• 

  How Does Degrowth Actually Work? LEED Co-Founder’s Open Letter Supporting Fair Start’s Climate Campaign Protecting Children 

   

  IPCC’s repeated Planetary 2030 Climate Crisis Carbon Pollution Reduction Deadline, requires roughly an 840 gigaton / $30 trillion reduction, which includes accelerating positive feedback loops like wildfire pollution and methane releases from melting permafrost and frozen methane hydrates.  IPCC stated that this reduction is required to preserve commerce, national security, cost-effective resilience, and a habitable Planet.

  Fortunately, $70 trillion of available investor assets can be rapidly deployed globally achieving the Deadline.

  The repeated IPCC Deadline is per se documentation that unrestricted growth and growthwash have exceeded the carrying capacity of the Planet, with a plethora of accelerating false and deceptive claims violating global truth in advertising protections.  These deceptive and unlawful claims are made in communications about what is green, sustainable, environmental product, environmentally friendly, eco-safe and many other broad, deceptive, and unsubstantiated claims including claims of material / substantive omissions

  More dangerous is accelerating greenhushing, blocking bonafide green claims and suppressing free speech, transparency, and democracy.  This degradation of democratic processes that could have mitigated the Crisis, has instead, limited the resilience of poor children to withstand it.  The recognized and exceeded 350 ppm CO2 safe level for atmospheric carbon, in fact exceeds the 280 ppm CO2 safe level for children. The UN this year calculated that over 2 million people have died from the Climate Crisis, many of which are poor children.

  This 280 ppm safe climate restoration level for children can be achieved in part by – wealth/income scaled family planning entitlements geared to ensure delay, smaller families, and a clear route in terms of where, when, how and with what resources every child born will survive and thrive.  These metrics are part of the consensus Green Initial Public (IPO) Offering Fair Start Pilot, providing a right to a healthy environment, through minimums and extra credit for supply chain carbon pollution reductions and zero carbon operating emissions, global forestry and illegal logging protections, electric vehicles, social equity including climate justice, reuse / circularity, and extensive toxicity bans and reductions.  Green IPOs measure increased cashflow from sustainability over any company’s global supply chain with consensus underwriting standards achieving SEC requirements, and substantially increase Green IPO company valuations from unprecedented investor demand. 

  Green IPOs have been documented in the 10-year positive statistical business case released at the NYSE, as achieving IPCC’s 2030 Deadline by rapidly deploying globally, available and substantial investor assets.  This paves the way for loss and damage reparations from accelerating climate damages that now threaten near- term cost-effective resilience.  For example, 29 years of ice-penetrating aerial imagery by leading global governments, documents that protections from 2’ of sea level rise flooding and 10’ of storm surge, are required by 2030 at a U.S. cost of $5 trillion to preserve commerce and national security.

  The UN documented this year that at least one million children died from the Climate Crisis, with children the most vulnerable bearing the greatest harm and accelerating future harm.  

  What do we do about this tragedy?  By statutory law in all US States and throughout the world when dealing with children’s welfare, the principle in force, is that we must act in the best interests of the child.  The basis of this predominant legal principle is that children are not able to defend themselves, and adults are subordinated to that principle and priority, and required to act in the best interests of the child.

  Further, equitably, children have had no role in causing this genocidal harm, and existing statutory authority including in the U.S, makes both those that cause this deadly harm including serious bodily harm, and those that incite or imminently further this harm, liable for genocide to children.  

  Given the greatly accelerating Climate Crisis with no solutions in place and accelerating deaths of children, children’s rights must be restored to a safe level to both protect and preserve their human and ecological health and welfare.  

  This is a well-settled matter of public policy and law, and a superior priority than any class of property rights since greatly accelerating death and serious bodily injury are at stake and prohibited in this instance by binding and enforceable international statutory law.

  There is no greater good than investing in the health, welfare and prosperity of our children who are our future.

  Very truly yours

  Mike Italiano

  Mike founded the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), Capital Markets Partnership (CMP) & ASTM Committee E50 Environmental Assessment, was USGBC CEO & General Counsel, directed approval of LEED 1.0 & was Chairman ASTM E50. Mike also wrote and directed development & approval of LEED RELi 1.0 and 2.0 national consensus resilience standard with Perkins+Will, USGBC & CMP. He published over 70 articles in the environmental field, authored seven environmental books. Mike has over 30 years of environmental experience including as Senior Analyst at the White House Science Office and Assistant to the Director, National Commission on Water Quality where he helped write the Congressional Report on the Clean Water Act.

