IPCC reports 'diluted' under 'political pressure' to protect fossil fuel interests

Berlin: April 14th 2014. Sigmar Gabriel speaking at the IPCC WG3 briefing. 'TheFuture.net' protestors watch him in silence.

IPCC reports 'diluted' under 'political pressure' to protect fossil fuel interests
Saudi-led coalition sought to make policy summaries as vague as possible to minimise climate action

Nafeez Ahmed 16 May 2014 theguardian.com

Increasing evidence is emerging that the policy summaries on climate impacts and mitigation by the UN Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were significantly 'diluted' under political pressure from some of the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters, including Saudi Arabia, China, Brazil and the United States.

Several experts familiar with the IPCC government approval process for the 'Summary for Policymakers' (SPM) reports – documents summarising the thousands of pages of technical and scientific reports for government officials – have spoken out about their distortion due to political interests.

According to David Wasdell, who leads on feedback dynamics in coupled complex global systems for the European Commission's Global System Dynamics and Policy (GSDP) network, "Every word and line of the text previously submitted by the scientific community was examined and amended until it could be endorsed unanimously by the political representatives."

In a detailed paper critiquing the WG1 Summary for Policymakers, Wasdell revealed that:

"Greatest pressure to establish grounds for the highest possible budget came from those countries whose national economy, political power and social stability depend on sustaining the asset value and production revenue derived from exploitation of their resources of fossil energy. Additional pressure was applied to the political agents by those vested interests whose sustained profitability was based on the extraction, refining, marketing and use of fossil energy as the ground of the global economy."

As an accredited reviewer for the IPCC's 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, Wasdell had previously criticised the political approval process for playing down amplifying feedbacks which could accelerate climate change. That charge was strongly denied by the IPCC's lead authors at the time, although political interference amounting to "scientific vandalism" was alleged by othersources.

Wasdell told me that scientists familiar with the political approval process in Stockholm for the new WG1 Summary for Policymakers - including WG1 co-chair Prof Thomas Stocker who had signed the 2007 rejoinder to Wasdell - had confirmed that governments fought to amend text that would damage their perceived interests. His paper says:

"… the objections were led by Saudi Arabia, strongly supported by China, and associated with an emerging group of 'like-minded nations.' The impasse was broken following suggested modifications of both text and diagram provided by the representatives of the USA. The resulting compromise safeguards the vested interests of global dependency on fossil sources of energy, while constraining the capacity of the international community to take any effective action to deal with the threat of dangerous climate change."

WG1 co-chair Prof Thomas Stocker, however, denied any knowledge of such political pressure, describing these allegations as "not correct for WG1." He conceded that "the situation is different" for WG2 and WG3.

Wasdell said that the draft submitted by scientists contained a metric projecting cumulative total anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, on the basis of which a 'carbon budget' was estimated – the quantity of carbon that could be safely emitted without breaching the 2 degrees Celsius limit to avoid dangerous global warming. He said that the final version approved by governments significantly amended the original metric to increase the amount of carbon that could still be emitted.

The total carbon budget according to this estimate is about 1,000 gigatonnes of carbon (GtC) – although over 531 GtC was emitted already by 2011, leaving 469 GtC left. Applying the "corrected non-linear function" reduces this available budget to just "280 GtC" – this figure does not account for the role of greenhouse gases other than CO2, including the potential impact of thawing permafrost or methane hydrates.

If included, they would reduce the budget even further. Current emissions reduction pledges, therefore, still guarantee disaster. His paper reads:

"… present levels of international contribution towards the reduction of emissions still led to a cumulative total of 2000 GtC by the year 2100. That left an emissions reduction gap of some 1097 GtC between promised reductions and the 903 GtC required to prevent temperature increase exceeding the policy goal of 2°C."

Wasdell thus told me:

"The summary for policymakers is a document of appeasement, not fit for purpose. In reality, if my calculations are correct, we not only don't have much of a carbon budget left, we have already overshot that budget – we're in overdraft."

Wasdell's claims about the politicisation of the IPCC's summary reports for policymakers are corroborated by other scientists.

