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Category: News & Fair Start Headlines
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The Fraud Killing Mostly Black Babies
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Is UNICEF Legit or Doing More Harm Than Good? Ask Leadership the Right Questions on Issues Like Child Abuse and Find Out.
Recently, a 2-month-old by was seriously injured when a 10-year-old girl dropped the baby on a tile floor, authorities in Florida said Monday, announcing the arrest of a 36-year-old woman who they allege instructed the child via the online video game Roblox on how to kill the infant.
Far away, UNICEF’s lead, Catherine Russell recently stated:
Children are the world’s most precious resource. There is no greater cause than championing their rights and wellbeing. I am committed to this cause with all my heart, and I am proud to join the UNICEF family.
Ask Russell – here – how UNICEF accounts for children entering the world without parental delay and readiness entitlements, and how that impacts what UNICEF claims to value, and claims to do? Would she admit children entering the world without the resources they need reverses much of the work UNICEF has claimed do to?
If she can’t say that children have an overriding right to a fair start in life that creates an authoritative demand to the wealth they and their mothers need, she’s hardly being legitimate or inclusive and empowering.
Wouldn’t – given the role of birthing in the climate crisis – that deprivation have done more harm than UNICEF did good? Is UNICEF really just backing a standard that uses children as economic inputs for growth?
Fair Start’s research suggest UNICEF is doing exactly that.
We ask these question because Fair Start, as the fundamental fraud and reparations watchdog, is looking for those choosing to benefit at deadly cost to others by not admitting that birth inequity has undone many claimed impacts, and instead moving towards requiring preemptive and liberating debt/reparations accounting, which encourages parenting delay, readiness, and equity for children as they enter and impact their ecosocial environments.
These questions can divide the world into the fair and unfair – create a true border of human freedom and obligation that can reset national borders from the inside out – and allow us to overcome influential and unfair barriers to self-determination.
A body of growing peer-reviewed research showed it was physically impossible to be free, or self-determining, without this reform because there is no system of values, including representative government, outside of relative positioning to the social and ecological state-of affairs that determine infant health, equitable positioning, and opportunity, without this accounting. Those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not government and the wealthy.
That research also showed many organizations masking this fact with omissive claims of entitlement and impact, elevating their positionality in an illegal system operating in violation of child welfare laws rather than legitimating it, and often choosing to benefit their white kids at deadly cost to millions of children of color. Such entities and individuals – nonconstitutives or noncons – fall outside the protections of the scope of social obligation, and deserve as much protection and liberty as they ensure for children entering the world.
Concentrations of wealth and power, including philanthropic funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis often use decoy institutions and individuals – media, nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to create a fantasy world of micro-level social justice impact that hides liability for the macro-level forces undoing the impact.
Wealthy families in polluter nations use these low child welfare standards to undo upstream what they are pretending to do downstream – selling vegan products in growth markets that do more harm to animals than our sales do good, suing over immediate threats to endangered species that will go extinct long-run, centering children’s needs well after they arrive in the world and most of the damage is done, focusing on political candidates when their ability to represent is being slowly eroded.
The fantasy world ensures wealthy whites benefit at deadly cost to mostly persons of color. Not addressing birth and emancipatory inequity allows some to treat inherited wealth and other privileges as somehow magically outside of the democratic process, and to use it, their positionality, and growth to slowly disenfranchise the average voter.
One of those costs is violence. Nations using illegal violence to defend entitlements without being positioned to actually represent their constituents begets violence, like mass shootings, which usually target innocents rather than the wealthy families benefiting for the representative system.
We are now at a place where these families and their concentrations of wealth and power can use the wealth they made through the sustainability scam to attack the democratic process itself. The solution to this problem is to recognize that governments have no inherent authority, but only what is derived from and conditional upon them empowering their constituents, and that includes any authority to entitle wealth made at deadly cost to others that is partially owed in climate debt/reparations accounting. Inequity in one’s share in democracy is ineffective.
If you want a better future, find the most influential institutions and individuals engaged in entitlement and impact fraud – those who can be made prominent example of – and ensure they tell the truth and back accounting that legitimates their authority.
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Fundamental Fact/Value Checking Philosopher Peter Singer on Animal Rights
Singer prioritizes food reforms as a form of animals rights and liberation. However, Singer is part of a larger, broken and divisive system of birth privilege that was never equitable or sustainable – and had no protections for animals.
The full title of his famed 1975 book, Animal Liberation, is Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. His failure to promote an “our” consistent with animal liberation – ensuring entitlements first drive smaller and more equitable and empathetic human communities – vastly undid his work and masked the key drivers of the climate and inequity crises killing millions today.
Humans are animals, so inclusive animal personhood just means functional human rights – something Singer undercuts.
Fact: Not ensuring all children a fair start in life, as the first and overriding human right, does more harm to animals than Singer’s work on food reform does good – by far. The inequity and growth he ignores causes more suffering and death to animals, and humans, than vegan food reforms save.
And it’s only getting worse as the climate crisis sets in. Don’t get scammed. Ensuring children a fair start is the most effective way to free children, animals and the rest of us. Instead of backing justice, Singer benefits at deadly cost to others by hiding how his positionality harms humans and nonhumans – allowing him to appear as an altruistic savior when in fact the wealth he guides in the effective altruism movement was made at deadly cost to the animals he claims to value, and in contravention of the utility he uses as a base metric.
What are real animal rights?
Again, humans are animals. Animal rights and law focuses on nonhumans because of their unique vulnerability. Why then not focus on infants and animals, and the creation of fundamental power relations? Those like Singer and others do not because that level of comprehensive vision involves equity, race, democracy, and other factors that require true tradeoffs against one’s positionality. Effective animal rights is expensive.
It’s easier to ignore all of that.
True animal rights and law focuses on the creation of power relations, and limiting capacity to harm others – the capacity that is the core of the Anthropocene and the antithesis of animal rights.
Singer uses the same legal approach to intergenerational justice as Exxon. He has for decades, and now continues, to conflate bodily autonomy with the capacity to harm others, free riding on the collective action problem of racial, generational, national, etc. birth positionality, using fraudulent omissions and benefitting from legal systems that oblige others without empowering them.
How is that animal liberation? How is it not racist to refuse children of color a fair start in life? Would Singer not be eager to ensure the fertility delay and readiness reparations discussed below because (among serving other values), they compensate for the absence of animal rights in human reproductive rights regimes, and evade harm to animals in the future?