                                                                                                                                                                                                        

   

                                                                                                                                                  

                                                                                                                                                  

   

    

   

  December 5, 2023

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  What is the Fair Start Fund? Learn More.

  How do we ensure funding that ensures young women harmed by the climate crisis can have their children at a time, place and with resources the protect their and the child’s equity? 

  Problem: Climate and other ecological crises are set to kill million of those least responsible for causing it, a situation exacerbated by greenwashing and political illegitimacy.  

  Solution: We can minimize these deaths by funding young women to delay having children, and to ensure they do have any children in a place and with resources to ensure that child will survive, thrive and live as free as possible, in a system of social and ecological self-determination as can readily assess. This is the human rights-based and first priority for climate reparations and because extreme wealth was made at ecological and social cost to these children, it is subject to reparations’ claims.

  

  We simply ask: What are we doing to assure the conditions in which children born and raised, including their environment and role models, are being improved so as not to undo the benefits of the work we are otherwise doing in the world? What was the deadly cost of not doing that over the last several decades? 

  1). Under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, children born and not yet born have a right to a fair start in life, not a future of ever dwindling ecological resources and the scourge of climate change.

  2). The system of extreme wealth for a tiny few, which has externalized costs on the many, has resulted in profound economic inequality, ecological burden, and climate injustice on todays children and the next generation of children to come.

  3). To rectify this, Fair Start calls on a system of reparations from those who benefited the most from this unjust system to be deployed as baby bonds that enable women and girls to delay childbirth until they are empowered and integrated into the their democracies and workforce, and to ensure autonomy through access to family planning technologies so that they can best chose when, where and how to have children in the face of climate catastrophe and ecological destruction.

  4). Many are already giving under this model, not waiting for dysfunctional governments to act while millions die. 

  

  December 5, 2023

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  What Is the Fair Start Movement?

  

   

  1. The extreme wealth we see in the world today was made by through a system of unsustainable growth, and illegitimate cost/benefit models, that forced costs on most vulnerable and degraded the climate in a way that is taking millions of innocent lives.
  2. The most just and effective solution is to calculate those costs and use them to pay young women to ensure they have any children at a time, place and with resources that compensate the harm and protect the child and their environment. This replaces illegitimate political systems with no functional protections in the having and rearing of children, and thus none for the ecologies those children would consume.
  3. Fair Start was designed to remove barriers to that process, including targeting deadly greenwashers, and ensuring a peoples’ human rights tribunal, based on the fundamental value of self-determination, with primary jurisdiction over climate claims against the specific wealth driving the crisis.
  4. To start any work from a baseline without those legitimating reparations reinforces deadly greenwashing and exacerbates the situation, hiding trillions of dollars in liability and risking hundreds of millions of lives.
  5. We begin by simply asking: What are we doing to assure the conditions in which children born and raised, including their environment and role models, are being improved so as not to undo the benefits of the work we are otherwise doing in the world? In asking the question we are looking for those who use child welfare policy to undo the values they claim to promote and are thus being unjust and ineffective.

   

  

  December 4, 2023

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  Climate Justice and a Growing Fight for Children’s Rights v. Unlimited Wealth Made at Cost to Others

  These are some basic facts about climate change:

  • Climate change is now harming fetal and infant health harm, primarily in vulnerable families of color, as heat increases threaten to kill millions in the future.

   

  • Roughly three quarters of attempts to mitigate the crisis has been undone by growth policies, policies that exacerbated the one-tenth wealth gap between black and white families, which violates basic provisions in the Children’s Rights Convention. 

   

  

   

  

   

  • Wealthy families and companies, governments, and media who made their money on unsustainable growth are trying to actually ramp up those policies, urging women to have more children without safeguards, to profit from the growth that would create.

   

  • These same entities are intentionally hobbling each citizens ability to influence these risks and harms, through their democracy, by using growth to dilute the average citizen’s voice.

   

  

   

  • Those same entities avoid discussions of this as they greenwash their work and policies – hiding their liability for climate reparations. Academics are assisting, trying to skew the baseline for climate reparations and minimize payments by moving the goalposts and what it means to self-determine, and minimizing the harm caused by the systems of wealth they relied upon and benefitted from at deadly cost to others their entire lives.

   

  • As a public interest attorney for many years, I was not allowed by the organizations I worked with to ensure these facts were disclosed in their messaging, and organizations funded by wealthy white families have quietly killed attempts to change the policies. According to a senior administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, this hid the reality of ecocide and created a fantasy world of victories and progress that ensured the climate crisis. 

