changes have been linked to human influences, including

• a decrease in cold temperature extremes,
• an increase in warm temperature extremes,
• an increase in extreme high sea levels and
• an increase in the number of heavy precipitation events in a number of regions.

(p 15)


Exposure and Vulnerability

The character and severity of impacts from climate change and extreme events emerge from risk that depends not only on climate-related hazards but also on exposure (people and assets at risk) and vulnerability (susceptibility to harm) of human and natural systems.
(p 16)


Human Responses To Climate Change: Adaptation and Mitigation

Adaptation and mitigation experience is accumulating across regions and scales, even while global anthropogenic GHG emissions have continued to increase.
(p 17)

(AR5 Synthesis Report — Longer Report, 1 November, 2014)

Al Gore

Green Army: Persons of Interest

John Galbraith (1908 – 2006):
To a very large extent … we associate truth with convenience — with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life.
(The Affluent Society, 4th Edition, Penguin, 1984, p 7)

Al Gore (1948):
[Human] nature makes us vulnerable to confusing the unprecedented with the improbable …
Wishful thinking and denial lead to dead ends. …
(Climate of Denial, Rolling Stone, 22 June 2011)

Daniel Newman:
The is no investment that gives a higher return on investment than political influence. …
Instead of companies innovating, coming up with better products, serving society better, it's cheaper for them to buy politicians.

Jim Hightower (1943):
A corporation isn't a person until Texas executes one!

Paul Mazur:
We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture …
People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed.
We must shape a new mentality.
Man's desires must overshadow his needs.

John Keynes (1883 – 1946):
Consumption, of course, is the sole end of economic activity.

The Best Government Money Can Buy

Theodore Roosevelt (1858 – 1919):
The Republican party is now facing a great crisis.
It is to decide:

• whether it will be, as in the days of Lincoln, the party of the plain people, the party of progress, the party of social and industrial justice; or
• whether it will be the party of privilege and of special interests, the heir to those who were Lincoln's most bitter opponents, the party that represents the great interests within and without Wall Street which desire through their control over the servants of the public to be kept immune from punishment when they do wrong and to be given privileges to which they are not entitled.

(October 1910)

William Niskanen (1933 – 2011) [Chairman Emeritus, Cato Institute, 2008-11]:
[Corporations] have become sufficiently powerful to pose a threat to governments …
[In particular,] multinational corporations, who will have much less dependence upon the positions of particular governments, much less loyalty in that sense. …

Lee Raymond [CEO, ExxonMobil, 1999-2005]:
[We are] not a US company and I don't make decisions based on what's good for the US.

James Madison (1751 – 1836):
A zeal for different opinions [has] divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.
(Federalist No 10)

Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826):
[The] selfish spirit of commerce … knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain. …
(1809)

I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country. …
(1816)

Al Gore (1948):
The tainted election of 1876 (deadlocked on election night by disputed electoral votes in the state of Florida) was … settled in secret negotiations in which corporate wealth and power played the decisive role …

Rutherford B Hayes [19th President of the United States, 1877-81]:
[This] is a government of the people, by the people and for the people no longer.
It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.

(The Future, 2014)