He (and others, like Heather Gerken, who oversees animal law programming at Yale Law School) should admit they were wrong to not have done this before, and aid in moving the deadly wealth their work mis-entitled – much of it sitting with effective altruism funders – to now save human and nonhuman lives via fertility delay and readiness reparations. We can also make legitimate claims against the privileges of his children, whom he benefited through a performative form of animal liberation at horrific cost to other children.
The animal rights movements has been like a garden club celebrating nature on a micro level, while refusing to intervene in the clear cutting of the forests around the club, often because they benefited from their own silence. That happens enough and ecological catastrophe sets in, while effective altruism and other offshoots now use wealth made at cost to the professed values to drown out black and other more vulnerable voices demanding effective reforms, like treating black birth equity as the overriding human right. Animal rights advocates and lawyers often choose to continue the charade because their illusory audience and impacts seem better than not talking about these things, even if the underlying system undoes them. A better approach would be to choose a system that does not undo the work.
Who is responsible for the climate crisis?
Concentrations of wealth and power, including philanthropic funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis often use institutions and individuals – media, nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to create a fantasy world of social justice impact that hides liability. The fantasy world ensures wealthy whites benefit at deadly cost to mostly persons of color. As early as 2003, activists now involved with Fair Start were urged by the nonprofits in which they worked to promote food reforms as a means to benefit animals, reforms they and their employers knew were being undone by growth and inequity which enriched only a few.
Not addressing birth inequity allows some to treat inherited wealth and other privileges as somehow magically outside of the democratic process, and to use it, their positionality, and growth to slowly disenfranchise the average voter. We are now at a place where these families and their concentrations of wealth and power can use the wealth they made through the sustainability scam to attack the democratic process itself.
Singer’s beneficial impact is being undone as children enter the world without the resources their rights require, resources that would empower children to constitute – to be included – in legitimate political systems of self-determining peoples. Singer instead starts his proposed reforms by ensuring the capacity of the powerful to punch down and exploit the vulnerable, and in a way that benefits a few at cost to many. This burdens the children of wealthy families with increasing death debt – a debt which must be paid at some point, and saddles businesses with billions of dollars in increased climate costs.
Singer’s life, and the life of his kids – these are worth no more than other lives.
The fix?
Singer could simply support Fair Start lead Esther Afolaranmi and her efforts before the United Nations to legitimate political systems by ensuring accurate and equitable climate reparations for the harm done. These reparations ensure debt/savings accounting for children as they enter the world. It is impossible to choose who has influence over you, to be truly free, without this reform in how we communicate, and act. Those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not government and the wealthy.
“What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?”
Martin Luther King
Singer’s work, which does not benefit nonhumans on balance because it ignores the necessary family reforms, replicates the historic undercutting of the civil rights movement by white, wealthy entities – entities that had no intention of allowing equity by ensuring birth, developmental, and emancipatory equity.
We can do better.
Fair Start reforms and debt/savings birth accounts mean no child’s life will be made worth more than the life of another. This reform targets the fraud wealthy white families and fake charities in polluting nations have been using for decades to hide liability for the climate crisis.
These families and their concentrations of wealth and power have not created value. Instead they first used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens while benefitting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies.
This is fraud, falsely claiming entitlements, and hiding the larger impacts, in a way that benefits some at deadly cost to others. You can spot this nonsense when anyone siloes off social justice from the creation at birth of actual power relations, and thus evades the need to include others as ends – and not means – to accurately determine truth and value.
TAKE ACTION: Urge Singer – here – to admit these truths, and to say whether or not he backs a political system that moves towards equity and self-determination for all, a system where all entitlements derive from including and empowering others? Will be back the idea of an overriding human right to share equity, or continue to just elevate his positionality in a fundamentally illegal system rather than legitimating it?
You can also find other icons, quote them in a way that identifies the values they seem to want to further, and then show how their ignoring share inequity in democracy as children enter the world does more harm to their values than they do good.
Ask them: How do you account for children entering the world on what you value, and claim to do? How do you ensure self-determination for all? You are looking for sustainability, or impact, fraud.
You can also take legal action. States attorneys generals are obligated to account for the full spectrum of harms created by the climate crisis and its drivers, and to contrast them with potentially fraudulent claims many individuals and institutions make about their impacts. This assessment includes deviation from baselines that would have prevented the crisis, birth inequity that ensures those who benefitted from the crisis live while those least responsible die, political inequity and vote dilution that means the average voter has little influence on who can control their lives, etc.
In the core sustainability scam that drove the crises, many charities focused on sensational, micro-level campaigns while quietly undoing beneficial impacts with macro-level and inequitable family policies that enriched management as well as those funding the entities. You can urge your attorney generals to correctly account for the harms, and ensure preemptive justice for the most harmed.
Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation
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Did the charity you give to make the climate crisis worse?
Ask anyone claiming to good work in the world on any given day to account for #children being born that day without what the Children’s Rights Convention promises those kids in resources and rights. Then ask the person claiming to do good to reassess their claims. You will see a lot of good that many claimed to do actually fall away, by metrics we all believe in, with harm escalating as temperatures rise.
Fair Start Movement intends to prove in court that the practice of excluding key context from public benefit claims – for decades – exacerbated the climate crisis in the worst ways possible, skewing how we perceived the problem. We will also show that taking back and using the wealth some accumulated from these deadly omissions, to now compensate #mothers and children is the most just and effective way to better the world for all.
A lot of those who made #wealth on false claims are betting the average person is too distracted, uncaring or uneducated to understand what I just wrote. We hope, in grassroots action, to prove that wrong too.
Learn more at FairStartMovement.org
Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation
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Guest Blog: The Strong Financial Drive for Profit is Causing Harm to People, Animals, and the Environment.
Guest Contributor: Ayubu Nnko, founder and CEO of Education for African Animals Welfare Organization, based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
He is leading EAAW organization that focuses on animal issues while focusing focuses their hands-on efforts in Makalama and Iramba district,located in Singida Region because of it’s severity in rabies cases, number of less cared animals like dogs, cats, donkeys and low level of awareness on animal welfare in these areas. EAAW is also leading the Cage Free activities for layers in Tanzania while emphasizing and educating communities on plant diet for ethical and health reasons.