   

  

   

  • There now are concerted efforts by the most at-risk communities to publicize these facts, seek birth-equity reparations, and reverse the policies and their impacts. These efforts operate from the United Nations to national courts, and to local efforts, as well as to corporate certification and celebrity role-modeling campaigns. Because many avoid this issue do so because they face less risk than future generations, we encourage activist to include the adult children of those you need to take action in your activism. 

   

  • These efforts urge concentrations of wealth and power to offset the harms they are causing, and their wealth externalized on future generations by paying family planning and birth equity and development reparations that change the location, timing, manner, and with what resources women have children to ensure those children thrive rather than suffer because of the wealth-driven climate crisis.

   

  • This is not altruistic. This about liberation. Neither I nor you can be free in world with people who did not get enough what they needed growing up to constitute groups of free and equal persons actually capable of asserting authority and obligating persons to follow laws, especially when that allows the creation of so many people that we lose nature, which is simply the relative absence of the power of other persons. That is the logic of self-determination in a world with more than one person.

   

  

   

  • State legitimacy and authority conditioned on democratic and equitable empowerment of each child, which requires climate and biodiversity restoration through ecosocial birth equity as the first human right. Any other standards hide deadly harm, including harm to our freedom or self-determination, a value we can measure that loss of as it is converted to wealth for a few. The holding of elections is evidence that state legitimacy is based on the will of the people, but vote dilution, inequity, and other factors have severely degraded the influence of the average citizen in those elections.

   

  • Hence, birth-equity entitlements and reparations are equally self-determination reparations, ensuring climate and biodiversity restoration through the realization of equity-based child rights as the first and overriding human rights. We can limit and decentralize the power others have over us – under the idea of constitutionalism, whether through the climate crisis or in terms of wealth-based control of employment opportunities, by all means effective because government derives from free and equal citizens, a status which depends on how, when, with what resources, etc. they are created. 

   

  

   

  • These reparations are the most just and effective way to offset the harm caused by the crisis, and they can long-run help evade acts of mass violence driven early childhood trauma, a sense of disempowerment, the rising heat, and frustration with traditional justice systems.

   

  • Many are already paying these reparations directly, and concentrations of wealth and power that do not can be forced to using their legal liability for deadly greenwashing that hid the need for reform in a way that will kill many. 

   

  • Many in positions of power like Peter Singer evade this discussion and refuse to exit a political system that benefits them at deadly cost to others. How they handle this issue – from their position of wealth and entitlement – screams that it’s not their life on the line; that it’s other lives, and other parents’ children’s lives, on the line. Singer’s evasions are unique give his urging policies to liberate animals, the benefit of which were undone by family and growth policies. Also, by siloing off the liberation of nonhumans from social justice more generally, he ensured concentrations of white wealth and privilege, at cost to general justice.

   

  • But their positional privileges – including race, intergenerational, wealth and income, etc. – all derive from a lie developed between 1948 and 1968 that gutted family planning policy of the child rights, birth equity, democratic anti-dilution measures, nature preservation and other requirements that are required for political processes to remain inclusive and therefor legitimate.

   

  

   

  • Influential persons’ heightened influence relative to that of the average citizen is based on that – a lie that ensured artificial perceptions of truth and value (at cost to the true values above) that drives demand, in a world of vast birth-based inequity. Our perceptions of truth and value come from power relations created in the stages of our birth and development. For example, advertising backed by inherited wealth influences much of what we think. This inequity fundamentally placed some where they, in terms of influence, are relative to you. This family-based inequity in who we are, where equity would have meant an equal and influential vote in one’s democracy, fundamentally created the climate change is now harming fetal and infant health harm, primarily in vulnerable families of color, as heat increases threaten to kill millions in the future

   

  • Be clear: Our systems of governance exploited birth positionality to enrich a few, at deadly cost to many. Particular men chose that system, over inclusive ones where we invest in young women, and empowering  birth and development conditions, and ran it using coercion. 

   

  • For example, Elon Musk makes money selling electric cars to a growing population that needs them because that growth is destroying our atmosphere. The policies that ensured that growth also ensured birth-based black poverty relative to the massive head-start position in which white South African Musk was born, and a dilution of the average citizens power to use their democracies to reverse things like the climate crisis and birth inequity. Those policies did more harm, especially using a metric like self-determination, than Musk and his car sales did good. This is not about population as much as power relations, and not about growth as much as inequity, understood as an equal and influential role in determining the rules – formal and informal – one has to live under. If every child that could be born in South Africa at the time of Musk’s birth had equity in governance, had a role in making the rules,  would they have chosen the outcomes we see today? If exclusion was a violation of human rights, can we take back that amount of wealth that derived from the violation? Who would choose to use the same form of legitimacy that enriched a few at deadly cost to a blameless billion?

