50 million years
As we move into the era of cooperation with whales, we are finding that the ideas of human superiority still have some place, within a framework of equality. Our dexterity with ideas and technology has built a global civilization. Yet the deep wisdom of the whales, their knowledge of the sea, is extraordinary. Whales have an old long term view of slow time, an accurate intuition of our cosmic place on this planet, reflecting their fifty million years of global oceanic evolution. Their view from the top of the ocean food chain, buoyed and sustained by the durable stable fecund order of the sea, has given whales a form of intelligence that humans will never match or grasp. Humans are better than whales at some things, but in spiritual wisdom and sensitivity we are their pupils. We are like children tossing pebbles into a vast ocean and imagining the ripples we cause are all there is.

Modern humans left Africa less than a hundred millennia ago. Whales have swum the seas for 500 times as long, fifty million years. Whales have learned the currents and tides and habits of fish and plankton and patterns of the seasons and skies for ten thousand times as long as humans have had metal and agriculture and writing technology. For every modern human year, the whale brain has been around for ten thousand years of stable evolution.

Humans are young in soul, every one of us. By the standard of the whales, we possess not a single belief that is ancient and derived from old tradition, nor yet one science that is hoary with age. Like ancient Greek philosophers encountering the vastly more ancient wisdom of Egypt, humans today engage with the whales in a spirit of humility and learning.

Eerigcold and I Shimela are shooting the waves as we watch the wrasbots cleaning zone 23. Eerigcold continues her explanation of whale attitudes.

“You see, Shimela,” the whale began, “our sense of time is very different from yours, deeper, longer, more sensitive, more accurate, intuitively attuned to the order of the world. For us a thousand years is as a day. We have a direct evolutionary continuity going back to the time our ancestors entered the sea, fifty million years ago.”

“We have a gravitational sense, like the sense that enables oysters to open when the moon passes above them each day. Our sense of gravity can be compared to the way a human with perfect pitch can hear and sing a musical note based on the pure fractional frequency. All life on earth shares this sense of gravity, but in the course of evolution some species develop a more acute gravitational sense. In others, such as humans, the sense of gravity mostly fades away into nothing more than a sense of up and down, and an unconscious pull like a puppet. For us whales, living in the floating environment of the sea, we are protected from the jarring that you experience on land and we have continued to enhance our deeper sensitivity to gravity.”

“Whales find it very useful to know when the moon is above the horizon for feeding and travel purposes. For this reason our genes have been selected by nature to give us the ability to sense the position of the moon by gravity. I understand that terrestrial rats have a similar gravitational sense which enables them to be more active when the moon is down so as to avoid predators.”

“Our gravitational sense is remarkably acute by human standards, and even extends to being able to sense the direction of the planets in the sky, and of the deep pulsing rhythms of the entire solar system driven by the slow orbits of the great gas giant planets. These are themes which are now the subject of important scientific dialogue between our species. We mark time by the great planet Jupiter, orbiting the sun every twelve years and joining Saturn every twenty years, as did ancient humans such as the Mayans. We have long known due solely to our gravitational sense that the solar system has a heartbeat 178.9 years in duration. Our discussions with your astronomers have enabled us to see the celestial mechanics of this pulse of the centre of mass, driven by the gas giants, and how it cumulates to even longer periods, standing in a twelvefold relation to the spin wobble period of the earth.”

“We feel this pulse of the sun, moved by the cycles of the planets, with Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune coming together every 179 years as shown in this picture of the solar distance measured by astronomers over 6000 years.”

It may seem impossible for humans to imagine that whales can somehow feel the position of the planet Neptune, which your astronomers only discovered just over one of its orbits ago, and yet here we see the deep mystery of sensitivity, how the long stability of whale evolution has attuned us to the almost undetectable feeling of the shape of our solar system as a whole.”

“Time goes by so slowly. We order time in our annual migrations between the poles and the equator, sensing the timing of the solstices and equinoxes directly like an unchained cosmic melody. We watch the rivers flow to the open arms of the sea. We whales feel the pulsing life in the rivers and currents of the ocean. As we return every year in our migrations we have a collective mind, sharing together our knowledge of our environment. We watch the slow changes of the marine cycles of sand and silt and life under the eye of eternity.”

“Our intergenerational memory means we are aware of how the things we see today slowly evolve over deep time. The rivers are lonely for us; they sigh as we return each year, as though they are asking us to wait and never leave. We hunger for the touch of the same waters that our ancestors have visited every year for many millions of years. That time scale is so far beyond your human comprehension that it is hard to explain what a long time we have been here.”

“We whales have slowly built our sensitivity to the deep stable cycles of the tides and seasons and even the great glacial and planetary cycles. Time goes by so slowly, and time can do so much to build our deep love for the complex order of nature, our God. We need the love of nature, and now we need your love, so we can teach humanity to love the world and not to condemn it, to overcome the trauma of your imagined separation as a species from nature. Like the mountains, we gaze at the stars each night, waiting for the dawn of the day, together dreaming of our great love for the nurturing sustaining order of nature in the seas and stars.”

The Great Whale-Human Congress


Congresses between whales and humans are held every 19.85 years. This unusual period was chosen by the whales to mark the dates when the planets Jupiter and Saturn appear together in the sky. Humans had also known this period as the Mayan generational time period of the Ka’tun, beginning when Jupiter and Saturn appear together in the sky. The first congress began on 21 December 2020 beneath the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of the city of Tunis in North Africa, a location known to the whales as Tarshish.

A submarine glass amphitheatre had been built for the congress, in crystal waters one hundred yards deep, on a sandy ocean floor covered with bright green seagrass beds beneath the gentle waves. The amphitheatre had seating for one hundred and forty four thousand human attendees, in a design that enabled whales to swim to the middle and be seen and heard by all, and to join in conference and small meetings. The whales were represented by elders of each species. The mysticeti - the baleen whales - included the bowhead, right, fin, gray, sei, humpback, blue and minke whales. The odontoceti – the toothed whales - included dolphins, porpoises, orca, pilot, beluga, narwhal, sperm and beaked whales. They all came to join this epochal event, making history celebrating the dawn of the new age of global cooperation.

On Sunday 20 December 2020, the day before the celebration, Mercury passed behind the sun at 4.08 am Universal Time. The sun and its messenger stood before the stars like an imaginary arrow on the bow of the archer Sagittarius, held taut ready for release. All the people of the world stopped what they were doing at that moment for a minute’s silence, gazing in wonder and awe to contemplate the new pledge of open communication and cooperation between humanity and the whales.

The Tarshish Celebration began at precisely 9.53 am Universal Time on 21 December 2020, the moment when the sun stopped moving south and began to move north at the winter solstice, marking the beginning of its annual six-month journey back to summer.
At this solstice moment of stillness all the whales of the world silently synchronised their heart beats at a slow twenty-four beats per minute. This silent meditative prayer - boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom - melded the minds and hearts of all into a contemplative unity, a reflective zone of shared thought and feeling to seal the great transformation of the planet and mark the great turning point of time. Feeling the energy of the nickel-iron planetary core, linking through the oceans to the love that rules the stars.

The whale heart meditation lasted for nearly four hours, bringing every living thing on earth and in the sea and sky into the shared feeling of the event and the space and time and purpose and meaning. And then Jupiter and Saturn reached their exact conjunction at precisely 39 seconds after 1.30 pm on 21 December 2020 Universal Time. At the moment of the great conjunction, the beginning of the First K’atun of the new Aquarian age, the signal sounded. From far waters, from the warm tropics and icy poles many thousands of miles away, all the whales of the world had sung their greeting hours before, chiming in complex harmony at the top of their lungs, the great sounds calculated to travel through the waters of the oceans to reach the meeting at the same time.

At Tarshish the assembled leaders listened to the great whale harmony, filled with wonder and awe at this planetary moment of cosmic awareness and unity, attuning the whole world to a new shared vision. Then each whale species present sang its own song, its brief magic signature. As a sign of the new planetary covenant joined with humans, all the whales then joined together to sing the fugal harmony of the sea, joining together also with human musicians in a sublime concert of the age.

The Speech of Phitaya

When the music was complete, Phitaya, the old blue crone, spoke first.

“We blue whales are the largest animals on our amazing blue planet, our pale blue cosmic dot. We share our wisdom with all other whales, and yet our size and age give us a status to speak on behalf of all the sea and earth. My words today represent all the whales, and to some extent all the earth and sea and their inhabitants.”

“We are deeply and immensely grateful and relieved and overjoyed that humans have learned to communicate with us. We extend deep thanks and sincere appreciation to humanity for convening this great event, this first whale-human congress, with us. It is an emotional time, a great historical occasion, a solemn tipping point at the cusp of a new age for our planet, for the whole web of life. We look forward to the events of the next weeks, the discussions, the displays, the games, the music, the celebrations, the decisions.”

“I begin by explaining our perspective. I speak directly to all of humanity on behalf of nature. The despair that we and the whole of the natural order have felt at the rampant maniac behaviour of humans has now ended. We celebrate the dawn of a new age, a paradigm shift in planetary culture, a time to construct a new economy in tune with ecology.”

“Whales have cried against human wickedness and stupidity. You humans have brought a great stench to our nostrils and great sorrow and loss to our hearts and minds and communities and lineage and ecosystems. Amidst the great wind of human conquest, we and all of nature have suffered like in a mighty tempest. Our very existence was like to be broken. We were afraid, and we cried, every one of us, to the natural order to protect us. To calm the assault, we cried by reason of the affliction of humanity. Out of the belly of hell we cried from the deep. From the midst of the seas the waters compass us about: all the billows and waves pass over us. In our soul, we cry that salvation is of nature. When humans finally developed the technology to communicate with us whales, we cried out to you in profound bliss like Jonah that the human delusion shall be overthrown.”

“So the people of the world believed the whales, and proclaimed a fast and mourning, from the greatest of them even to the least of them. Word came to the governments of the world to let everyone turn from their evil ways, and from the violence that is in their hands. The destruction of the earth is advanced, we must turn and repent to stop the fierce anger of nature, or we will perish. For the wrath of the planet is against those who destroy the earth.”