Some people with great financial ability, have been helping to develop the business of raising animals for food as part of their prestige, or because they have a great ability to buy food and products derived from animals. This has been done without considering the harm they cause. They may or may not be aware of this, although there are various reports that explain the effects caused by large animal farms, the environment and the effect on humans to a large extent due to its results.
It is saddening to see that animals suffer while others enjoy it. Animal agriculture produces 65% of the world’s nitrous oxide emissions which has a global warming impact 296 times greater than carbon dioxide. It causes harm to many innocent people while the powerful do not suffer from the harm they cause. They have the opportunity to create an alternative or to continue living while their actions cause pain to millions of people, especially the powerless.
Studies show that raising livestock for human consumption generates nearly 15% of total global greenhouse gas emissions, which is greater than all transportation emissions combined. This is the reason why it is important to insist that the majority of people abandon the use of foods and products derived from animals in order to reduce these serious effects on animals and the current and future generations.
According to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), meat and dairy specifically accounts for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. If the world is to meet its target of limiting global warming to well below 2C, some degree of diet shift will be necessary.
Organizations that support animal welfare work have a great responsibility to ensure that the owners of large farms raising animals for food and other products, are responsible for supporting campaigns to eliminate the use of animal products, but they also support animal welfare activities to avoid those great effects that affect the world now and in the future.
It is sad that the immense poverty that is caused by the imbalance of the economic opportunities is continuing to cause suffering whereby poverty, unemployment and ongoing climate change continue to be a hindrance in addressing animal welfare problems in Africa.
The Fair Start Movement is in collaborations with Africa based organizations through the Seeds for the Future projects in Uganda and Tanzania among others. They are trying to bring in the balance where women can get enough food for their families while serving for their children, and through the improved environment, animals can have enough food which is part of their welfare.
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Forget Left v. Right. A Handful of Wealthy Targets Stand Between You and Freedom.
Human rights and democracy are meant to empower individuals, and thereby free them. But today’s world is very far from ensuring human rights. Why? Human rights and democracy are based on the fundamental condition that individuals are acting as free and equal persons in public affairs.
That fact implies something very specific, an inversion between growth and self-determination, that is missing from our political systems today.
Fact: Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights promises each person a meaningful role in their own government.
Because of the way we plan our families, people today do not act as free and equal persons. Totally inequitable and unsustainable family planning fueled massive population growth and a massive and growing gulf between rich and poor that disenfranchised the average voice and diluted democracy to something very far from self-rule. Abysmal levels of child development, which enabled unsustainable population growth and massive inequality across the globe, has degraded our democracies, drowning out each person’s voice and effective role in their own governance. Maybe the best long-run indicator of whether we are achieving democracy is compliance with children’s rights – and worldwide we have been and continue to fail in this regard.
The same poor family planning modeling that ensured mass child abuse and neglect, an endless gap between rich and poor, and the ecological crises we face today also diluted each citizen’s role in their political system. Over time that modeling replaced empowered citizens with disempowered consumers. This influential primer spells out how each of our voices matters less as overcrowding worsens.
Current and near universal systems of family planning make no connection between the creation of persons, and their democratic empowerment. This is not necessarily about population, in the traditional sense.
Fact: If the legitimacy of governance derives from the people governed, then consensual governance requires family reforms that would allow the intergenerational and constructive consent of those born, account for how growth reduces the ability of each person to consent to governance by others, and protect an ecological baseline premised on the absence of human power – thereby enabling consent.
At this point, in many democracies, the average individual voice and vote have been diluted to meaningless by growth. In many democracies, like the United States, it is so crowded that it’s actually irrational to vote.
Here is a recent study on the issue. Imagine trying to assemble a constitutional convention in the United States today. Our size alone would preclude a functional system, and yet the legitimacy of our political system is premised on that capacity. One of the best attempts to refute the rule that democracy is inverse to population size proved the rule because the authors had to define democracy so narrowly (as the reduced chance of a faction taking power) to the point of undercutting its fundamental value to try to even make the argument.
That population growth, enabled by the failure to require equitable and personal development and education, has also degraded our ecosystems, compounding the threats to human rights, democracy, and freedom by making the conditions for social cooperation more challenging. Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, saw population growth as a core threat to human freedom.
Fact: Each member’s role in a democracy is, cetus paribus, inverse to the size of that democracy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract 50-51 (Donald A. Cress ed. & trans., Hackett 1987) (1762);
Our current family planning policies, which encourage economic growth irrespective of individual levels of child welfare, fair starts in life, and environmental consequences, have made things worse. The United States is a largely unrepresentative democracy where family planning policies are designed to create large future populations of consumers, workers, and taxpayers, rather than a sustainable number citizens capable of collective self rule. They create people for shopping malls, not town halls.
Fact: To bring the United States representative ratio in line with that which existed at the country’s founding, the House of Representatives would need to balloon to a whopping 5,697 members, or nearly double that of the largest national legislature in the world: China’s National People’s Congress, with 2,980 members. DeSilver, D. (2018).
Is there a solution?
Functional democracies require highly developed citizens, which requires improving birth conditions and seriously investing time, love, and resources into every child born.
There is no way around this. The Children’s Rights Convention was designed to protect human rights that are specific to children, and ensure children’s development. But there have been no serious efforts to link the Convention to better family planning, and actually ensure the Convention’s intended outcomes. We do not apply the Convention upstream, to ensure children are born in sufficient conditions. Because we never never accounted for the role poor family planning plays in creating massive inequality and differences in opportunities in life, we failed to ensure human rights and minimum standards of welfare and equality for children. And as a result, we never ensured that adults become sufficiently developed to engage in the self-rule of true democracy. Without the requisite safeguard of ensuring serious childhood development, world population has exploded and created a negative feedback loop making it harder and harder to create systems of human rights and democracy. Today the average individual has little or no power over the government, their voices are lost in the crowd, and wealthy persons and corporations have significant control over our lives.
We can fix these mistakes.
We can apply serious child welfare requirements, like the Convention, to family planning systems by making those systems more cooperative, with parents working with their communities to bring children into the best conditions possible. That sort of working together embodies a real social contract, one that brings reasonable people on the left and right together, and ensures every child gets a fair start in life and a chance to become an empowered and accountable citizen. This is a social contract that eliminates unearned benefits and undemocratic influence, which reasonable people on both sides should oppose.
By starting at the source, and using Fair Start family planning to decentralize concentrations of power, including governments, large corporations, and wealthy families and individuals, we can shift resources to empower and free future children.