   

  • Or in terms of truth, consider prestigious academic brands and hierarchies built on random aptitude tests and family influence, or other commonalities like language, national origins, or other arbitrary criteria that hid deep (and thanks to the climate crisis, very deadly) misconceptions of simple things like full positionality, animal liberation and social justice. Those in these institutions used their influence to reinforce misleading, violence-backed notions of legitimacy that primarily protected hierarchies of wealth built on racism and ecocide. If there is meritocracy, it is because some were able to define merit using relatively arbitrary criteria – like gross domestic product – that created an ecological crisis killing millions.

   

  • Remember that – and that their wealth was created at cost to your freedom and the lives of others – when you engage those in positions of power as co-subjects in a shared democracy and bring them the reality of their position.

   

  TAKE ACTION FOR FUNDAMENTAL CLIMATE JUSTICE AT THE UITED NATIONS NOW.

  Urge anyone or organization you work with to choose child rights, and self-determination for all, over unlimited ownership of wealth and to pay equity-building reparations as an obligation. 

   

  November 15, 2023

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  Watch Dr. Melanie Joy on Actually Relating to Others, and Ending Injustice Everywhere

  Melanie Joy is a familiar name to many, for her work for animals and in challenging a quiet driver of suffering and sadness in the world today: Carnism.

  About Melanie:

  Melanie Joy, PhD, is a Harvard-educated psychologist specializing in relationships, communication, and social transformation. She is the award-winning author of six books, including the bestselling Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows and Getting Relationships Right: How to Build Resilience and Thrive in Life, Love, and Work. Joy is also an internationally recognized speaker and trainer who’s presented her work in fifty countries across six continents.

  

   

  Joy is best known for her groundbreaking theories on the psychology of violence and nonviolence and building healthy relationships. Her analyses have helped explain why people engage in “nonrelational” behaviors—behaviors that harm other people, animals, the planet, and themselves—as well as how to change this pattern.

  Her new book, How to End Injustice Everywhere: Understanding the Common Denominator Driving All Injustices, to Create a Better World for Humans, Animals, and the Planet breaks new ground:

  In this eye-opening and compelling work, psychologist Melanie Joy reveals the common denominator driving all forms of injustice. The mentality that drives us to oppress and abuse humans is the same mentality that drives us to oppress and abuse nonhumans and the environment, as well as those in our own groups working for justice.

  How to End Injustice Everywhere offers a fascinating examination of the psychology and structure of unjust systems and behaviors. It also offers practical tools to help raise awareness of these systems and dynamics, reduce infighting, and build more resilient and impactful justice movements.

  Hear Melanie discuss her book, and learn why training ourselves to be relational can end injustice.

  She said this about relations with future children:

  We’ve all learned to believe the myth that there’s a hierarchy of moral worth: that some individuals or groups are more worthy of moral consideration, of being treated with respect, than others. This belief lies at the foundation of all forms and acts of injustice, which include not giving children a fair start in life. The belief in a hierarchy of moral worth lies at the core of the dysfunctional mentality that causes us to think, feel, and act in ways that violate our integrity and harm the dignity of others and that leads to unjust power imbalances.

  By recognizing the hierarchy of moral worth as the myth that it is, we can help to create a more just world for children, enabling them to have the fair start in life that they deserve.

  Her vision of justice aligns with what Fair Start sees as the first human right, a right that overrides all others, the right to an ecosocial fair start in life. 

  Many misunderstand Fair Start as a population organization, or worse. In fact, all we do is show a terrible mistake in the 20th century in which world leaders treated the interpersonal act of creating others as a matter personal/private the parents in order to avoid elites having to fund fair starts for all kids, and to enable profitable growth that evading those fair starts would create.

  The disasters from that move – from ignoring the truly relational nature of creation – are only beginning to unfold. Of course we have a solution. 

   

  November 7, 2023

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  Toddlers Are Tortured to Death Because We Don’t Ensure Fair Starts in Life

  A two-year-old was recently tortured and killed by his parents. Roughly five kids die at the hands of their parents each day. 

  Why?

  

  This happens, fundamentally, because we do not ensure family planning policies that ensure all children a Fair Start in life. Those policies work when we incentivize parents delaying having kids until they are ready to be parents.