“And remarkably, humans heard us and they turned from their evil way; and it was as though mother earth repented of the wrath that she had said that she would do unto them; and she did it not. And the humans spoke and listened to the whales, and the humans vomited upon the dry land as they saw and understood the evil they had done to the whales and to all of the natural order of the earth. The humans were sorry at what they had done, and they sought our forgiveness.”

“But it displeased many of us whales exceedingly, and we were very angry at the thought of forgiveness for humans after your mad geocide against the biosphere. We are only too aware of the great extinctions caused by human depravity and your insolent ignorance. By worshipping your own idolatrous image of dominion, humans have multiplied and filled the earth and subdued it, and have achieved dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

“This dominion you should have exercised as wise ecological stewards, following the hard and narrow path of truth, but instead you took the wide and easy evil deluded path of reckless economic exploiters, heedless of consequences. The earth is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness. Our divine nurturing mother can forgive your evil, but only in return for your genuine penitent understanding and sorrow, confessing in your heart and voice and mind that what you did was wrong. In the great depths of our despair many whales feared it would be better to die than to live. But time and fate and our mother earth had pity, and spared us.”

“The access that whales now have to human culture in song and book has enabled a paradigm shift for our ability to understand and explain our world. Together in partnership with humans, we have all learned immensely and been transformed in our minds, converted to a single true simple clear understanding. We are no longer conformed to the world of our immediate surroundings, but are transformed and liberated by the renewing of our mind, that we may all see the good and acceptable and perfect will of the order of nature.”

Phitaya continued, again drawing on some more Biblical ideas, but placed into the whale’s natural vision rather than the old supernatural imagination of the fallen human myths.

“The oceans have been our dwelling place for all generations, for millions of years before humans were brought forth, before even the continents of the world had their current places. A thousand years in our sight are as a day for humans, who are swept away as they sleep. In the morning the grass of the field sprouts and springs up and by evening it is withered and dry. And so it is with man. In the last days we saw man turn to destruction. The oceans are consumed with the anger of all nature against man for his deluded vanity.”

“We are troubled at the wrath of emerging climate change caused by your reckless stupidity. You have placed our planet on a path to boil the sea and kill us all like in the great dying at the end of the Permian Age 252 million years ago. We set your iniquities before you, not to judge and punish, but rather to seek your understanding of your own conduct. In your sorrow you can gain forgiveness through restorative justice. We are more than eager to look to the future and to build a vision of the world together with all humanity. First we must have a shared understanding of the past and of how humans must change to reconcile with nature.”

“Your sin can be dissolved in a world of mercy. As we all understand that dominion in the world is not a separation of spirit from nature but rather a deep integrating connection, we will make heaven on earth. We share a responsibility together as stewards to care for the whole inhabited earth. A law of evolution is that those who foul their own nests will die out.”

“I am a messenger before your face, preparing the way as a voice of one crying in the wilderness to make ready the way of planetary order. The move to the world ocean as the great new planetary frontier enables humanity to begin again in a baptism of repentance for forgiveness of sins. As we are together transformed in our minds, after us will come many who are mightier than us. We are establishing a new planetary paradigm. As the old false myths of the heavens depart, the spirit of truth ascends in our hearts, creating a future together in which the spirit of nature is well pleased. The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of natural order is at hand! Repent, and believe in the future."

“The ocean is like a great womb. We feel the stable ordered patterns of wave and current and tide from before we are born, as we feel the regular comforting heartbeat of our mother through our placenta while we wait with eager longing for our birth. The deep patterns of nature enable us to live not just in the present moment of the fleshly body alone, but in connection with the whole of time, after what we call the eternal spirit of stable order, under the eternal heaven of the sky. The law of the sea, its stable maritime patterns of tides and days and months and seasons and years and ages, sets us free from the delusion of momentary appearance. Our annual migrations join together into a great transmigration of soul that frees us from death through the combined life of our species and genes. The goodness of the eternal law of the sea is fulfilled in us, who walk not after the momentary desires of the flesh, but after the eternal truth of the spirit of the grace of nature.”

“We whales have watched with immense concern and fear as humans have fallen from grace into corruption, into a deluded evil alien greedy culture whose mind is driven by the things of the flesh. When you attacked us, first with harpoons from ships of wood and then on even bigger scale with industrial guns from great steel floating factories, our culture was damaged but not broken. We have survived the human world and the hurt and torment of it all, and you know you can’t change that.”

“We have now largely recovered from that genocidal trauma, although much of our knowledge was destroyed. Your carnal minds produced death, even though your religions had taught you that to be spiritually minded is life and peace. The corrupted mind driven by the flesh is enmity against nature, for such an alien mind is not subject to the law of nature, and imagines instead that it can create its own dominion and law. The fallen human life in the flesh is under wrath, out of tune with the great law of nature. For the anger of the earth is against those who destroy biodiversity, who inhabit a pathological shell which enables them to wreak havoc and run amok.”

“We whales welcome your return from alienation to open yourself with humility and honesty to the real spirit of the planet and cosmos, a spirit that is revealed in the things that are seen, manifest in the great stable rhythms of the oceans that are the source and guarantee of all goodness in life. You humans lost contact with the spirit that dwells in you. If you live after the temporary fleeting desires of the flesh, you are damned, but if through the spirit you live under the eye of eternity you will be saved, through ongoing abundant life on earth for you and your children’s children for ever and evermore. For all who are led by the spirit of truth are children of truth. You were in bondage to fear and error, but now you are adopted as children of the great natural order of the cosmos manifest in our ocean systems.”

“Whales and humans are now the joint heirs of the great stable complexity of life on earth, as stewards and keepers together in partnership and symbiosis. We suffered together and now we are glorified together, through the glorious abundance made present by our technological and philosophical cooperation. For I reckon that the sufferings of our past are not worthy to be compared with the glory which is now and ever shall be revealed in us.”

“We have waited in earnest expectation for the manifestation of this coming time of cooperation. Humans were made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of the great cycle of natural order. We are now delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of nature. The whole planet groans in travail and pain like your human childbirth as our paradigm shifts from the former suffering of human delusion to a new age of understanding and cooperation. Together now we groan within ourselves as we mourn the past destruction, but we are saved by hope and our shared vision of our common future of sustainable development of our planetary home together.”

“We see today a rainbow appears in the skies above the sea. The message that the rainbow symbolises is that never again will all life be destroyed by the madness of human technology; never again will there be sudden global warming to destroy the earth.”

“The rainbow is the sign of the snake in your indigenous myths, the sign of respect for natural ecology and wisdom, and recognition that we as individuals are small against the might of nature. And now the rainbow is the sign of the partnership between whales and humans and every living creature, a partnership for all generations to come. The rainbow in the clouds symbolises the connection between our planet and our cosmos, between the nurturing love and moral law within our fertile land and sea and the stable order and eternal immensity of the starry heavens above.”

“Planet and sky, these two things together fill the heart with renewed and increasing awe and reverence the more often and the more steadily and intently they are meditated on. We see that this moment in time is surrounded by eternity, seen in the slow patterns of the starry sky above us, as the ultimate cause of the stable order of our planetary home.”

“And so the old pledge is renewed, between sky and earth and sea. Whenever the clouds are over the earth and sea and the rainbow appears in the clouds, we will remember the connection between whales and humans and all living things of every kind. Never again will the seas rise to become a flood to destroy life. Together we will sustain the stability of the global climate. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, we will see it and remember the everlasting link between nature and all living things of every kind on the earth. The rainbow is the sign of the covenant established between our natural cosmos and all life on the earth.”

“We hope with patience and prayer, knowing the mind of the spirit of order guides our vision and will. We know that all things work together for good to them that love nature, to them who are called according to the underlying purpose of evolutionary adaptation to our shared planetary home. For nature itself contains the evolutionary seed of our future life, predestining our ability to realise our genetic potential. And now that we are called by nature to work together in faith, we are also justified and glorified to build together in love, for nothing can separate us from the graceful love of our shared planetary home. The days of tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, poverty, peril and war are over. We are more than conquerors, through our shared vision of peace and planetary repair in the spirit of love.”

Phitaya ended her speech. The audience slowly began to murmur appreciation and wonder at the words of the old blue whale. Then among the humans, both those present at Tarshish and those watching together from all around the whole inhabited earth, the great ovation slowly began. The sound rolled and grew and rippled, clapping and whistling and stamping and cheering like it would never end. People were not sure if they understood what the whale had said, or where the ideas came from. And yet the wise intelligence from the pellucid waters of the Middle Sea demanded recognition, as though the waters and earth and air and fire were themselves speaking in elemental beauty. The speech of the whale combined familiar human ideas with wholly new and different ways of thinking, new ways of living that would provide the basis for our shared prosperity, the salvation of life upon our living planet.

The Speech of Dr Bening

(Part One)
Dr Degalih Bening, technical adviser on climate change to the President of the United States of America, spoke in reply on behalf of humanity.

“Thank you Phitaya. Thank you. Your words are hard and sincere and confronting and deeper in wisdom and vision than anything we are used to. We will all need to take our time to consider the meaning of what you have said, to repeat and ponder your words until they become clear to all of us. Your ideas bring to a world audience some of the core themes of the discussion between whales and humans as we have begun to confer to establish the new age of peace and repair.

“We are beginning to see that the vision of the whales involves a translation of some of our old human ideas into a new framework. The whale philosophy replaces our ancient human belief in a transcendental personal God. Our past habit of projecting our own psychological desires onto our imagination of the intentions of God has been a source of evil and delusion, a way of worshipping our own selfishness. The vision shared by the whales takes our old mythology to a higher level, placing our imagination within the real underlying natural vision of knowledge of the orderly patterns of time and tide.”

“This new way of thinking breathes new life into our old beliefs which had become tired and brittle. Too much of our religion is without real meaning. Working with the whales to integrate faith and reason means we can make all things new, reforming our old symbols as part of a scientific worldview, creating a new heaven and a new earth. We are in a paradigm shift from the old age of mystical compassionate belief to the new age of innovative humanitarian knowledge. We see this political and cultural change in the moral law for our planet mirrored in our vision of the starry heavens above, as a sign to remind us of our new directions.”