In a letter addressed to senior IPCC chairs dated 17th April, Prof Robert Stavins - a lead author for the IPCC's Working Group 3 focusing on climate mitigation - complained of his "frustration" that the government approval process "built political credibility by sacrificing scientific integrity." His critique was, however, widely misrepresented by climate deniers as proving that the IPCC's scientific verdict about the dangers of global warming are too alarmist.

Leading the pack, Daily Mail reporter David Rose attempted to equate Stavins' concerns with those of economist Richard Tol, who withdrew "from the summary of an earlier volume of the full IPCC report, on the grounds it had been 'sexed up' by the same government officials and had become overly 'alarmist.'"

Yet as noted by Dimitri Zenghelis, principal research fellow at the London School of Economics Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, Tol's claims about IPCC alarmism are riddled with "significant errors and misrepresentations," "selective" and "misleading" quoting, and based on his own paper containing "a number of mistakes", as well as a "fundamentally flawed" understanding of "the risks of climate change."

The IPCC's assessments of the potential costs of climate change "is probably an underestimate," argued Zenghelis, "because it omits consideration of many of the impacts of climate change, including potentially catastrophic risks."

Prof Stavins himself dismissed the denialist "fringe elements of the press and blogosphere" which "capitalised on the situation by distorting the message of my original post to meet their own objectives."

"My expressed concerns," Stavins told me, "were about the government approval process of one section on international cooperation of the Working Group 3 Summary for Policymakers." He emphasised: "My remarks did not include any comments on and have no implications regarding the integrity of climate science." Rather, government representatives in Berlin sought to "protect their respective countries' interests by minimising text that could be perceived to be inconsistent with their negotiating positions."

Stavins' remarks were also backed up by Oxford University's Prof John Broome, a IPCC WG3 lead author:

"At our IPCC meeting, they treated the SPM as though it were a legal document rather than a scientific report. To achieve consensus, the text of the SPM was made vaguer in many places, and its content diluted to the extent that in some places not much substance remained."

Far from being too alarmist, these criticisms suggest that the IPCC's summary reports are too conservative. Like Wasdell, Broome describes how "a coalition of countries led by Saudi Arabia" at the April approval session in Berlin "insisted" that all "figures" depicting increases of greenhouse gas emissions in countries classified by 'income group' "should be deleted."

Saudi Arabia, he said, also "wanted to delete all references to any part of the main report that mentioned income groups… in the end Saudi Arabia got its way completely."

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, other countries leading the drive to dilute the document included China, Brazil and the United States.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed

Murdoch-owned media hypes lone metereologist's climate junk science

Murdoch-owned media hypes lone metereologist's climate junk science
Absurd anti-science faux journalism flares up again - as usual, it's Big Oil that's set to benefit, not the public

Nafeez Ahmed 16 May 2014 theguardian.com

This morning I, like any of you, was disappointed to see that the frontpage of The Times carried a story by the paper's environment editor, Ben Webster, which read, 'Scientists in cover-up of "damaging" climate view.'

Variations of the story had been plastered everywhere, spearheaded by Murdoch-owned outlets, repeated uncritically by others.

The Daily Mail, much loved for its objective reporting on climate change (and other stuff), declared: 'Climate change scientist claims he has been forced from new job in "McCarthy"-style witch-hunt by academics across the world.'

These stories were quoted approvingly by the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto as "the latest reason to distrust the authority of 'consensus' climate scientists."

But even a cursory glance reveals how thin these stories are.

The latest climate denialist outburst hinges on one man - Prof Lennart Bengtsson of the University of Reading. According to the Mail and The Times, a paper submitted by Bengtsson to Environmental Research Letters, was rejected by the journal not because it was bad science, but because of political "intolerance of dissenting views on climate science" among climate scientists.

The paper purported to challenge the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) projections that global average temperatures could rise by more than 4 degrees Celsius by end of century, claiming that the climate was much less sensitive to carbon dioxide emissions than widely understood.

Bengtsson also complained that he had been bullied by climate scientists "all over the world" after he joined the notorious 'sceptic' think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), causing him to resign. The letter was published two days ago on the GWPF website as a press release:


"I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. I see therefore no other way out therefore than resigning from GWPF. I had not expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life. Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc.

I see no limit and end to what will happen. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy. I would never have expecting anything similar in such an original peaceful community as meteorology."