Children’s right to a fair start in life is the genesis of the social contract, consent, and political freedom. And as such we can obtain that right by all means effective. Fair Start Movement is helping push this process of improving family planning forward, through things like child-first Fair Start order legislation and rights to nature litigation that work together to temporalize and reorient our understanding of things like human rights and democracy, and will build a free future for all.
A Litmus Test for Real Democracy?
Our being free and equal persons involves whether we first treat the capacity for each person’s self-determination as directly inverse to population growth to the addition of other equally empowered people, relative to a neutral baseline such as the nonhuman world. In other words, while many would reasonably trade off the relative self-determination of living alone in the wilds and accept societies with growing populations because of the benefits they bring, they would only do so up to point, rather than losing one’s role in the democratic control of their society. Free people will always act to preserve their equal role, their mattering politically, in the process. In such a dynamic, each person is politically empowered, and empowered equally, such that all groups are arcing down towards optimal and ecocentric population sizes. If people are empowered equally and thus matter politically this direct inversion, relative to neutral position that makes the concept of self-determination coherent, is inevitable. This inversion is crucial, and consistent with the need to invest equitably in each child so that they are empowered parts of functional democracies.
The first reason persons would be obligated to follow laws is if the legal system intentionally includes, and reflects the will, of its constituents. This test determines whether systems are doing that.
Does such a test seem like something most persons would pass today, or is it perhaps too abstract to apply? If we study media and political discourse around population and constant messaging around threat of the “baby bust” to economic growth, including statements by popular thought leaders regarding the crisis of underpopulation, we might infer that many people would fail this test. They would fail to act in the way the test requires. Many may not care about growth because they know the average person does not matter politically, in terms of having an influential voice. This apathy would be justified given the debilitating impact of growth on each person’s political influence – making it irrational to even vote in many societies.
Wealthy and powerful thought leaders support growth because they also know their power is not going to be offset by the addition of new empowered citizens who matter equally. If anything, the average person born today is likely to simply become a consumer, worker, taxpayer, soldier, etc. in systems over which they have no democratic control, and which mostly benefit others. These top-down economic systems are backed by the coercive power of the state, the threat of violence, that defends state-created property rights. Under our test above such people are not living freely and equally, because they are not politically empowered.
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Wealthy Animal Protection and Environmental Organizations Created a Fantasy World of Impact That Hid the Climate Crisis, Ensuring Countless Black Children Will Die
As the United Nations has recognized, the climate and related crises killing millions of persons least responsible for the crises are fundamentally driven by ubiquitous and inaccurate impact claims that create a fantasy world – largely funded by wealthy and white concentrations of wealth and power – masking the reality of the Anthropocene and its deadly deprivation of political equity.
Contrasting such claims with relevant facts can avoid the hiding of liability for mounting deaths as the climate crisis escalates, and can incentivize life-saving changes in messaging and behavior. It can avoid misinformation that drives the fantasy world of accurate costs and benefits that ensured the crisis and now minimizes climate reparations.
Most claims by animal and environmental protection organizations in the United States have not accounted for the impact of growth and inequity, and inequitable growth-based policies, on animals, 1) growth and inequity which together are doing more harm to humans and animals than conservation, dietary change or other common interventions are doing good, including 2) increasing demand for animal habitat and products, and 3) driving deadly emissions that cause suffering and death to animals and humans.
Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.
In one case a member of a prominent and wealthy family funding animal and environmental law projects insisted on omitting the role inequity and growth on their charitable impacts claims, knowing these omissions were hiding drivers doing more harm to animals than the funder’s work has done good. They feared how full-spectrum evaluations of claims, costs and benefits, around the climate and related crises, would impact the family’s wealth.
These organizations show prioritization of growth over equity, exploiting children’s birth positionality – including race positionality – in ways that are killing millions, and could kill hundreds of millions of persons and untold numbers of animals.
Are charities always on the right side of justice? Compare the assumption of a legitimate baseline to the use of that baseline by Exxon, and the relative impacts of growth versus dietary change.
There is a difference between those who choose a system of inequitable and exploitative birth and developmental positionality, which is the largest driver of nonhuman suffering, and those who do not. Those who choose the former, often oblivious rich kids who want to performatively help animals while ignoring that on balance they harm them, is the nonsense that created the climate crisis.
Why It Matters
How can we ask those like Exxon to admit full impacts, back true liberty via degrowth, and change course towards restoration and measurable legitimacy/equity, if the most key social justice movements – the ethos of which demands the change – does not?
The climate crisis will cause unimaginable suffering, and fundamentally derives from illegal entitlements designed around exploiting future generations of humans and nonhumans. It is physically impossible to remove what we do from the context of who we are becoming as a species, and taking claims out of that context ignores loss of equity on at least eight levels, impacts we are all responsible for given our birth, developmental and emancipatory positionality – existential impacts which for most of us have exponentially greater impact on others than what we choose to do in life.
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How is it not racist to back a system of birth entitlements where children of color get a tenth or less of the wealth as white kids, are largely excluded from the political system, and bear the deadly cost of an ecocide they did not create? We would and should ostracize anyone who refused to hire black people. Why not identify, reform or if they cannot be reformed, ostracize anyone backing largely old white make billionaires whose wealth is being made at deadly cost to millions of black children, wealth that could be moved to still save lives? There is a bright line test for this sort of racist, based on whether one supports universal birth equity or not, now pending before the United Nations.
Take action: Ensure the organizations you work with specifically account for the impact of growth, and growth-over-equity policies, on animals and the environment, wherever making claims about specific beneficial impacts achieved through targeted interventions, and in claims using the term “sustainable” or comparable standards.
Leaders and organizations either support accurate claims that include the key contexts and standards, as well as fundamental fairness where we we all move towards not benefitting at cost to the welfare and self-determination of others, or they do not.
Organizations must work from an equitable orientation of truth, context, and fundamental political obligation, that is not inconsistent with being merciful to animals. Ask their leads whether they think all children deserve a fair start in life, and how ensuring that relates to UN mandated fair climate reparations based on measurable standards of equity which, because they are primary, preempt all conflicting interests.
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Is the Charity You Donate to a Decoy? Rich Families Use Them to Avoid Climate Liability.
Wealthy families make money on growth driven investments, and avoiding any obligation to fund children outside of the family getting a fair start in life. One way to do that is to make those who wish to assist those in need think that they are making progress when they are not.