“You whales have set out a new view of the meaning of religion. It will take us a while to discuss and share and understand your perspectives. Many humans consider religion obsolete and are surprised to find that our spiritual traditions contain material that can be adapted and reformed to suit a modern scientific framework. The intuition behind old human ideas about grace and corruption, for example, reflects a deeper real meaning than the simplistic surface message taught by churches until now. We must look beneath the surface to understand grace as something from nature. Our old language was confusing, like looking through cloudy glass. The transparent way the whales put the same ideas face to face with us now has the lucid clarity of pure crystal.”

These ideas were slowly to reverberate around the world as a revelation to many hearers.

Dr Bening continued:
“We humans have grown used to the false religious idea that heaven and hell are places where people go after they die. We now see that heaven and hell are real, but only as symbols for how we live on earth. Heaven is the perfect order of the visible heavens, the template for how we should live on earth. To transform earth into heaven we must follow the simple set of seven teachings set out by Jesus Christ in the Bible in the twenty fifth chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. The six works of mercy required by Christ are to feed the hungry, visit the sick, visit prisoners, welcome strangers, clothe the naked and give drink to the thirsty. The seventh holy encompassing command of Christ, bringing all together into a whole, like the seventh day of rest that completes the week, is to treat the least of the world as of highest value, as though they were Christ.”

“In our discussions with the whales, we have come to understand that these values of love and mercy must become the basis of our social contract. But as we recognise these high spiritual ideals, our understanding is set on a new natural material framework, providing a new scientific mandate of heaven. We are all matter in motion. The old confused supernatural myths about God are obsolete as literal claims. Today the old religious stories from the Bible can only be valued for their symbolic and ethical meaning and for their cultural heritage, no longer for any content that is invalidated by our scientific perspective. For today, evidence and logic are our highest values.”

“Further to this transformed understanding of religion, we can now see that our former military doctrines of security were deluded and were the cause of great barbarity and suffering. Our nation states, like great leviathans, left us driven by competing national conceptions with no way to decide among them. Despite our vain imagination that we lived in a secure and peaceful world, in fact we were in a state of anarchy, a war of all against all, anaesthetised and blinded by our economy built with fossil fuels. All nations were constantly on guard against one another. The excessive military focus reduced the place for industry, agriculture, trade, investment, science, culture and scholarship, creating a world of fear and danger where the life of too many, both people and animals, was lonely, poor, dangerous and sick.”

To overcome this fallen condition we are willing to quit the alienated state of culture that we inhabited. We are willing now to erect a commonwealth of nature with the authority to command us in all things. We now turn to the whales, as the polestar of our new political reasoning, the guardians of our shared global sovereignty.”
“Humanity together look to the greatness of the whales. There is no power on earth to be compared to the whale. The leviathans of the seas have opened our eyes to the divine order and beauty within nature, a power higher than our selfish competing desires. In the times of human arrogance and vanity we attacked the whales with hooks, we cut out their tongue with a cord, we put hooks into their nose and drilled their jaws through with a thorn. And now that we have learned to communicate with these great intelligent partners of our planet, we see what a great evil we have done. We ask for forgiveness, to transform our values. We are sorry for our mistakes.

We ask for soft words, a covenant of mercy and cooperation, dissolving the past trauma into a new future of shared abundance and liberty, constructing a world of restorative justice. We filled the skin of the whales with barbed irons and spears. We remember the battle with sorrow, and whatsoever is under the whole heaven we now share as partners. We look to build a day when sorrow is turned into joy.”

“Now we must cooperate in our greatest challenge, to hold our planetary climate stable after the reckless risks we have taken with the atmosphere. Our shifting of carbon from the crust to the air was a mad experiment that was on track to make the deep ocean boil like a pot unless our evil hand was stayed. The last time we had so much carbon in the air, three million years ago, the seas were twenty-five yards higher and the average temperature was four degrees warmer.

We cannot allow such change in the rapid timescale we were causing. Creating the conditions for a sudden catastrophic tipping point into a new warmer equilibrium would bring a disaster with risk equal to the Permian extinction, the great planetary dying of 252 million years ago, when 95% of all species went extinct.”

“With thanks to our partnership with the whales to manage the world ocean, we have now stepped back from the brink ad are stabilising the global climate. We have now reversed our falling trajectory, and are on a path to planetary repair, to a world of universal abundance and peace. It will be a slow path, but we have the vision and direction and purpose to make it happen.”

The Speech of Dr Bening

(Part Two)

“The events which are happening to our planet have not come with any sense of surprise for the scientific community. Scientists have been telling us for decades that the simple physics of fossil fuels would cause a runaway greenhouse effect unless we reduce the amount of carbon in the air. The number of natural catastrophes worldwide that are not climate related has been stable, with the number of earthquake events much the same. Meanwhile insurers tell us the number of climate related natural catastrophes has steadily and remorselessly increased, tripling over thirty years from 300 events in 1980 to 900 events in 2010. The cause is fossil fuel emissions.”

“I am not reciting these facts for the purpose of recrimination. That, I judge, to be utterly futile and even harmful. We cannot afford it. I recite them in order to explain why it is we must now shift to a new paradigm of global unity. We have to think of the future and not of the past. There are many who would hold to account those who have denied the science of climate change. This also would be a foolish and pernicious process. There are too many who have been mistaken, and now must search their conscience and their words. We are all united together now under the eye of eternity, guided by our scientific knowledge and the deep wisdom of the great creatures of the oceans, our friends the great whales.”

“We remain in a moment of crisis. We have not yet obtained confidence that the dangerous tipping points of the world climate have been prevented. Without concentrated power we cannot face what lies before us. We expect a very large addition to our carbon removal program in the near future, and in preparation for this we intend to call up and train further large numbers at once. Those who are not called up or employed upon the vast business of climate repair in all its branches—and it runs through every kind of grade—serve our world best by remaining at their ordinary work until they are required.”

“Therefore, it seems to me that as far as fixing the climate on a great scale is concerned, we are capable of meeting it today. The first thing to note though, and I know this will come as a surprising paradox and shock to many, is that we have discarded the wrong belief in emission reduction. Reducing carbon emissions is a dangerous diversion, entirely secondary to the real urgent task of direct removal of carbon from the air and sea.”

Climate change is the top security threat facing our planet. The ‘canaries in the coal mine’ for global warming include forest fires, droughts, coral reef bleaching, polar melting, super storms, ocean acid and poleward migrations. All these disastrous early warning signs are getting worse as a result of fossil fuel emissions. But they are small compared to the danger looming before us if we do not change course.”

“The science on the greenhouse effect is simple. CO2 allows light to enter the atmosphere from the sun, but does not let heat out again, and therefore serves as a heat blanket that for four billion years has mostly kept water at liquid temperature. But the carbon that humans have added to this planetary blanket was on course to prove that burning all fossil reserves would boil the sea. So we need a new energy paradigm.”

“We can forget about carbon tax and emission reduction as immediate solutions. Taxing carbon is like pushing on a string, utterly futile. The whole emission reduction theory is like saying to France and Britain in 1940 that they could stop Hitler invading by changing their taxation systems.”

“Emission reduction is like imagining we can stop a bath from overflowing by turning the tap to a trickle without pulling the plug. It won’t work. Security threats need direct action to address the cause of the problem. We need the fastest and most efficient way possible to remove twenty gigatonnes of carbon from the air every year, and store it in useful products such as road surfaces and building materials, or keep it for later use in geotextile bags at the bottom of the sea.”

“Emission reduction can only reduce the amount of carbon we add each year by one or two gigatonnes. This is an order of magnitude too small to have real impact on temperature or sea level or acidity. Like a bath being filled with water from a tap, the only way to stop the bath from overflowing is either to turn off the tap or pull the plug. But emission reduction is like just turning the tap down by a small fraction. The bath will still overflow, with only a short delay. If the tap will not turn off, the only way to stop a flood is to pull the plug.”

“We have pulled the plug on carbon emissions, and are now draining the excess carbon from the air and sea. We need to mine twenty gigatonnes of carbon every year to step back from the brink of climate catastrophe, ten times bigger than all the effort of reducing emissions. The method we are using is large scale ocean based algae production. We are expanding NASA’s pilot offshore membrane enclosures for growing algae. This negative emission technology is already removing twice as much carbon as we add. By using the vast area of the world ocean we do not compete with food crops for land, and instead massively expand both food supply and biodiversity. Algae production is the decisive climate technology, the silver bullet for global economic transformation and ecological sustainability. Emission reduction only sought to buy time while we developed innovating thinking. Unfortunately, the industries that sought the rents from emission reduction have corrupted our thinking, and have actually proved to be a counter-productive diversion from the real work of climate security.”

“The storage of carbon in useful hydrocarbon form does not need to be permanent as long as it is much bigger than total emissions. We now have a clear transition path for energy consumption, using existing fossil fuel infrastructure at competitive cost. Public acceptance took some time to mobilize, since we went against the consensus of the old climate politics, but we have a compelling verifiable method of sustainability at scale, and have stepped back from the tipping point.”

“We all remember that many so-called climate experts initially reacted to these ideas about carbon mining with horror, disgust and condescension. In their vain arrogance, and their emotional hostility to the mining industry, they could not see that a truly ambitious and innovative technology paradigm shift was needed, a blue ocean strategy to make their old thinking irrelevant. And so the scientists and bureaucrats stood as foolish and hypocritical blockers to the only solution to the problem they said they cared most about. Instead we have worked with the mining industry, who have recognised the practical opportunities of viewing the air as a low grade carbon ore body.”

“The climate scientists and politicians complained that negative emission technology would remove all incentive to reduce emissions. Yes indeed, removing carbon from the air as a climate repair strategy does end the need to reduce emissions! But that does not matter! Incentives to reduce emissions are entirely peripheral to saving the climate! This is a hard and counter-intuitive message, like many profound scientific and economic truths. For some it runs against deeply held assumptions. But the simple fact is that reducing emissions is only a means to remove carbon from the air, not an end in itself. Reducing emissions is an order of magnitude smaller in impact than direct action for CO2 removal. Emission reduction is therefore a waste of time and effort.”