Contradicting this, however, in an apparent effort to pretend that the scientific community actually agrees with Bengtsson's claims about climate change, The Times story also reports: "Scientists from around the world sent messages of support to Professor Bengtsson."

So which is it? Did scientists worldwide support him or bully him?

Indeed, there seems little actual evidence for non-scientific motivations behind the rejection of Bengtsson's work. The Mail and Times, for instance, spin the quote of an unnamed scientist who had been asked to peer-review his paper submitted to Environmental Research Letters, saying the study's publication would be "harmful" to the climate science orthodoxy.

Both newspapers report this incredulously. How dare climate scientists worry about climate deniers exploiting junk science?

A spokesman for the journal's publisher, IOP Publishing, told the Mail that Bengtsson's submission:


"... was peer-reviewed by two independent reviewers, who reported that the paper contained errors and did not provide a significant advancement in the field, and therefore failed to meet the journal's required acceptance criteria. As a consequence, the independent reviewers recommended that the paper should not be published in the journal which led to the final editorial decision to reject the paper."

Sadly, that didn't stop these newspapers from suggesting that the decision was motivated by concerns other than advancing and protecting science.

I asked Prof Bengtsson to substantiate his allegations by clarifying the number of scientists who had allegedly been pressurising him to the point that he feared for his safety. I also requested to see the full text of the reports of the scientists who had peer-reviewed his rejected study due its scientific "errors." He did not respond to my request for comment.

Thankfully, IOP Publishing has decided to make the full reviewer reports publicly available so that we can all see why Bengtsson's paper was really rejected:


"The overall innovation of the manuscript is very low, as the calculations made to compare the three studies are already available within each of the sources, most directly in Otto et al...

Summarising, the simplistic comparison of ranges from AR4, AR5, and Otto et al, combined with the statement they are inconsistent is less then helpful, actually it is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of "errors" and worse from the climate sceptics media side."

Far from denying the validity of Bengtsson's questions, the reviewers set out ways he could improve the work:


"A careful, constructive, and comprehensive analysis of what these ranges mean, and how they come to be different, and what underlying problems these comparisons bring would indeed be a valuable contribution to the debate.

I have rated the potential impact in the field as high, but I have to emphasise that this would be a strongly negative impact, as it does not clarify anything but puts up the (false) claim of some big inconsistency, where no consistency was to be expected in the first place. And I can't see an honest attempt of constructive explanation in the manuscript.

Thus I would strongly advise rejecting the manuscript in its current form."

The "unbearable" scientific isolation that Prof Bengtsson experienced as a consequence of joining the GWPF, and submitting scientifically questionable material to a leading journal, should not come as a surprise. That the climate science community roundly rejects the GWPF's denialist rantings, and found Bengtsson's work in this regard unfit to publish, is evidence for theoverwhelming consensus on climate change - not against it.

As an illustrative example of just how isolated Prof Bengtsson and his ilk are, consider the fact reported earlier this year by Scientific American that out of more than 2,000 peer-reviewed climate science publications put out over the last year from November 2012 to December 2013, the number of scientists who denied the role of human-caused CO2 emissions in current climate change "is exactly one."

That's right. One.

Compare that to the number of scientific authors of those 2,000 plus papers - 9,136. So over nine thousand scientists over the last year agree that our fossil fuel emissions are principally responsible for contemporary climate change, and just one disagrees. The poor sod must be feeling pretty damn lonely, I imagine. Perhaps almost as lonely as Prof Bengtsson.

Such media misrepresentation is now par for the course. According to Forbes' denialist in residence, James Taylor, "only half of American Meteorology Society meteorologists believe global warming is occurring and humans are the primary cause" based on a new survey.

The actual authors of that survey, published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorology Society, disagreed. In a statement responding to Taylor: "Among all the respondents, about 7 out of 10 (73%) said human activities have contributed to global warming." The survey further attempted to explore differences between meteorologists specialising in climate science, and those who didn't.

It's worth quoting the clarification here in detail:


"We found that more than 9 out of 10 climate science experts (93%) who publish mostly on climate change, and the same proportion (93%) of climate experts who publish mostly on other topics, were convinced that humans have contributed to global warming. We also found that about 8 out of 10 meteorologists and atmospheric scientists who publish on climate (79%) or other topics (78%) were convinced that humans have contributed to global warming. Lastly, we found that the group least likely to be convinced that humans have contributed to global warming was AMS members who do not publish research in the peer-reviewed scientific literature; only six out of 10 AMS members in this group (62%) were convinced."