Decoy nonprofits do this by making claims that hide key factors, like inequity and growth.
Greenwashing is generally when someone conveys a false impression or misleading information about how a company’s products or services are environmentally sound. Often it involves using terms like green, sustainable, humane, safe, or regenerative, etc. when those making the claim are on balance harming the environment.
One of the worst forms of greenwashing is called growthwashing, or hiding the impact of population growth when making a claim. When a company or nonprofit makes any claim related to the environment, check to see if they are accounting for the way outdated family policy, and the growth it creates, is undoing that progress. The claims usually omit the fact that population growth is undoing the what is being claimed, increasing demand and consumption in a way that is causing ecocide.
That means those making the claims chose family policies that put more animals in factory farms, research labs, and puppy mills, ensured more children would be born and raised in conditions of abuse, suffering and deprivation, and policies that also ensured each person had less of a voice in their political systems – the systems many groups point to as the best source of change.
The growth many claims hid (and sometimes promoted) undid roughly three-quarters of the reductions in carbon emissions achieved since 1990 by increased efficiency and alternative energy production.
https://populationmatters.org/news/2021/01/study-population-growth-cancelling-out-climate-change-progress/
Those lies will help lead to the death of millions in the future.
Growthwashing is one of the worst ways to exacerbate the climate crisis, and it prevents reforms that could save millions of lives. Growthwashing does something else that is uniquely harmful. It hides the impact human rights can have on our lives when we truly understand them, and the way fairness – first and foremost in our creation – overrides conflicting rights and interests, like property rights to wealth, much of which was made by externalizing costs on future generations. Growthwashing hides that we cannot separate our values from who we should be.
Growthwashing hides what we owe to future generations, and instead it enables our quiet exploitation of them. Growthwashing, unlike simple greenwashing, involves robbing us of our freedoms in a variety of ways, in addition to harming us through our environment. It hides our valid claim to resources for young women to plan their families in a way that can save millions of lives.
Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.
In one case a member of a prominent and wealthy family funding animal law projects insisted on omitting the role inequity and growth on their charitable impacts claims, knowing these omissions were hiding drivers doing more harm to animals than the funder’s work has done good. They feared how full-spectrum evaluations of claims, costs and benefits, around the climate and related crises, would impact the family’s wealth.
TAKE ACTION: TEST ANY CHARITY YOU BACK. IF THEY REFUSE TO TREAT BIRTH EQUITY AS THE FIRST HUMAN RIGHT, THEY COULD BE A DECOY.
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To Be Free Means Being Fair. Ensure All Can Self-Determine, By All Means Effective.
What Is Fairness at Base? Preemptive Discourses and Reparations That Change Birth and Development Conditions to Ensure Real Freedom, and Not the Freedom to Harm Causing the Climate and Other Crises Killing So Many
Summary
Climate reparations for kids enable political legitimacy, thus preempt all conflicting laws, and must be measured and used in a very specific way: Funding the having of children only above an ecosocial and political threshold or line of equity and thus self-determination.
Under the International Bill of Human Rights anyone can use any means effective to assist moving wealth at the top to young women in order to plan to save the next generation because constitutive entitlements always come first. Ask anyone or any organization who made a claim of creating some beneficial impact for how they accounted for the impact of children entering the world on the day the claims were made. You will find zero actual or functional protections for infants and animals almost universally. Ask anyone what policy they are using to functionally protect children as they would enter the world – using a metric like share equity for example, and thus indirectly protect the animals humans would otherwise consume.
Ask anyone what policy they are using to functionally protect children as they would enter the world – using a metric like equity for example, and thus indirectly protect the animals and nonhuman habitat humans would otherwise consume. They will have no real answer because to ensure that protection would require obligating would-be parents to plan in specific ways, something that is widely considered forbidden because of an obscure policy mistake by the United Nations between 1948 and 1968.
How could there be a constitutive process enabling the use of collective pronouns in constitutions and covenants if each person could not choose to orient from such a norm, rather than from the directives of those claiming to represent? Had Micah Johnson, or Ashli Babbitt, known this they might have done other than they did. The world today is in crisis because we created many who could not understand what you are reading here.
Regardless, we can fix it.
Member states to the human rights regime have no authority to protect concentrations of wealth and power holding entitlements, when that money is owed to young women who are the only ones who can have and raise kids with share equity, such that governments can actually be sovereign, actually represent the constituents born and raised by the mothers, and have actual/legitimate authority to enforce any entitlements at all. Where else would government get authority?
There is no obligation without inclusion, and no inclusion without equal influence offsets relative to zero (0, 1, 2…0). All rules should be fair; the first rule should creates rule-makers.
Through this standard and process we will avoid impact scams that threaten to cut reparations by trillions, and increase the death count by tens of millions. The borders of human power are not lines on a map, but an ecosocial threshold/line of share equity – the only irreducible obligation. To exist is to be in a seamless web of benefit and cost with countless others. Freedom means bending those so that all make choices for themselves, not others.
We all have to work to get all children over the line as they enter the world so they can constitute their own borders, and that line is being seen as the tradition and enforced isolation of would-be parents being broken every day in favor of collective work in care groups around the world, and as activists ready to target the adult children of concentrations of wealth and power who owe the most. How could there be a “We the people ….” obligating us without a collective decision-making process? It would be physically possible. The threshold/line is the true border of human power and freedom. Fair Start is not everything, but it is the first step to all things,
This not about population – this is relational power, on eight levels, that inverts from would-be parents lording over future generations toward measurable and legally entitled empowerment and inclusion of the vulnerable before they arrive. The wealthy can pay, or poor children will die. Those we ask to choose can either say their benefitting at deadly cost to others was correct, or refute the system at based and assist in correcting. Our UN effort inverts the system to help ensure the right result, by all means effective.
History
Critical legal errors made between 1948 and 1968 began a series of events leading to the climate, inequity, and democracy crises killing so many today. The errors involved letting false assumptions about existing entitlements take root, ones that centered in family law and policy.
They included a narrow conception of power that focused on the use of violence by the state and its derivatives, rather than things like the power of parents over their kids, our power over the environment, how wealth lets some control others, etc. This narrowing – of human freedom – was done to protect the entitlements of wealthy families from scrutiny as the human rights regime was being formed, and at base cut the values that comprise self-determination out of the premise of who we should be.