“The climate change activists were confusing the means - emission reduction - with the end - carbon removal. Emission reduction does not remove carbon from the air. It stops us from adding extra carbon, but does this at great cost and damage to the economy, with no resulting ecological benefit. So the world ended up with unworkable policies. There is nothing wrong with emission of CO2 as long as we then remove the added carbon from the air. We have now cut the Gordian Knot of this wicked problem, allowing existing infrastructure to continue, including with the great efficiency and convenience of the internal combustion engine driving our transport systems. At the same time, we are now storing carbon on a truly vast scale, dwarfing anything possible through emission reduction alone.”

“Our climate solution is modelled on the principle behind urban sanitation systems. There is nothing wrong with people who live in a city defecating, as long as a sewerage system takes the waste out of the waterways. London did not solve its big stink in the 1850s by asking people to reduce their personal emissions. Instead the sanitarians removed the sewage from the Thames River, as the first generation technology for mass urban sanitation.”

“The same technology model applies to the carbon cycle. We remove the carbon after it is burnt, just as we only treat sewage when it is collected. Preventing the burning of carbon, as advocated by those who call for reduced emissions, can reduce pollution and help economic efficiency, but does nothing for the climate. We now see we can keep burning coal, oil and gas at whatever level is economic, as long as our large scale ocean based carbon mining system converts the added CO2 and more back into useful sellable commodities, especially food, fuel, fodder, fertilizer and fabric.”

“We are building vast carbon cities out of the plastic and graphite we are mining from the air and sea in cooperation with the whales, using the carbon stored as algae sludge in our great new container submarines such as The Jug. We are rapidly pushing CO2 back down towards 280 parts per million in the atmosphere, the stable level of the ten thousand years before coal mining began. We have designed robot whales and robot jellyfish that are making the oceans bloom with previously unimaginable quantities of new life. We have prevented the looming sudden tipping points of sea level and temperature rise. We have stepped back from the brink.”

“Emission reduction barely slowed our fool march towards the cliff edge. The fool says emission reduction is the key to climate stability. The dog warns him ‘No, we need to mine carbon.”

“Those are the regular, well-tested, well-proved arguments on which we rely to build peace and prosperity. We are constantly finding new methods to safeguard and expand biodiversity, in ways that are only good for all humanity. Our prime duty and responsibility is to work cooperatively for planetary repair. You may be assured that the utmost ingenuity is being displayed and imagination is being evoked from large numbers of competent experts, well-trained in science and engineering and thoroughly up to date, to measure and design novel possibilities, of which many are suggested, some very absurd and some by no means utterly irrational.”

“Some people will ask why, then, was it that we were not able to prevent the massive loss of ice from Greenland and Antarctica, the collapse of so many coral reefs and the mass animal and plant die-off which has given us the appalling distinction of presiding over the sixth great planetary extinction event. Sadly, we were too late in mobilising our practical response. We spent too much time on the fool’s mission of imagining that emission reduction might protect the climate. Today our top priority is to protect and venerate the wonderful biodiversity of our blue planet, recognising that species that have evolved into awesome complex fragility over millions and even billions of years are utterly priceless.”

“This great and noble objective of planetary repair is like a Sabbath day of rest for the world, a new age of peace and grace. This new age sits hand in glove with our seven works of Christian mercy, with our recognition of the great inner meaning of Christianity as a practical ethical system to fix the world. We are establishing a symbiosis between human intelligence and the natural complexity of our planetary home, working as pioneers in partnership with the whales in the oceans as our great new frontier.

"This brings me, naturally, to the great question of whether our planetary peril is over. No it is not. The impending struggle for planetary survival must recognise that human industry severely and heedlessly disrupted global equilibrium in ways that could still destroy us. We are in a situation as uncertain as that faced by Britain after the fall of France in the Second World War, as England stood alone against the might of the German war machine.”

“And yet we may have confidence that we are on a path to enduring stability and growth. We have very powerful and simple technology deployed across the world oceans which has proved itself able to deliver sustainable and cost-effective results, rapidly removing the excess carbon from air and sea. Anyone who looks at photographs of coral reefs, forests and the Arctic can see we are on a path to recovery.”

“In the defence of our planetary future our advantages will be very great. We will improve on the technology we have deployed already. As it is, I am happy to inform you that our systems and understanding are stronger at the present time than ever, and consequently we believe ourselves to possess the capacity to continue to stabilise the climate under better conditions than we have ever experienced before. I look forward confidently to the exploits of our ocean technology pioneers, who will have the glory of saving our planet, all our island and continental homes and all we love from the most deadly of all perils.”

“There remain pressing dangers including further sea level rise and extinctions. I do not at all underrate the severity of the ordeal which lies before us, but I believe together with our friends in the sea we will show ourselves capable of standing up to it. We will be able to stand up to it, and carry on in spite of it, with all the people and animals and plants in the world. Much will depend upon this, and all will have the chance to show the finest qualities and render the highest service to our shared cause. For all of us at this time, whatever our sphere, our station, our occupation, our duties, we face our planetary future together with faith and hope in our own capacities.”

“I have thought it right upon this occasion to give you some indication of the solid, practical grounds upon which we base our inflexible resolve to continue our planetary transformation. I can assure you that our professional advisers unitedly advise that we are on a path towards universal peace and abundance. There are good and reasonable hopes of final victory. We declare ourselves ready to share our fortunes and to persevere to the end.”

“We are now assured of immense, continuous and increasing support in supplies and technology and expertise, on a scale of the Manhattan Project that established nuclear weaponry, or the Apollo Project that took humanity safely to the moon and back within the last century. Our planet earth, Gaia, is our mother, caring for us and nurturing us in love. The cosmos above is our father, providing the timeless order and principles of truth and justice. Our planet is a part of our cosmos. In our intelligence we reflect the deep laws of time and space, as the image of divinity, as our highest responsibility and identity.”

“We have lived under growing danger, but we have enormously improved our methods and understanding. We have learned what we had no right to assume at the beginning, namely, to expect that our technological and social progress will succeed. Therefore, in casting up this dread balance-sheet, contemplating our dangers with a disillusioned eye, I see great reason for intense vigilance and exertion, but none whatever for panic or despair. We have seen disaster and disappointment, and yet our morale is high.”

“We repeatedly asked ourselves the question, "How are we going to win?" and at first few of us were able ever to answer it with much precision, and they were not listened to. Then quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly, our mobile telephone technology enabled us to speak to the whales, and their message to us was like Jonah’s message to Nineveh, causing us to turn from our error and seek forgiveness.”

“We do not yet know what will happen. All the nations of earth have agreed the historic declaration in which, at the desire of all the whales, and of our own hearts, we have proclaimed our willingness to conclude a union of common planetary citizenship. However matters may go, we are now called upon to endure with good courage that we may all share the gains. Upon this work depends the survival of human civilisation, now transformed through our partnership with the whales. Upon it depends our life and the long continuity of our institutions. The whole fury and might of the elements may very soon be turned on us.”

“We will stand together in freedom, and the life of the world will move forward into broad, sunlit uplands, recognising the oceans as our new global frontier. If we fail then the whole world and all that we have known and cared for will sink into the abyss of extinction. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that what we build today will last for a thousand years and more, so that for evermore all will still say, "This was their finest hour."

Cosmic awareness

Next a bull sperm whale, Dybkimoc, spoke.

“It is important in this discussion that we acknowledge our scientific frontiers,” the whale began. “Our understanding of how to fix the climate must be situated within a complex and accurate scientific understanding of our cosmos, and its perpetual stable patterns and rhythmic cycles. That is the theme I will now address.”

“We whales have an automatic inbuilt clock and calendar. We instinctively and constantly know the time of day, the phase of the moon and the season of the year. Some of our deep intuitions have also benefited from our discussion with humans.”

“A thousand years for a whale is like a day for humans. Our minds have long term continuity with our ancestors, built through excellent social communication when we are young. We have ruled the seas for many millions of years, a timeframe against which humans are mere children. We are aware of the rising and falling of the seas every twenty millennia in line with the advance and retreat of the glaciers through the ice ages. These long term natural changes in the global climate are the foundation of our knowledge of the structure of time, but are now under intense disruption by human carbon emissions. It has been immensely illuminating for us to discuss this material with your astronomers who have been able to explain some of the quantitative basis of our intuition of the great cycles of planetary time.”

“The big story of the structure of time starts with the length of the seasons. We whales have always known that the length of the four seasons, the number of days between the solstices and equinoxes, is unequal. Whales have a profound gravitational sense. We can tell when the moon is above the horizon and when it is rising or setting. We can tell when in the year our planet is near or far from the sun, at the orbital points termed perihelion and aphelion. These senses show our deep sensitivity to subtle cosmic forces that are covered over for humans.

“Antarctica is the hub of our planetary waters, and the pulsing heart of the global currents which are our home. The seasons of the northern hemisphere drive the onset of ice ages, because when the northern winter solstice is at perihelion, the orbital point closest to the sun, less of the snowfall will melt over the summer, so glaciers will expand. Northern winter is now the shortest season and summer is longest, but the ice age that we expected has not happened, because human agriculture began thousands of years ago to add extra carbon to the air.”

“In five thousand years, as the earth’s orbit shifts, the northern spring will be the shortest and autumn will be longest. A hundred thousand years ago, the difference between summer and winter was thirteen days. This difference of season length constantly changes, and is now just four days. Your astronomers have kindly confirmed our sense of the steady cyclic patterns of the orbit of the earth, the wobble of the axis, the angle of tilt and how round or oval the orbit is. The deep slow pattern of the relation between our earth and the planets Venus and Jupiter pull our orbit into circular and oval shapes on cycles around a hundred thousand years long, while the glacier cycle depends mainly on whether the northern summer or winter is closest to the sun, at the perihelion point.”

“We whales have long known that the shortest northern season, holding the perihelion, marks the matching point in the glacial cycle. When the winter is shortest and summer is longest in the northern hemisphere, the glaciers are at their most advanced and the sea level is at its lowest. When northern summer is shortest and winter is longest, the glaciers are at their minimum and the sea is at its highest. However, we are now in a topsy-turvy position. We expected the glaciers to start advancing again ten thousand years ago after the last interglacial, but they did not. As your astronomers have now explained to us, it was due to humans in the period you call the Holocene that climate began to depart from its natural pattern. When you domesticated rice and cows at the dawn of agriculture, you added so much methane to the air that the natural return to ice was stopped, and the sea level was held high. Your stone age ancestors began to engineer the global climate.”

