#red plenty

‘It’s funny how England never seemed to pay too much of a price for its crimes.” “No one does. You pay for being the victim, not the criminal.”’ (p 32)

‘If one percent of the humans alive controlled everyone’s work, and took far more than their share of the benefits of that work, while also blocking the project of equality and sustainability however they could, that project would become more difficult. This would go without saying, except that it needs saying.‘ (p 58)

‘The three richest people in the world possess more financial assets than all the people in the forty-eight poorest countries added together.‘ (p 74)

‘This is what our thinking has been reduced to: essentially a neoliberal analysis and judgment of the neoliberal situation. It’s the structure of feeling in our time; we can’t think in anything but economic terms, our ethics must be quantified and rated for the effects that our actions have on GDP.‘ (p 74)

‘Arctic permafrost contained as much stored methane as all the Earth’s cattle would create and emit over six centuries, and this giant burp, if released, would almost certainly push Earth over an irreversible tipping point into jungle planet mode, completely ice-free; at which point sea level would be 110 meters higher than at present, with global average temperatures at least 5 or 6 degrees Celsius higher and probably more, rendering great stretches of the Earth uninhabitable by humans. At that point civilization would be over. Some remainder of humanity might adapt to the new biosphere, but they would be a post-traumatic remnant, in a post-mass-extinction world. That being the case, efforts were being made to thicken the Arctic sea ice in winter, which would allow it to hold on longer through the summers.’ (p 147) ‘If economics is a method for optimizing various objective functions subject to constraints, then the focus of change would need to look again at those “objective functions.” Not profit, but biosphere health, should be the function solved for; and this would change many things.‘ (p 166)

‘Everything relied on the whole system working. If it didn’t we would die, one way or the other, from thirst or from fighting each other. This was all completely clear to everyone but the crazies among us. There are always such people, but in this case they were outnumbered a hundred to one at least, and subdued by the police if they made trouble. For the rest of us, it came down to this: we had to trust our society to work well enough to save us. As it had never worked very well before, this was a big leap of faith, for sure.‘ (p 168)

‘We were so afraid that we behaved well, that was how bad it was.‘ (p 169)

‘Extinctions and ocean warming can’t be fixed no matter how much money future people have, so economics as practiced misses a fundamental aspect of reality.‘ (p 173)

‘Another man said I don’t own my kids’ teacher, I don’t own my doctor, I don’t need to own my house. I just want to pay the collective for it, not some landlord. So maybe someday the solidarity will overcome the splitting.‘ (p 248)

‘We have to live, we have to give this place to the kids with the animals still alive and a chance to make a living. That’s not so much to ask.‘ (p 248)

‘Some who feel the end is near work to hasten it, or worsen it. Their position seems to be that if they’re going to die then the world must die with them. This is clearly a manifestation of narcissism, and has been named the Götterdämmerung Syndrome.‘ (p 297)

‘Who is incentivized to do what in a wage ratio of one to a thousand? Those getting a thousand times more than starting wage earners, what’s their incentive from out of that situation? To hide, I’d say. To hide the fact that they don’t actually do a thousand times more than their employees. Hiding like that, they won’t be normal. They’ll be bullshitters.‘ (p 384)

‘Not that there aren’t conspiracies, it’s just that they’re all well known.‘ (p 408)