The assumptions bypassed ensuring democratic share equity – where each person has a minimum and measurable level of self-determination, as well as the necessary critical children’s / environmental rights, in reproductive rights systems. Instead, having children was deemed a matter personal to the parents, with no functional obligations to others – a move that allowed the mostly white officials and wealthy families that designed this standard to privilege their children and benefit from investments in unsustainable growth.
Because having kids was wrongly assumed to be more self-determining for the parents than other-determining for the kids and community, freedom was – at an existential level – wrongly seen doing what one wished, not actually being positioned relative to others and one’s environment, to be free. The errors created chaos – which accounts for the sense that something unfixable is at work.
This seeded a fundamental form of political illegitimacy. Rather than ensure that national sovereignty derived from the individual sovereignty of each constituent, the entitlements – through ensuring growth, vast inequity, and sub self-determination standards of child development – slowly converted broad political freedom into an attempt at economic freedom, as subjects began to crowd, distrust, disempower, and pollute each other out of town halls and into factories and shopping malls. There is no theory of law or legitimacy that can get around the basic need for share equity.
Key theorists, from Raz, to Dworkin, to Finnis, and even Kelsen – all made the same mistakes, mistaking bodily autonomy for share equity, which is now ensuring the death of millions. To think governments have authority to defend wealth made at deadly cost, when it could be used to save the lives of those it risked, is a fallacy and those engaged in it fall outside the protection of the social contract for obvious reasons.
Thus, demand, market valuation, legality and legitimacy, etc. – the many benchmarking values we use today – all were artificially manufactured to avoid costs that would have evaded the climate crisis, through a process of not investing enough in persons to empower them with real choice. All oughts or values derive from the idea of who – as free persons – we should be, and that begins with children’s birth and development standards pegged to concrete thresholds, like greenhouse gas emissions standards below 280 ppm. There is an objective morality marked by our relation to nature, and through it and our backgrounds, our relations to others.
The status quo standard, the inequity/unsustainability standard, enabled collection of wealth by enabling greenwashing and other deadly impact frauds (where the claimant was doing more harm than good, by their own metrics), and by skewing cost/benefit analysis to place deadly costs on others, mostly women and children of color with no political influence. The climate crisis shows a fundamental failure in criteria for evaluating truth and value, because we never included children as ends, versus using them as means, and as such ensured growth that overshot carrying capacities, and many children with no means to deal with the consequences.
It is a false premise that there is a obligatory “we” from which to live our lives until we change these facts because without a change we start by exploiting and thereby harming, rather than empowering in a way that is measurable with clear benchmarks, others. It is a false premise that there is a obligatory “we” if we start with zero actual protections for infants and animals, and zero actual protections is the case in our legal system today, almost universally. Ask anyone what policy they are using to functionally protect children as they would enter the world – using a metric like equity for example, and thus indirectly protect the animals humans would otherwise consume.
They will have no real answer because to ensure that protection would require obligating would-be parents to plan in specific ways, something that is widely considered forbidden because if the mistakes described above,
And all along, it became increasingly, physically impossible for the legal system to ensure laws were made by persons who were actually representative. As share equity dissipated, so did the representatives authority, but corrupt legal institutions and their representatives ignored this – exacerbating the crisis in what might be called the “authoriscam.” The mistakes mean wealth and many other entitlements recognized after 1968 are suspect, and their legitimacy may rest on the payments of climate reparations and death debts.
The Problem Today
The result of the above is massive white wealth supremacy today and an accepted paradigm of colonizing future generations with our costs, with those least benefiting from the crisis suffering deadly costs. How is it not racist to back a system of birth entitlements where children of color get a tenth or less of the wealth as white kids, are largely excluded from the political system, and bear the deadly cost of an ecocide they did not create? We would and should ostracize anyone who refused to hire black people. Why not identify, reform or if they cannot be reformed, ostracize anyone backing largely old, white, male billionaires whose wealth is being made at deadly cost to millions of black children, wealth that could be moved to still save lives? The inequity/unsustainability standard is still in wide use, millions are dying, and this is just the beginning.
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There are identity politics rising because member states sold away the democratic voice of their subjects, and national identity with it. There can’t be a meritocracy if we never included persons in a way that allowed them to assess and determine what merit means, and the climate crisis hints whatever criteria were used were way off.
We have to revise all cost/benefit models now ensuring inaccurate results because they are used an underlying democratic standard to obligate people to follow laws, but never actually included them as democratic constituents, but rather exploited them as economic means for growth. We now owe the difference to avoid children dying in heat waves we created, and then put them in. In other words, leaders defined terms like “sustainable” and “green” based on ensuring growth-based profits for their rich, and normally white, kids. They did not benchmark them based on the actual harm, on eight levels, killing millions of black infants.
This is the fox guarding the henhouse. Leaders today are assuming legitimacy to hide actual harm with low legal standards, the legitimacy of which was based on actually avoiding the harm. Legal institutions can use legal fictions after they have authority – they cannot use them to get authority, and imagine self-determination and inclusion/empowerment when the values are simply not there.
What is equity and self-determination?
Yes a woman needs the autonomy of terminating a fetus that would otherwise come to rule her life, but if she then dies in a heatwave because she has insufficient resources she was never really free, and anything that said or suggested it was “green” without actually having done what was necessary to avoid her death – using at least eight metrics – is greenwashing, and one way the metrics add together is to assess whether she had an equal and influential role in determining the rules that would have limited the power others had over her. Here, it seems, not much.
Everything we think, say, or do, begins with a collective orientation that is hidden behind the illusion of human bodily autonomy that created the climate crisis, and if we are to be free, in that orientation the addition of new constituents must offset the influence of each constituent by one, relative to a restored nonhuman world. That requires a threshold beneath which children should not be born, and above which any may be born with a collective exchange in care model collective planning that ensure offset via the threshold or line. Fair Start will soon be suing to fund accounts that would fund the thresholds
Much of today’s law and policy is based on the idea that humans act of out of self-interest. But there is a more fundamental driver of human behavior, linked to humans’ inclination to imitate rather than innovate beneficial behavior, in which humans choose criteria to evaluate truth and value that align with their (usually privileged) birth, developmental, and emancipatory positionality. Not having kids out of self-interest in the climate crisis mitigates harm. Imagining you are saving animals in the Anthropocene, and leading others to see you that way, framing reality as such, when the entitlements around your birth positionality did more harm than good to animals, is deadly.