  Who opposes these policies? Those, like Elon Musk, who benefit from a fundamental system that promotes economic growth over fair starts in life for all kids. 

   

  

   

  How do we end child abuse? We can take the money directly from those like Musk, who made their wealth through a system that externalized its costs on others – costs like child abuse – and use it to fund the incentives we need. Why can we take it? All rules – like those that entitle him to wealth – should be fair, and the first and overriding human right requires fairness in creation.

  TAKE ACTION: Urge the United Nations to admit that they failed to ensue human rights by not starting with fair starts in life for all kids and support the taking back of wealth and the giving it into fairness-based family planning as described above.

   

   

  November 2, 2023

• The New York Times Can Do Better on Family Policy Reporting

  The New York Times recently reported on China leaning on women to have more kids, in the middle of the climate crisis, with no way to assure they will thrive in the future. The reporting does not cover how the United States does the same, through media – including the New York Times – and things like the child tax credit system.

  How can we change this? Getting the resources needed to give all kids an ecosocial Fair Start in life is the first human right. The lead editor at the Times can be approached in person to admit the Times reporting had undercut this right by – like China – urging women to have kids with no assurances of a fair start in life.

  

   

  He can now publicly change course.

  TAKE ACTION: Find and urge Joe Khan to do the right thing, and ensure Times reporting includes all relevant family policies, and the impacts of not giving kids a Fair Start in life on our world.

   

   

   

  November 2, 2023

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  Hamas Attack on Israel Comes from Decades of United Nations Growth Policy. Take Action.

  A Hamas attack on Israel has restarted large scale conflict in the region.

  What fundamentally caused the situation unfolding in Gaza and Israel today?

  Fact: While the United Nations urges the idea of human rights, the reality is that they have intentionally embraced destabilizing economic growth-based family policies in the Middle East that violate those rights. Instead of ensuring children’s basic rights, the policies created more and more people, with greater levels of inequity and hatred, in an area that is already an environmental nightmare.

  

  What did UN officials think would occur? 

  TAKE ACTION: Urge the UN Secretary General to take fundamental responsibility for what’s happening in Gaza and Israel today. He and others at the UN, not the children on both sides, should be held accountable for economy-based family systems that treat humans as means not ends. 

  October 9, 2023

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  Get the Fair Start Entitlements You and Your Children Are Owed

  We can’t truly call ourselves civilized if we don’t protect our most vulnerable. The Fair Start Movement gives current and future children the advocates they need to get the life they deserve.

  • Anne Green, PhD
    Former Professor at Carnegie Mellon University
    Executive Director, One Step for Animals

  Would it be wrong for a young woman with little wealth or income intending to become a mother to demand birth equity resources – resources that simply ensure a level playing field for her child and offset the climate harms the child would experience – from a wealthy family that externalized the deadly environmental and social costs of its wealth upon the child she wished to have? What if that family exploited that birth inequity and growth to not only harm her future child, but ensure that child would be likely to work for little money for the wealthy family and their children? What if the young woman were black, and whose child would have 9/10th less wealth than white kids because they would be black, and the white family she asked could afford to share by choosing to have fewer children?

  Here are the benefits of such a new way of thinking of families: 

• The billions who would get a fair chance in life rather than be born, work for the wealthy, and die – all in poverty.

• The countless animals who would not suffer and die in the deadliest phases of the Anthropocene because of such a move.

• And the billions whose voices would actually matter in functional democracies because of her bravery.

• And the wealthy that are already giving along these lines of paying back future generations, out of obligation, thus marginalizing the greedy who do not give.

For all of the reasons given above, many reasonable people would consider the young mother taking peaceful action to achieve birth equity for her future child, and setting an example that others might embrace to protect all future children the height of working towards freedom and justice. Free people will follow rules that start by limiting the influence others have over them. The process of her seeking birth equity would be, in that sense, liberating. 

She can leave the money with the wealthy family, knowing it was made at cost to others, or move it and save lives.

Those on whom she would make the demands – who would choose preventable deaths – seem tiny and worthy of targeting relative to all of that. Her move to demand is a move towards knowing her and many other children, under a test laid out by one of the leading political philosophers in the world, will live free.

TAKE ACTION TO MAKE SUCH ACTIONS MORE FEASIBLE: URGE THE UNITED NATIONS TO RECOGNIZE THE RIGHT TO A FAIR START IN LIFE. 

You can also give to efforts on the ground to make this change a reality.