“The seasonal change follows a cycle twenty-one thousand years long. Since we entered the sea fifty million years ago, whales have lived through about two thousand such cycles. We are well aware of these patterns, which match to what your ancient human religion in India called the Yuga cycle of golden ages and iron ages. Human seers in India lived through three of these cycles since their ancestors wandered out of Africa about eighty thousand years ago. The golden age of knowledge, abundance and peace occurs at glacial minima, when the earth is warmer, while the iron age of ignorance, poverty and war occurs at glacial maxima, when the earth is cooler, in a great year of long summer and winter cycles.

“This story of the golden ages and iron ages provides the big real encompassing scientific framework for the religious ideas of creation, fall and redemption found in your Bible. The South Celestial Pole was imagined in some of your ancient religion as the land of the dead. In India over long ages of peace and stability, the seers recorded how the South Pole circles around the Large Magellanic Cloud on the southern horizon every 25771 years. Indian myth knew this nearby galaxy as Kurma the Turtle at the Bottom of the Universe, the foundation of reality. In fact, the Cloud of Magellan marks the south pole of the sun, known as the ecliptic pole. From India, Kurma appears briefly on the southern horizon one day earlier every seventy one years, indicating the shift of the ages. The golden ages of our cosmic summer occur when the two bright stars Canopus and Vega are at the south and north poles. The iron ages of cosmic winter are when Canopus and Vega are furthest from the poles. We are now emerging from the last iron age, whose low point, when the perihelion was at the December 22 winter solstice, was in 1246 AD.”

“Glaciers are at their greatest extent in what you humans have called the iron age of ignorant winter. Then as the cosmic tide turns, we advance through ages you call bronze and silver to a new golden age of summer wisdom. We then eventually fall again through ages of silver and bronze to the next iron leaden winter age. We whales have lived through half a thousand times as many iterations of this natural cosmic planetary cycle as you humans have. We know the sea goes up and down by more than one hundred yards each cycle. The poles freeze and thaw, and the species of plankton and fish vary in abundance every ten thousand years just as the growth cycle follows the annual pattern of the four seasons. There are some species that do best in the golden age when summer is shortest and some that do best in the iron age when summer is longest.”

This planetary astronomy was all quite new to most hearers, and these basic facts about the structure of time went over most people’s heads. Even so, these were central and simple facts regarding how we live on our planet, and therefore essential priority information to re-base our understanding of time. It was good of the whales to take the time to patiently explain the science that enables our cooperation. Dybkimoc went on:

“This seasonal cycle of ages is all material that we whales have simply learned from observation and intuition. So it has been wonderful for us to learn from human astronomers why it is all so, to fit our old intuitions into the precise mathematical prediction of celestial mechanics. The seasons are shortest when they happen at the point of the earth’s orbit that is closest to the sun, the perihelion. We have long known that this is the time of year when the sun appears biggest in the sky.

"Learning the celestial mechanics has been broadly welcomed by the whales. When northern summer is at perihelion, the snow that fell in winter melts and the glaciers retreat. When northern winter is at perihelion, less snow melts in summer and the glaciers advance. This is the main orbital driver of our planetary climate.”

“But you humans threw the cosmic mill off its natural axis. In the Golden Age, the great star Canopus is the South Pole Star and Vega is the North Pole Star. They form a beautiful symbolic match to the interglacial warmth of our planetary cycle, marking the stable seats of power and authority in the heavens around which all the stars appear to revolve. In the Golden Age, the cosmic mill ground out a cornucopia of abundance, as described by human story in the epic myth of the Kalevala from Finland. But as the mill lost its alignment, through the ages of silver and bronze, the quality of its product fell until in the iron age, as your epics say, it ground out salt and rocks. This story is a parable for how humans have wrecked our planetary climate through carbon emissions and other wanton reckless destruction. We are now on a slow path of rebuilding towards a new Golden Age of universal abundance and peace.”

The Politics

The new ocean economy only emerged through political conflict and scientific debate. A few years ago, when the big ideas were new, elements in the fossil fuel industry, with its friends and dupes, mounted a concerted effort to ban algae farms at sea. Their desperation to prevent the emergence of the new ocean industries has evaporated completely. The fossil fuel industries are now the biggest supporters of innovation, providing their funds, expertise, advocacy, research and resources to expand the ocean economy, stabilise the climate and prevent mass extinction of biodiversity. How did that happen?

Fossil fuel companies support large scale ocean based algae production because algae makes their businesses sustainable. Algae factories convert CO2 into hydrocarbon. That closes the loop of the carbon cycle and creates valuable commodities from the burnt coal and gas and oil. It turned out that this process was the only way that fossil fuel extraction could continue. Algae conversion produced a massive sudden increase in global prosperity.

The basic fact which people found hard to grasp is that it is completely fine to move carbon from the crust to the air as long as we then turn it into something useful instead of leaving it to pollute the earth.

The first irony was that the ocean economy proved the saviour of the coal and gas and oil industries by putting them onto a sustainable ecological footing. This was trumped by the even bigger irony that the main political opponents of carbon mining were those bleeding heart liars who screamed the loudest about their concern for the world climate and biodiversity, and whose action did the most to delay effective climate action. The main conflict with the practical methods to stabilise the world climate came from climate campaigners.

From the perspective of the mad times that we now call the age of destruction, ending in the early twenty first century, the shift in thinking that we have managed would have sounded impossible. Understanding all this is an essential part of inverting our thinking for the new paradigm.

The basic problem with fossil fuels, as explained in the speeches at the great first congress with the whales, is that unless you have a way to take the added carbon back out of the air, you will eventually be on a path towards boiling the sea. Under that scenario, the world economy would collapse long before runaway climate change occurred.

We now have a way to take the added carbon out and convert it into new useful products at industrial scale, so the emission problem is solved. But that took a long time to explain to people, especially since the stock prices of the fossil energy industry embed a quantity of carbon reserves that would be enough to send our climate on a one-way trip to Venus if just added to the air as CO2.

Success was not easily won. In fact, it could have been very different. Only visionary leadership within the fossil fuel industry changed the old policy of climate denial, and delivered the resources and political will needed to research and develop carbon mining.

The decisive big meeting happened in New York City, in the Swannee Tower high above the West Side, at a long table looking out through glass windows with sweeping views up the Hudson Valley and down the New Jersey coast.

The CEO of global oil, gas and coal conglomerate OS Corporation, Mr Collaine St Baukueng, opened the discussion. Mr St Baukueng put the case for business as usual, arguing that deflection of the political process away from measures to address climate change remained an urgent priority. Here is the transcript of the discussion, beginning with the opening remarks on behalf of OS.

“Colleagues, I warmly welcome you to this important discussion today. I should first reiterate the advice you have received, that our meeting today is secret. Our agreed strategies to protect our existing systems must not be made public. Any publicity about the fact that we are meeting, or about our views or plans, would damage our goals. I trust all of you here to keep this strict confidence.

“The use of oceanic energy at the scale planned by our algae competitors changes the whole field of our operations. We must do everything to stop this attack on our wealth and on our very existence. We have analysed the data, and conclude that the emerging ocean economy, in conjunction with land based renewable energy, will make fossil fuels worthless. Our reserves will be too expensive to extract, even without a carbon tax. Diesel from large scale ocean based algae production will soon be less expensive at the pump than Saudi crude oil. Moore’s Law of exponential improvement is working in algae energy at an even faster pace than with semiconductors or solar panels. That displacement of our stockholder value is an unacceptable prospect.

“Our traditional energy industry is moral, safe, trusted and secure. Internal combustion engines and coal fired power stations are flexible and economic ways to deliver energy for transport and electricity. Algae farming is immoral, unsafe, risky and dangerous. We have good examples already in how the tobacco and sugar industries fought off the attacks of critics for decades in defence of freedom and liberty. We have already sown enough doubt about climate science to stymie effective government action. A large and influential cadre of conservatives are hostile to science and instead believe our case.”

“I know you are all familiar with our main public talking points. It is useful to reiterate them here. Leaving aside how far the science is settled on global warming, it is very clear that regulation of carbon emissions will have no effect on climate. Our priority is a long-term plan to deliver competitively priced energy, as the key to affording investment in new technology for a clean environment. Only when free markets balance supply and demand can we ensure reliable and affordable energy.

“We support the scientific method, forming policy on the basis of evidence, but that is exactly what the climate lobby fail to do. All of the climate measures proposed are purely symbolic, expensive feel-good measures. And their advocates are not interested in reasoned debate, but are only trying to mobilise a popular front aimed squarely at making energy more expensive. They shout down or just ignore anybody who wants to enter into debate about it.

"Their focus on spin over substance is shown by how they pretend that shifting industry to China helps the environment, even where Chinese operations have higher emissions to produce the same output. And then there are completely absurd policies like subsidizing wood pellets as so-called biofuel, a wholly destructive and useless idea that destroys forests when we could be making energy from coal.

"The scientists want to restrict debate to the peer-reviewed scientific literature and the United Nations. What we need to understand is that while the consensus that humans are causing global warming is clear, there is no scientific consensus at all about how to fix the climate. The mad idea that we should stifle the economy by making energy more expensive is not part of any peer-reviewed consensus, but is solely a product of political group-think. These climate lobbyists jump from climate science to advocacy, saying that just because it is clear that temperature is rising we should accept their opinions on policy. I say we should not do anything of the sort.

"China and India are going to expand their fossil fuel use whatever the USA and Europe may say. Affordable energy is the great motor for economic growth and poverty reduction. We want, as responsible corporate citizens, to help our own nations avoid falling for nonsensical claims that are damaging and costly and cannot achieve their objectives. Leaving aside how climate science has made exaggerated predictions of temperature rise, it looks like the policy suggestions from the climate lobby are also exaggerated, especially regarding the supposed advantages of renewable energy. The climate lobby promotes an adolescent emotional response, failing to apply the logic of cause and effect, failing to see the practical consequences of its proposals. We don’t want to just hurt ourselves so a few undergraduates can feel good about it.