Humans can only constitute the future through the language of obligation and the accurate linguistic creation of power relations. The fundamental mistake we all seem to be making is that our obligation is inverted: It would be physically impossible to be free unless we see ourselves as first obligated to persons who will parent, rather than first ruled by those at the top of the influence pyramid, e.g. officials, the wealthy, CEOs, celebs, etc., because all entitlement to influence derives from the governed and their primary equitable positioning.
Young women would have more justification to use coercion to get the resources they need, if to constitute, than the unrepresentative officers with guns defending wealth have to use it. This primacy of a discourse and the 1, and process inverting the direction of power, allows us to name high profile individuals that should be engaged. They are treated as members of a democracy, which is only constituted of individuals, and not as members of something that makes them beyond reach. And leaders of media urging racist and genocidal pronatalism in the climate crisis deserve what they get.
The Fix
There is a move underway at the UN and in many nations to correct the errors, and preempt any conflicting law or policy, rather than use the fundamental entitlement system that caused the crisis.
- Using the old standard and recreating the fantasy world of self-determination – even in the most basic language of impact we see everyday – that caused the climate crisis interferes with measuring actual harm for the crisis who owes what to whom.
- The risk of retaliatory violence is growing as temperatures rise and the wealth – the deadly costs of which fell on others – is denied the victims. In fact, much of the violence – including mass shootings – are misreported, with media omitting the political drivers of the acts. In terms of bearing the correct legal (inclusion in one’s democracy in a measurably empowering way) burdens and barriers, it should be more likely that leaders of concentrations of wealth and power die for not saving children, than children die for not being saved. But violence can be evaded.
- The solution is clear and many are moving towards it: Measurable share equity, or having an equal and influential role in limiting the climatological, social and other forms of influence others have over you, and that harm your self-determination.
- Member states to the human rights regime have no authority to protect concentrations of wealth and power holding entitlements, when that money is owed to young women who are the only ones who can have and raise kids with share equity, such that governments can actually be sovereign, actually represent the constituents born and raised by the mothers, and have actual/legitimate authority to enforce any entitlements at all. Where else would government get authority? There is no “we the people” without each individual being measurably empowered in that collective, and if one tried to benefit from as system law and order premised on inclusion such that others are left to self-determine as ends of offset each voice and influence equally relative to nature (e.g., 0,1, 2 . . .), there should exist none paying low costs and getting high returns by treating others as means. One is either using accurate, constitutive and legitimating language and action, or not.
- There is precedent for crossing lines to ensure the wealth is moved, like the Defiance work of the African National Congress. The key to this move is disabling current illegitimate entitlements – which drive everything – through the revelation of the fraud they create, and the death debt that encumber them and can be collected any anyone, anywhere.
An Inescapable Binary
The inequity/unsustainability standard, versus the fairness/legitimacy standard that should have been used by 1968, represents an unavoidable binary distinction. It differentiates along at least eight concrete values/metrics that measure the space between self v. other determining persons, (permissible emissions, political representative ratios, children’s wealth, etc.) and would result in trillions of dollars difference in reparations, and millions of lives saved.
The UN and related domestic legal actions implementing the preemption – dozens – would 1) standardize public benefit claims to avoid deadly and fundamental impact fraud 2) standardize climate and related crises loss and damage evaluations to account for all actual harm relative to real world baselines necessary for legitimate political systems and entitlements, 3) recognize the partial preemption of any conflicting entitlements with this process, and 4) recognize the right to entitle future generations with self-determination and share equity in their democracies as the basis of national legitimacy, and by all means effective.
This standardizes around actual harm (under 280 parts per million), rather than using the same standard – under pressure from the same wealthy families funding greenwashing – that caused the crisis (over 400). That’s the fox guarding the henhouse. Under this standard, every child born beneath the line creates a death debt the children of the wealthy carry. And to make some beg for charity when the thing is owed as a human right violates human dignity, and invites direct justice.
The threshold (which is the first point of political relativity for everything) is operationalized via a debt/savings account and a more collective form of family planning, and uses investments in a wide variety of resources including delay, time, cash, corporate shares, obligations that preempt taxes, time commitments, training and aid internships, etc., as well as parenting delay towards readiness, relocation, education and training, co-investments, etc.
The threshold, through debt and savings, can incentivize both the wealthy and vulnerable to change family planning, covering one’s debt before having kids, or alternatively, adding co-payments to the accounts before having kids. Accounts for particular collectives, care groups, fund kids only over the line, and also determine how actions can unwittingly move the line up, making it harder to get kids over.
The threshold is not a human choice. It is an objective measure of actual harm created by a fragile ecosystem and human needs that determine the impacts of birth, developmental and emancipatory conditions. The threshold is that, from which deviation caused massive harm. It is the antithesis of the fantasy world of “sustainability” created by wealthy persons who seek to now use it to minimize justice.
Piloting the change
There are pilots underway in various regions, including the United States, and while the UN human rights regime preemptively mandates the measurable threshold, activists are quickly evolving away from the eurocentric framework and towards Afrocentric care-based subsystems that mimic the origins of democracy in women’s care circles,
This process begins and centers on a discourse of intergenerational truth and reconciliation and mirrors the African National Congress Defiance anti-apartheid model of inverting illegitimacy and illegal entitlements. It uses a one question language test referred to as the constitutive discourse which converts the abstract preambles of constitutive legal instruments, which are needed to legitimate our power relations, to functional and inclusive processes.
A discourse to accelerate the change
The old social contract went something like men with money and guns writing rules for all others to follow, and drawing borders around themselves. This version sets a line – or border between freedom and power – beneath which children should not be born, and uses collective family planning discussions to get all kids over the line. Those kids can then write and follow their own rules.
The line or threshold is a full-dimensional border that can be used comparable to other apartheid-dismantling efforts.
There is a concrete discourse that urges target audiences to factor in the impact of children entering the world on any day the members of the audience made inaccurate social benefit claims publicly using the unsustainability standard which inevitably (we start everything we do with a decision, on the binary, about who we should be) contradicts the values of the speaker, and then ensuring the target audiences investing in young women using the fairness metrics as compensation for the fraud, and benefit at cost, that led to the crises.
The test lets anyone know which side of the binary someone falls – the inequity/unsustainability standard, versus the fairness/legitimacy standard. It lets us know who is punching down on the most vulnerable, in a universal circle of accountability, inclusion, and listening. And it ensures future generations will understand issue like what is covered here – which is not the case for most persons living today.
