Our Plight (And What We Can Do About It)

Part 1: The premise of Andy Caffrey for Congress 2012

by Andy Caffrey

July 1, 2011

I’d like to present this to you as two components. The first is my assessment of the world situation and why it compels me to run for Congress. The second part presents the organizing strategy and financing plan.

It only took one issue, one global situation to impel me to develop the strategy for my individual campaign to get elected, and the broader strategy to use the methods we develop to reach as many voters as Big Money reaches with paid advertising. For it is not the money that wins elections (e.g. Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina). It’s what the money does that counts.

If we can achieve without an arsenal of money for our campaigns what money achieves for the corporatists, then we can have our revolution to topple the plutocracy with a grassroots and community-centered elected Congress and Senate. Guns aren’t needed because if we could rally enough of us to wage an armed revolution, then that would be enough people to just vote the people in! Voila! Revolution by ballot box!

This gives me hope! For the Climate Crisis has been allowed to progress 30 years longer than morally it should have without any truly substantial international-scale action to prevent or stop it on the scale nature requires for our civilization to survive this century. I can’t see us surviving even three more decades…

I’ve been following and then researching and then lecturing and organizing around the Climate Crisis for over 30 years. I even coined the meme “Climate Crisis” in 1996 or earlier. I became concerned about the catastrophic breakup of polar ice a bit later when I saw inTime and Newsweek U.S. state-sized chunks of ice breaking off of West Antarctica’s Ice Sheet (WAIS).

As the decades have progressed, my research and writings in this area have made me expert enough to have been the only person on the planet to predict the breakup of the Larsen Ice Shelf (which was simulated in the opening of the movie The Day After Tomorrow). This research involved studying Earth’s past 2-3 million years, a period 20 times longer than the age of our species. What ice cores have now revealed is that carbon dioxide levels have never been as high as they are now in the entire 2.1 million year era of the Ice Age, which means never before in the existence of Homo sapiens.

I also noticed a pattern that terrified me. Throughout our Ice Age past, every time the carbon dioxide level reached 280-285 ppm, a 40,000-100,000 year ice age glaciation cycle kicked in burying Canada in a mile of ice. We are now over 100 ppm higher than that level. It is my conclusion that humanity and the constantly evolving (or sadly and more likely de-evolving) ecosystems of our biosphere are not safe from terminal climate catastrophes and the collapse of all industrialized societies into chaos until we get atmospheric levels of CO2 below 280 PPM.

So, 350.org, the popular climate activism group of our day, misses the boat. By far. Consider as analogy an approaching tsunami. If one is on the beach and waits until he sees the wave approaching, and he finally turns and runs at that point–even if he runs in the right direction–he will be just as dead as the guy who stayed on the beach sipping his screwdriver. Unless he gets far enough away and in time, he is dead. Nature (and the fossil fuel corporation’s leadership) presents us with the exact same predicament in the guise of the Climate Crisis.

So how much do we have to change industrialized human societies and how fast if we are to save our necks and not destroy any future for our children?

My answer begins with research David Suzuki presented in his 1991 book It’s A Matter of Survival. In it he cites conclusions from 1990 scientific assessments researched by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the now Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the Woods Hole Research Institute. All of them indicated the need for the U.S. to reduce it’s CO2 releases 55-80% below 1990 levels by 2000 or 2005.

Since that time the science has concluded that those reports under estimated how much we must change and overestimated how much time we had to do it. So the government traitors, the Republicans and Democrats in Congress and the Presidency and the Supreme Court, conspired to violate our national security and aid the violators to assure that we did nothing to protect our nation and the rest of the world since that time. So we now have an entire federal government led only by fossil-fuel traitors to America. We are doomed unless something very profound happens very quickly.

Now President Obama is proposing we get to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. Fifty years too late.

There is not a soul in the federal government challenging him on this.

As a Climate Crisis organizer for 30 years, I’ve worked in all manner of ways to alert the public and influence government and economic social decisions. I’ve worked to get people to make personal lifestyle changes, to work on influencing government at local and state levels, to influence the federal government and the international treaty process. Those are pretty much the only domains in which humans can influence the changes that humanity must make.

Without going into any detail, I will state my conclusions:

1) For 41 years, since the first Earth Day, hundreds of millions of people around the world have gotten behind the notion of changing their own lifestyles to be more ecological. In all that time it hasn’t and it will not in the near future make enough changes to save us from The End of the World.

2) Hundreds, perhaps now as many as 1,000, state and local government officials have, since Dick Cheney’s Secret Energy Treason Task Force meeting with Big Energy executives at the commencement of the George W. Bush coup, been working to create the policy that the Bush Coup was ignoring or subverting. The best they have put forth takes us only about 1/4 of the distance we need to go. So our governors and mayors will not save us from The End of the World.

So anything below influencing national policy is useless unless much more profound change is directed from the federal or international realms (which are effectively the same since the federal governments veto anything the international level puts together which doesn’t meet the rapacious and depraved cravings of the fossil fuel organized crime syndicate) as well. So, even the most enlightened city and state government leaders will not save us from The End of the World.

3) Which is why the international treaty process is also not going to save us from The End of the World.

4) That only leaves us the federal government, and really that means the federal government of the USA primarily. Now we are talking about the heart of the beast as revealed when Bill Clinton sent Al Gore to Kyoto to gut the climate treaty, which in the end only pushed for an 8% reduction of greenhouse gasses. The genteel Al Gore has proven he does not have the warrior temperament to save us from The End of the World.

4A) It is my conclusion that given the need to appease enough of the most stupid, gullible, superstitious, whacked-out lunatic fringe of Americans with absolute political bullshit that distracts all Americans from learning and coming together around this shared and urgent predicament, the best we can hope to get in the White House is another Obama or Al Gore. They have therefore shown us that working to get a President to lead America to make the change isn’t going to happen. No president is going to save us from The End of the World.

4B) So, likewise, the Supreme Court, appointed by the President, will not force the changes required to save us from The End of the World.

4C) That just leaves Congress–the House of Representatives and the Senate. In some of the smallest states, like Vermont and their election of  Bernie Sanders, it has been shown that achieving a Senate seat is possible there. These kinds of Senate runs should be encouraged in every small state. Some states have fewer people than the approximately 660,000 people in a typical Congressional district. Winning another single Senate seat (in addition to Sanders’ and perhaps Al Franken’s) by a warrior who is willing to wield the filibuster regularly to shut down illegal wars, genocide, terraced, in fact, omnicide (the death of everything). Franken shows that celebrity and a history of populist activism can even win Senate seats in even larger states, like Minnesota where they are in shape having practiced and wielded Paul Wellstone grassroots-centered politics for decades now.

But living in California, the difference for me between organizing to win a seat in the House versus the Senate is the difference between having to organize within a community of 660,000 people and one single Senate race extending over 37 million citizens.

For a Californian, that just leaves winning a seat in the House of Representatives.

So, can that be done? If so, how? If done successfully, what could he or she do that leads us to accomplish what we must accomplish?