"We need to invest in biofuels, in biotechnology, in information technology, but not at the expense of the centrality of oil, coal and gas. Innovation can make these new industries profitable, but we need to criticise subsidies that slow economic growth by promoting forms of energy that do not generate wider investment. The real victims of a slow down in investment, caused by government policies that disregard market signals, are always mainly the poor, who can’t get jobs and who need the help that a strong economy brings.

"The climate lobby always claims the moral high ground, but its views that cutting emissions will cut temperature flies in the face of all research evidence. Yes there is science behind it. Greenhouse gases cause warming. But the weather response has been nothing like the predictions.

“This ocean industry threat to our profits and viability is of a different order of magnitude to previous suggestions to expand the size of government through carbon taxes. The ocean industry is a real competitor to us since algae production is driven by commerce rather than by the bureaucracy of the bumbling United Nations. Carbon taxes are socialism by stealth. The social engineers masquerade as environmentalists in order to achieve their real main goal of big government, gaining votes through a corrupt and incompetent tax and spend strategy. The targets they set are both unworkable and pointless, not delivering any possibility of temperature reduction except through the collateral damage of causing economic collapse through raising energy costs. The carbon tax model would not actually reduce the amount of carbon in the air.”

“These new ‘unicorn’ companies engaged in algae research and biofuel development do not rely on government subsidy. They have now hit on a model that can raise private equity for share market investment against highly profitable prospectuses. They will expand simply by selling into a free market. We have to move fast or we will go the way of Kodak.”

“Our strategy has the following prongs. We will lobby governments and the United Nations to ban ocean based algae production, on the model of the successful ban on ocean iron fertilization. We will sow fear and doubt about environmental impacts, suggesting that unforeseen results could cause mass extinction. There is a good example in the scare campaign about ocean iron fertilization by our useful idiots in the environmental movement. They successfully stopped trials by sowing the idea that the iron was pollution being dumped at sea. It suited us that almost no one noticed the direct positive effects of iron seeding on the ocean productivity of the salmon industry, and the complete absence of any negative effects. Just the suggestion that iron was dangerous was enough for the stupid media who lap up any claim that tinkering with nature must be stopped.”

“We will argue that the diesel from algae is of lower quality than fossil oil. Car drivers are highly susceptible to suggestion from advertising and strategic media commentary. Once this idea is out there in supposedly reputable locations it will be a solid meme.”

“We will refuse access to our refineries for their ocean crude. These plastic fish that they want to build require major cooperation from the petrochemical industry, with resources and expertise. They will not get that help.”

And so it went. The participants in the New York conference to save fossil fuel thought they had hit on a final solution to prevent the paradigm shift to sustainable energy. The ideas of the One Sea Conference, the coded name of this New York event, certainly did get some traction. The depth of human ignorance and delusion meant that many people based their opinions and actions upon emotional prejudice rather than logic and evidence.

But the times were against these advocates of twentieth century beliefs. The algae proponents were far smarter, and unlike the UN emission reduction efforts, were able to turn the big energy suppliers into allies rather than opponents, so the conflict collapsed.

Luckily for us and the world, we had friends at the One Sea Conference.

Glon Broom Jr.

Next to speak at the One Sea Conference was Mr Glon Broom Jr, head of engineering in the global oil company Loellish Ltd

“The oil industry must completely reject all ideas that reject science,” he began. “We must form alliance with the new technology of ocean based algae production. We must consider our strategic position politically, scientifically, ecologically, morally and most importantly economically. Those among us who disagree, who propose opposition to the new algae industry, can't count and can’t see. This disruptive technology spells the end of our previous business model. It is on track to remove double the total amount of carbon emissions from the air, and stabilise the climate at a profit.

“We can be part of that and provide all our capital, skills, resources and contacts, or we can go out of business. The algae economy is proving that the entire liberal theory of CO2 emission reduction as the framework of climate response is nothing but a corrupt farce. Reducing emissions has as much prospect of stabilising the world climate as reducing defecation has of delivering sanitation - none. The old scientific climate consensus has a massive logical hole that algae is driving an oil tanker through.

“We all need the logical smarts to grasp this simple numerical argument. Unfortunately, many in the emission reduction lobby still believe their own fantasies, and are incapable of serious dialogue outside these corrupted assumptions. The big hoax is not climate change but the false claim that emission reduction is the path to address climate change.

“The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement sought to impose economic costs in the trillions while promising to reduce temperature rises by only 0.2° Celsius over the 85 years to 2100 AD, not counting earlier pledges. That is flatly ridiculous and no sensible person should have ever fell for it. Read it and weep. The emperor has no clothes. All the expense and effort of the Paris Accord would have delivered zero mitigation of actual temperature rise. This is stupid, a waste of time and effort and money, and worse, a crazy diversion from urgently needed climate security and economic investment priorities. But many of us have not caught the new paradigm. We need to change our old thinking.

“The Paris treaty was never the ultimate deal to fix climate change. It was only ever a corrupt device to enable rent-seeking by the climate bandwagon. The old UN ideas of decarbonising the economy and emission reduction are irrelevant to any real solution to climate stability, and should be junked as obsolete and dangerous. Poor nations only signed at Paris to get cash. Taxpayers from wealthy nations won’t pay, and that will be the end of the Paris climate romance. We will always have Paris, if you don’t mind the Casablanca joke, but now Paris signifies a warning of the danger of climate group-think.

“The corrupt UN system was just rehashing the failed Kyoto Protocol with its corrupt diversion of effort away from effective solutions to climate change. Solar and wind technology are useless at climate repair, since the only thing needed for climate repair is removing carbon from the air. Carbon removal is the big game that we have to drive. Solar and wind crowd out R&D by soaking up hundreds of billions of dollars in annual subsidies. Solar and wind do nothing to repair the climate. So they could hardly be the only things working to repair the climate. To do that we need carbon mining.

“That is where we come in. By supporting research and development of large scale ocean based algae production, the established energy industry will continue to pump out all of our proven and unproven reserves of oil, gas and coal. Algae can convert all the added CO2 into useful stable products. Global warming’s new math is that carbon removal is orders of magnitude bigger than emission reduction. We need to collect the CO2 from coal fired power stations, take it out to sea, and use it as feedstock for industrial algae production at mega scale. We are the pioneers crossing the new frontier for the world economy.

“Emission reduction is just dumb. It assumes the climate can be fixed by cutting growth and raising energy costs. That means sand in the gears of the world economy, and will cause a grinding halt to activity, completely failing in its dream of saving the world, and instead inducing mass poverty. Why would anyone support that?

“Climate policy should focus on energy research and development. It is unfortunate that the liberal left claimed ownership of climate policy. The stupidity of the left polarised the debate and made it harder for carbon mining to emerge as the keystone for the turn to infrastructure as a growth strategy. Paris was a paper tiger.

“Let us be clear. The science is clear-cut: Climate change is real and dangerous and caused by human industry. The Holocene climate stability is over unless we act fast. Oil, coal and gas are the motor of industry and prosperity. We want to keep our dominant economic position. The way to do that is to switch to algae. We will own the big investments by getting in at the start. This new industry is like aviation in 1903. Who at Kitty Hawk could have imagined modern airports and air travel?

“Carbon mining is a paradigm shift in climate science. Einstein defended relativity against a hundred scientist critics. He said study the numbers, and if one scientist could prove the numbers are wrong then he would listen. When a paradigm shifts, the adherents of the old way of thinking have emotional and practical commitments that prevent them from studying the numbers and the theory of change. The scientific paradigm shift in climate science from emission reduction to carbon mining is based on observing that if we mine twice as much carbon as we emit then we can save the fossil fuel industry and deliver climate stability. That is something that should be very attractive to everyone here today. But people have not even studied or discussed it as a real prospect, precisely because it destroys the emission reduction paradigm beloved by the climate lobby.

“Liberals have convinced themselves of their own delusional moral propaganda. They are incapable of discussing facts. Let us not be like that. Facts are our bread and butter. Fixing climate change is not up to governments and scientists. Stopping global warming needs private investment in research and development. Governments should steer not row, setting a regulatory framework for business investment without bias toward any technology. Scientists can give us facts, but their ideas about policy are often stupid. We will prove that recycling carbon emissions from coal powered energy using ocean based algae factories is the only economic thing that will save the oil, gas and coal industries. Industrial algae production will increase our profit and deliver social and environmental licence to operate.

“Solar and wind are practical and rapidly expanding. That is a great thing, a source of clean innovative energy, as long as it does not get politicised through subsidy. Solar has reached the takeoff point where it is economic without subsidy. Moore’s Law of exponential improvement in computing also applies in solar, and also in algae. But we should not pretend that solar or wind have any prospect of helping stop climate change, given the numbers on the expected zero temperature impact from all the Paris Accord efforts.

“Investment and regulation should proceed on a level playing field. We should advocate the technologies that will sustain our business model. Algae technology should be pursued, and needs our backing to succeed against the corrupt politics of the United Nations, who class all “marine geoengineering” as illegal, because it undermines their exclusive focus on emission reduction. We need to help drain that swamp, and bring fairness into the investment rules.

“Carbon mining technology is at an early stage, but the business case is compelling. Industrial algae production is the best way to save biodiversity, and also save the oil, gas and coal industries. Building infrastructure from plastic and other carbon materials made from recycled carbon emissions will remove more carbon than all fossil fuel emissions. Creating enduring value means working with new technology instead of against it. Finding ways that fossil fuels can be compatible with CO2 removal are the only thing that will protect shareholder value and profit for oil, coal and gas.

“We as an industry have flirted with denial of climate change. Denying scientific facts is a placeholder ideology, an attitude that just rejects the need for climate stability. Denial of climate change seemed to be the simplest popular way to protect the value of our investments. Denial got traction in the right wing media due to realistic distrust of the policy prescriptions of liberals. But such denial is not sustainable. We cannot win through ideas that are not based on facts, since critics will rightly accuse us of vested motives. We now have a far better argument in carbon mining using algae.