Many concentrations of wealth are retaliating, and taking extreme measures to hide the errors, avoid climate and other liability, and minimize or scuttle reparations. Defensive litigation is coming. Given the stakes as temperatures rise and inequity grows, there is the serious risk of violence. We need to make sure entitlements minimize that risk, not exacerbate it.
Future actions will test the model:
If a poor family needs access to air conditioning to survive, we will ensure the trespass laws defending the homes of the wealthy who benefited from the climate crisis cost-externalization scheme are preempted, and those in need get access. We will also ensure the death debt of concentrations of wealth attach to the adult children of the debtors, and will eventually be collected.
This is the binary choice, and every day we lose by letting debtors hide and avoid it: We can leave illegitimate wealth where it is or move it and save innocent lives as we invert the political system from top down coercion by non-representatives in what amounts to spamocacy, to bottom up investment and measurable inclusion.
Truth and reconciliation can mitigate the risk and unify around the value of measurable self-determination. Nothing has a more just, beneficial and liberating impact on children, animals, and the environment.
This is not intersectionality. Think of the values below all together as different sides of what it means to be free. Many children die every day because they are born without these entitlements, and all are inseparable and determined when we have children above or below the specific line of ecosocial inclusivity.
The framework standards – moving towards fluid borders, and functional constitutional conventions
- Welfare – ensuring things like health, nutritional and educational outcomes that are measured based on the world as it would have been had the United Nations in1948 actually used self-determination – rather than reproductive isolation of families – as the standard for who we should be. Google terms like “conviction” with terms “child abuse” and “child torture.” Those refusing a threshold benefitted from the suffering your are reading about to make money on things like growth-driven investments.
- Equality of opportunity – ensuring that one’s birth and developmental positionality is not a dominant factor in things like the income or savings one accrues in adulthood. What is it like to know you will work for others, be under their rule, just because of your birth positionality. It’s a life of doubt and subservience, driven by those who refuse equity. When we factor in deadly racism, extreme action is expected to save black lives: How is it not racist to back a system of birth entitlements where children of color get a tenth or less of the wealth as white kids, are largely excluded from the political system, and bear the deadly cost of an ecocide they did not create?
- Nature/environment (e.g., measurable emissions) – limiting emissions to levels that would not have caused the crisis, generally less than 280 ppm, and requiring the restoration of full biodiversity towards optimal ranges consistent with low-end UN growth projections. Current growth and wealth-based high emissions standards have already dilled millions. How should we treat those willing to choose a standard from which they benefit, but that kills others? How should we treat those that defined “green” to allow wealthy, white families to make money on growth-based investments, rather than a green that would have saved black infants’ lives.
- Successful parenting – ensuring that parents do not regret having children, including eliminating cases of neglect of abuse, through successful planning. All of the child neglect and abuse you may find online represents a failure for the parents too, but parental regret for a life largely lost is another measure to see what those refusing delay and readiness for an equity standard of birth and development are ready to saddle others with.
- Having an equal and influential share to determine all laws, including constitutional provisions – limiting representative ratios to those fitting with low-end UN growth projections. When some choose to other-determine rather than self-determine, by choosing economic families over democratic ones, it robs you of your freedom. How do free persons deal with such threats, and how have they in the past?
- Democratic, not economic, levels of trust – Metrics for trust among citizens must show their willingness to trust each other with legislation, and all lesser included forms of trust that implies. How much do you trust those around you, how is that related to those persons not getting what they needed growing up, and how does that impact your quality of life? The test for this high level of trust is called the lesser power asymmetry.
- Real efficiency – Ensuring outcomes, like gross domestic product, are based on the inclusion of others as equals tracked through birth, development, and emancipatory conditions that comply – minimally – with the Children’s Rights Convention and Right to a Healthy Environment as well as correlative rights and obligations. What are humans able to do if treated as ends? This means not exploiting others in disregard of the capacity of all to contribute highly. Many academics urged measures of efficiency that exploited children in a way killing millions. Whether a famous academic, or leading economist, how shall they be held personally accountable for benefitting at cost to others, and through a choice of fundamental systems characterized by top down coercion rather than bottom up inclusion and empowerment?
- Self-determination, or share equity, to limit the influence others have over you – Whether you are free requires an amalgamation of the other metrics above. How could your self-determination not be limited by those entering the world? In this value, It would not seem to be limited if the average person were not really being empowered at birth, but being exploited by others. Intergenerational justice is hard because humans – even the greatest social justice warriors – often want to privilege their children and use it as an excuse to harm others.
Measuring Loss and Damage:
There are efforts underway to measure and award loss and damage for climate change. But all fundamentally recreate the error that drove much of the crisis after 1948: The absence of sufficient environmental protections in family planning regimes, both to limit emissions well below 300 ppm and to ensure minimum levels of welfare and resources for all children to deal with adversity, like rising temperatures.
The current loss and damage evaluations ignore this fundamental error, and would award based on arbitrary baselines that minimize the awards. Moreover, they ignore irrefutable arguments regarding any national legitimacy and political obligation deriving from the measurable self-determination of its constituents, that would treat high-evaluation reparations as preemptive of any conflicting laws and policies. The action before UN seeks to standardize this evaluation, and avoid “the fox guarding the henhouse” with the concentrations of wealth and power, including governments, that caused the crisis dealing with it in a way that benefits them at deadly cost to others.
In Walden we learn that a basket weaver could not expect to succeed in the “free” markets being created by those colonizing his lands. But even Thoreau missed the fundamental value of nature in constituting power relations towards equity and freedom. To the extent the beadworkers of Amboseli face the same threat from the likes of Elon Musk and his sort, we can make harsh examples of moving their illegitimate wealth as a fundamental act of liberation. To use god’s standard, nature, to entitle justice is the avenging hand of a higher power. The beadworkers offerings are inherently valuable, as we ensure we treat others as ends, not means.
Why then engage the UN, or member states at all, if there is an authority higher binding them? They become instrumental, and useful, but without the withering lie of having the last word, and as demands for intergenerational justice stretch into decades of action that view will lift those demanding share equity.
TAKE ACTION: Use the discourse and truth and reconciliation above to bifurcate concentrations of wealth and power, whether an individual or institution, into free persons and unfree barriers. Rank the latter by their ability to make the change you know is needed, and scale up influence on the most influential barriers until they break. This work deals with the first border between you, any kids you have or care about, and freedom.