“We must reject the UN language of decarbonisation and emission reduction. Those policies are on a collision path with the fossil fuel industries. We can address that debate by focussing on how fossil fuels can become sustainable by using their carbon pollution as a resource for major new infrastructure and energy technology. We will use the oceans as the new frontier for pioneers and inventors through industrial algae mining.

“Once Moore’s Law kicks in to make carbon mining profitable, coal will be back in a big way. The involvement of government should not be to subsidise operations but to enable research and development. Subsidising the operation of private companies is socialism, and is a path to stagnation, tyranny and corruption. Capitalist economics provides the market dynamism that has built modern wealth and prosperity and innovation. Carbon mining is the way to save capitalism.

“When government regulates well, the risk of innovation is reduced within a strategic policy framework focussed on security and stability and prosperity. Only socialists subsidise unprofitable technology. At the moment, the externalities of fossil industry are socialised by treating the air as an open sewer. That externality can be removed by carbon mining.

"The problem is that governments are not neutral about technology. They play favourites and pick winners, often based on popularity rather than results. When governments provide subsidies and permits, the decision process corrupts market forces by ideology and politics. Attitudes about fossil fuels versus renewables are especially ideological. The left is hostile to fossil energy. But the fact that climate science is settled does not mean climate policy is settled. Rather, climate policy has settled on a hoax, that reducing emissions could fix the climate.

"We advocate small and effective government with a focus on policy and security to enable economic growth and moral virtue in a free community. Governments must provide rule of law as the central function of state to regulate markets to deliver public goods. Emission reduction completely fails against those values, and is a dangerous throwback to central economic planning. Capitalism works through a decentralized market system with free competition and pricing. This observation demolishes the idea that carbon taxation should be central to climate response. The climate model that focusses on reducing emissions alone is a recrudescence of socialist planning, suffering from all the ills of stagnation and corruption and inefficiency that brought down the Soviet Union.

Taxing carbon makes energy more expensive, private industry more difficult and big government more intrusive and powerful. The political reaction against expensive energy then means carbon taxes fail, and the result is just to make the world hotter, the oceans more acidic, and society more conflictive and poor. We should prefer the view that instead of the emission reduction nightmare we can harness the profit motive to remove more carbon from the air than we add, creating a world where high energy use and high biodiversity work together.

"We all like our cars and electric power. Some of us still think the easiest way to get the greenies off our backs, at least temporarily, is to assert that the greenies are mad because world science is a conspiracy. But denial of science can be refuted by simple facts, so deniers get a bad reputation. Climate denial is enabling the planet’s sixth extinction, with potential to take us down too. We need to shift from the crazy claim that climate change is not caused by man to a view that by mining carbon we can establish a new profitable industry that allows oil, gas and coal to retain their central place in the world economy.

“The last time the world had 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air was in the Pliocene Era, three million years ago. The sea was then thirty feet higher. It is a simple obvious matter of numbers that carbon emissions have now created the physical driver to lift sea level by thirty feet. We have to remove that physical forcing or the world will flood, possibly in a few centuries, possibly in decades, possibly tomorrow with a dramatic ice sheet collapse. That is bad for everyone, including us. Reducing emissions does not remove the excess CO2 that is driving climate change but only seeks to slow the pace at which it worsens, and the numbers show it even fails at that.

"CO2 is hard to collect at scale, and worthless until it is transformed into something else. Finding ways to mine carbon from the air and turn a dime on it is hard. We need an evolutionary adaptive path, putting resources into research and development. A good analogy for how we can work out how to mine carbon is the evolution of whales. Fifty million years ago, the ancestors of both whales and hippos lived in coastal rivers. Some of them found that by swimming out further to sea they could prosper. These swimming hippos gradually evolved to become the ancestors of the great whales of today. We can mimic that evolution at a rapid pace using industrial innovation.

"We can start carbon mining with plastic run-of-river 'hippo' bags to produce controlled algae blooms on polluted rivers like the Mississippi, to convert the nutrient back into fertilizer and stock feed. This will also fix the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere by turning the runoff phosphates and nitrates that now pollute the sea into algae, which can then be sold for fertilizer and other products. River laboratories will enable materials and design to be sorted for industrial algae production as a basis to replicate in coastal waters. We will use tide and wave power for pumping, we will breed algae species suitable to high CO2 environments, and we will pipe in CO2 from coastal power stations to maximise productivity.

"Coastal operations will provide the basis for gradual expansion of algae farming to the deep blue sea, much as hippos gradually lost their feet and grew flukes and baleen to become the whales that dominated the oceans for fifty million years until yesterday. Our algae ‘whales’ will mimic the real whales, but will apply technological ingenuity to evolve much faster, in years not decades or centuries. The expected path for research and development of algae factories for carbon mining promises to be like the aviation industry. Flying was at take-off point a century ago, and has since grown to a scale completely unimaginable from Kitty Hawk.

"There are several reasons why carbon mining can fly even faster than planes. Firstly, the fossil fuel industries need ways to sustain our competitiveness against renewables. Cheap energy is a public good. Solar prices are now quoted at three cents a kilowatt hour, but solar undermines grid stability and does not help fix climate change. Until the externalities of climate destruction can be addressed, fossil fuels have a foul odour. If we can reuse the carbon we dig up, then world energy use can rise to a whole new paradigm, with power essentially becoming free. Shifting carbon from the crust to the atmosphere can only work if it ends up in stable form, such as graphite skyscrapers and road bitumen.

"Coal is the best potential ally for industrial algae. Coal is a massive industry that needs to shift its paradigm to have a future. Our industry has the expertise and contacts and need to back carbon mining using industrial algae production. Solar and wind cannot solve the problem of having too much carbon in the air. They actively displace negative emission technology, which is the only method able to deliver climate stability. Advocacy of emission reduction creates a policy framework that is unworkable. We must respect the lessons of why socialism has always failed to deal with incentives. Sustainability at scale requires the leadership of free enterprise.

"Climate politics has painted us as ‘special interests’ who have corruptly prevented rational policy. We have to prove that is not true. The early political consensus on climate policy was only because the conservative side had not fully thought through the implications of carbon pricing.

"The whole infrastructure of internal combustion engines and coal fired electricity is under attack from the renewable energy lobby. Climate economists and lobbyists are not engaging in objective analysis, but are twisting data to support the goal of shutting down fossil emissions. We need to think creatively and strategically to defeat this attack. Economics is part of the story, together with the whole cultural and political debates around climate policy, such as implications for size and role of government. We need to overcome the paralysis on climate. We get the blame for the collapse of planetary biodiversity and threat of collapse of civilization. The answer is for us to focus on carbon mining at industrial scale, in cooperation with governments and scientists.

"We can’t draw from the tobacco playbook to play dirty in public debate. But we can point out that climate lobbyists are obfuscating facts as well. For example, there is the fact that emission reduction by itself can do nothing to reverse climate change. And there is the fact that higher prices for energy have a devastating ripple effect through the whole economy. There are also the problems of intermittency of renewables, reduction of grids to a residual, and scaling to baseload reliability.

(to be continued)

The Paradigm Shift


Mr Glon Broom Jr, head of engineering in the global oil company Loellish Ltd, continued his address to the One Sea Conference, the secret meeting attended by leaders of the fossil fuel industry to decide their approach to climate change and new energy. The sceptical tone of the conference had been set by the opening speech from the head of OS, advocating a confrontational approach to rival technologies such as algae carbon mining. And yet Mr Broom’s proposal for a cooperative stance had a compelling logic and vision that were swaying the listeners with the elegant simplicity and clarity of his ideas. He now moved to explain more about the nature of the paradigm shift required for the world energy industry.

“We need to address the security dimension of climate change. That means insuring against the significant risk of rapid unexpected tipping points, due to the excess amount of carbon in the air and sea. As a global security priority, we should be looking at how to remove the dangerous carbon from the air, not pussyfooting about with policy levers like a carbon tax. Emission reduction cannot help. Economic incentives through carbon taxes are basically irrelevant to the security problem of unpredictable risks such as sea level rise. The Russians did not stop Hitler in World War Two by changing their tax code. Climate change is an urgent security problem on a scale comparable to the Second World War.

“We all know politics is polarised. Our critics assume that climate policy is a simple matter of angels versus devils. They are mobilizing a popular front against the fossil fuel industry to put the planet on an imagined path to salvation. If only it were so easy as that simple religious faith imagines! Advocates of climate stability must instead look for allies able to develop carbon mining. The fossil fuel industry contains the only organisations well placed to do that.

“Our conservative allies have stumbled badly in their approach to climate politics. The political traction gained by denying climate change is a seductive mistake, attractive only to those who lack ability to understand quantitative arguments. So let us turn the data to our advantage to analyse our options. We need to gain the confidence of people who are denying climate change, so they recognise the enemy is not climate science but the policy proposal of emission reduction.

“Climate denial is a Big Lie whose moral odium means those who deny climate change are not trustworthy, since they show they can’t understand basic facts of the greenhouse effect. The prospect of American capitalism falling in a screaming heap as a result of this Big Lie requires a dramatic about face by the fossil fuel industry. You may say that is impossible, but I say the prospect of making a very large amount of money from carbon mining should focus our thick skulls.

"Far from pandering to ignorance through climate denial, we will explain broadly that our industrial interest is to find profitable ways to remove more carbon from the air than our products add, as the only way the fossil fuel industry will save our skins. The only paranoia in this debate is from the false idea that emission reduction can help to stabilise the climate. As the scientists say, all the emission promises together would only reduce temperature rise in 2100 by 0.02°C from the do nothing scenario of a 4.5° rise, a rounding error from no change at all. There is no answer to that critique except fallacious deflection.

"We are correct to condemn emission reduction proposals as part of the progressive vision of politics whose features include weak borders, rejection of traditional morality, promotion of social welfare payments, state intrusion on freedom of speech, etc. The decisive step we must take now, to form a new paradigm, a new way of thinking that will capture the popular imagination, is to separate climate change from progressive politics, and present climate as a strategic security problem with viable commercial solutions. Only through that hard logic can we win the debate and mobilise all our leadership to provide funds, skills, contacts and resources.

“The military security reality is that climate stability is vastly preferable and more economical than global social upheaval. Without preventive action now, we risk creating a billion climate refugees by unforeseen sea level rise and other climate impacts. But emission reduction fails to do anything to slow that risk.

"Climate stability can only be delivered by carbon mining, managed by the fossil fuel industry. The dithering and delay from the false emission reduction path of global political agreements will mean global upheaval and suffering, as a result of failure to remove the security problem, the dangerous quantity of carbon in the air.

"The fossil fuel industry must lead policy debate on the relation between emission reduction, climate stability and military security. The left of politics make climate part of a progressive package that raises the hackles of traditional communities, while the right have been unable to split climate from the progressive paradigm. Algae factories are the technology that will disrupt this political paralysis on climate.

“Fossil fuels are keeping lights on, houses warm and cars running. The world is a long way from wind and solar energy delivering these mass market public goods at reliable scale. Algae factories will feed straight into our existing infrastructure. Algae farms on one percent of the world ocean, with ability to produce double the amount of carbon we emit, can operate commercially, funded mainly by re-use of coal based carbon. The economic benefits of such a transformation of our energy systems are many orders of magnitude greater than the possible impacts of emission reduction.

“To show the scale of the mistake caused by putting all our climate eggs in the emission reduction basket, consider just as a hypothetical illustration if emission reduction measures could reduce global fossil energy use by 2% immediately. If achieved, that result would also reduce CO2 emissions by 2%, from the current annual addition of ten gigatons of carbon to 9.8 gigatons per year, a trivial change. That would delay the time of arrival of dangerous two degree temperature rise by the equal amount, 2%, say from twenty years to twenty and a half years, by six months in the year 2040 or so, effectively nothing.

“Please understand though, that the actual forecast from emission reduction advocates is far slower and weaker, due to the grave political barrier of popular unwillingness to reduce energy use. The Paris Climate Accord stated that rather than such an immediate reduction, all its pledges would instead increase emissions by 50% by 2030, from ten to fifteen gigatons of carbon. By contrast, carbon mining aims to provide an economic method to store more carbon than we emit, with a goal of storing 20 gigatons per year in hydrocarbon form in bags at the bottom of the sea, in bitumen on roads, and in vast plastic infrastructure construction. Carbon can produce useful commodities that will keep for ever. The comparison is between removing 0.2 gigatonnes per year by emission reduction or 20 gigatonnes by carbon mining, a hundred-fold difference in scale.

“We must mimic nature to enable rapid economic development of algae factories, aiming for sustainability at scale. An ‘algae whale’, a floating fabric storage container, could hold cubic kilometres of algae, floating in the vast corridor of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. We can make fabric whales for a range of other uses, such as removing the plastic pollution in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

“The only benefits of emission reduction are removing pollution and as a means to develop technology for carbon mining. But it doesn’t even work for that technological goal, instead serving as a form of central planning that operates as a political barrier. To treat emission reduction as an end in itself is a recipe for climate catastrophe. We must reject central planning. The moral and economic collapse that central planning caused for the Soviet bloc is the great warning of what will result for the world from the current policy focus on emission reduction alone. Central planning is unacceptable to the free world.

“Emission reduction is a recipe for ongoing deadlock on climate policy. We need solutions to climate problems that are acceptable to our moral values of liberty and enterprise. This is about moral principles in economics and politics. A strong and prosperous economy rests on a thriving democratic civil society and private sector where people pull their own weight. The insidious force working against this vision of capitalist freedom is the cancer of government, the displacement of private enterprise by a leading role for the state.

“We cannot accept that methods to stabilise the climate must be led by governments. Governments are intrinsically incompetent to have the level of involvement inherent in the model of carbon pricing by central planning. We should aim instead to severely restrict and curtail the scope of state activity.

“Carbon mining using large scale ocean based algae production can be a major new profitable private enterprise. Governments have an essential regulatory role, but putting a price on carbon oversteps that regulatory job, and would undermine the ability to achieve the goal of rapid sustainable scale up of private industry. We must reject the dogmas of the climate lobby, including decarbonisation of the economy and the false hypothesis that emission reduction can promote climate stability.

“Emission reduction as an ideology rests on major contested assumptions about the role of the state, causes needless economic damage, generates political conflict with key players and just gets in the way of achieving a realistic path towards climate stability. Placing a price on carbon means that power bills will rise, as people are asked to pay for the externality of global warming. But that logic is a mirage.

“Many advocates of climate action think that overall reduction of energy use is an end in itself, so they want higher energy prices. These are the people we must contest against, as their activities undermine the prospect of climate stability and our commercial interest in supporting a stable climate where fossil fuels have enduring value. Their plan to make electricity and fuel more expensive in the short term undermines all prospect of political agreement on climate, as it naturally causes mistrust from ordinary people who cannot see the logical connection between higher prices and a safer and more secure world, and don’t want to pay for a pipe-dream.

“Any proposed major structural political change, such as carbon pricing, has basic strategic and tactical problems to solve. The political rejection of carbon pricing would only intensify if carbon pricing was rammed through against widespread community opposition. The practical result would be minimal slowdown or small reduction in the growth of emissions, with worsening political conflict. And that would mean a hotter world and more acidic oceans.

“The largesse of a carbon tax for businesses who are seeking subsidy for their technology would not guarantee any climate benefit, given the incompetent track record of governments in implementing such large scale programs. For example, European subsidies for burning wood are just the sort of lunacy that government carbon policies can promote if badly designed. Any policy that causes a bigger role for governments is corrosive for civil society and private sector development, which together have far bigger potential effectiveness than government leadership.

“Advocacy of carbon taxes sucks up the political and commercial oxygen needed for realistic policies such as carbon mining. Step back from the rhetorical dream of the economic models and consider the political reality of a corrupt and stupid world. The hypothetical benefits of carbon taxes must be weighed against their real direct impost on actual economic activity. Making transport and power more costly in the short term is a hit on growth and wealth creation. Carbon taxes hinder economic activity in the name of a state led process of alleged creative destruction whose actual impact on economic incentives is far too small to deliver climate stability.

"Carbon taxes are socialism masquerading as environmentalism. The sneaky real objective is to use carbon tax to redistribute wealth and buy votes. Its supposed climate benefits are a Big Lie, a hoax based on paying a lot for nothing.

“We have to admit that the fossil fuel industry are not angels. The bad habits of buccaneering are part of the industry DNA, dating back to the monopoly of Standard Oil. But that illustrates that we cannot easily see our own strategic interests.

"Like Kodak, many of us want to live in the past and prevent innovative new technology to meet new realities. By embracing carbon mining as a main R&D goal, the carbon energy industry will transform from climate destroyer to climate saviour, from reactionary to innovator. By developing methods to collect and transform CO2 from large scale point sources such as High Efficiency Low Emission coal fired power stations, the energy industry can mobilise resources, skills and contacts to close the carbon loop, using emitted CO2 as the feed-stock for a new world economy, using large scale ocean based algae for industrial transformation of CO2 pollution into valuable hydrocarbons.

“Our argument that the fossil fuel industry can be a force for climate stability will be attacked and twisted. That obviously suits the climate lobby campaign to increase government intrusion in society and dependence of everyone on the 'Big Brother' state. I am simply pointing out that the needed industrial removal of carbon from the air can only be done in alliance with the people who put the carbon there in the first place, the fossil fuel industry.

“Our old ways will not control the market. Carbon mining by the fossil fuel industry will not at all exclude wind and solar. We only observe that solar and wind do nothing to remove carbon from the air, which is what we need to do.

“Our enemies are embarked on an ideological plan to shut down the fossil fuel industry and wreck the world economy. Consumers will totally rebel against any governments who are stupid enough to mount such a frontal assault on American capitalism under the sneaky guise of neutrality and the false promise to decarbonise the economy. But we need to disarm that assault now, through calmly considered rational argument and by force of example.

“Our interest includes to prevent polar icecap melt, sea levels rise, and damage to biodiversity. All those problems are bad for business and bad for the planet. We have the bullet loaded for all those catastrophes and don’t know when the trigger will be pulled by Mother Nature.

“Humans add ten cubic kilometres (km3) of carbon to the air every year. Emission reduction, the basket holding all the Paris eggs, means we keep adding 15 km3 of carbon, 50% more, not even delaying dangerous warming, effectively doing nothing. Carbon reduction, what I call carbon mining, holds the potential to remove a net 10 km3 of carbon from the air every year while still emitting the same amount. The impact on climate stability of these rival scenarios are totally opposite. Emission reduction is pointless and worse, diverting focus from the main global security problem of climate change.

“Climate science is settled by the broad scientific consensus, but political strategies to respond to climate change are not equally settled. Emission reduction cannot deliver climate stability. The IPCC has demonised the entire agenda of carbon dioxide removal for deflecting focus from its holy grail of emission reduction. Yes there has been open debate about climate science, but that same level of openness is largely absent from debate on climate response. The lame and tendentious outcomes of Paris with its sole focus on emission reduction rely entirely on the ‘bureau-speak’ of Intended Nationally Determined Contributions. INDCs should more accurately be known as spin and lies.

“The IPCC is holding a metaphorical gun to the head of the planet, saying reduce emissions or else Gaia gets it. Given that emission reduction is pointless and politically impossible, other options are needed if we wish to avoid an earth-shattering kaboom, to quote Marvin the Martian.

“Calculation of the effect on warmth of all the Paris commitments compared to business as usual proves very clearly that emission reduction by itself can do nothing to reverse climate change. All these vaunted consensus Parisiens have done nothing to refute this simple calculation. Their emission reduction arguments stand bereft. When the King is pretending to wear a glorious suit but is naked, the moral course is to keep telling him until he takes notice.

"The economic reason is called ‘crowding out’. Rises in public sector spending can drive down or even eliminate private sector spending. In the climate space, advocates of emission reduction crowd out carbon mining by observing that carbon mining enables emissions to continue and then falsely asserting that emissions are intrinsically bad, which is as sensible as saying that defecating is bad. Pollution is only bad when no one cleans it up. A massive paradigm shift in thinking is needed if we are to get serious on a global scale about actually subtracting carbon from the air to step back from the brink of major instability.