Compare that to Taylor's flagrant misinformation.

Why would outfits like the GWPF and Murdoch-owned press engage in such absurd faux journalism? Who knows?

The GWPF barely needs much comment. One previous Guardian investigation uncovered that one of GWPF's funders is Tory Party donor Michael Hintze, head of $5bn hedge-fund CQS which operates in the oil finance industry, among other areas. Another investigation exposed the "links between Lord Lawson and the GWPF and fossil fuel companies", including "a large Australian coal company."

As for Rupert Murdoch, it's no secret that he has significant interests in the fossil fuel industry. Murdoch is a major equity share-holder in Genie Energy, where he is also a strategic advisory board member. Genie is a major investor in US and Israeli shale oil and gas projects.

Murdoch is "extremely well regarded by and connected to leaders" in the "oiland gas industry" and "the financial markets," rejoiced Genie CEO at the time.

According to the US journalism watchdog Media Matters, Murdoch's FOX News has frequently run news stories promoting Genie Energy's shale projects.

What we're seeing here, then, isn't really journalism at all. Whatever its intent, in effect, it amounts to little more than glorified industry PR calling itself 'news.'

The real story is how the IPCC's projections and solutions are likely to be far too conservative, having been 'diluted' by pressure from the world's biggest fossil fuel polluters.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed

UN - climate 'perfect storm' is already here. Time to slay Zombie Big Oil

A full globe view of earth showing the western hemisphere Photograph: NASA/Corbis

UN - climate 'perfect storm' is already here. Time to slay Zombie Big Oil
Business as usual is planetary suicide, but the 'incumbency' plans profit at cost of planet. Thing is, they're already dead
Nafeez Ahmed, 3 April 2014 theguardian.com

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report on the impacts of global warming this century has been widely recognised as clarifying beyond all doubt that we do, indeed, face an unprecedented planetary emergency. Moreover, not one that will arrive far into the future, but that's happening right now.
The perfect storm is here

The report states unequivocally that:

"… recent climate-related extremes, such as heat waves, droughts, floods, cyclones, and wildfires, reveal significant vulnerability and exposure of some ecosystems and many human systems to current climate variability."

Over the last few years, "several periods of rapid food and cereal price increases following climate extremes in key producing regions indicate a sensitivity of current markets to climate extremes among other factors."

Just look at the unrest in Egypt, Syria and Ukraine – not to mention Venezuela, Bosnia, Thailand, Argentina, Brazil, Bangladesh, China, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, among many more - all of which are related to the fact that food prices have hovered around "the boiling point" over the last 18 months.

And according to a new report by the Environmental Justice Foundation(EJF), in 2012 alone 31.7 million people were forced from their homes due to extreme weather events such as flooding and storms.

As I've argued before, this is a taste of things to come, rooted as it is in a 'perfect storm' convergence of climate, energy and economic crises.

The EJF points out that every 1 degree Celsius (C) rise in global average temperatures is estimated to cause a 14% increase of intergroup conflict and a 4% increase of interpersonal violence. While climate change does not by itself necessitate conflict, refracted through the current structures of an increasingly unequal global political economy, it dramatically increases the risk.

In the IPCC's words, continued climate change will bring with it an escalating "breakdown of food systems linked to warming, drought, flooding, and precipitation variability and extremes." This collapse of interdependent human and natural systems, in turn, will likely "prolong existing, and create new, poverty traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hotspots of hunger," as well as increasing "risks of violent conflicts in the form of civil war and inter-group violence."

But violent conflict, in turn, "increases vulnerability to climate change" by harming "assets that facilitate adaptation, including infrastructure, institutions, natural resources, social capital, and livelihood opportunities" – creating a vicious cycle.
Forget dystopia – welcome to an unlivable planet

What's most disturbing about the new report, though, is its business as usual scenarios. The IPCC projects that our current carbon emissions trajectory is heading for carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations of 936 ppm by 2100, which would lead to a rise in global temperatures of between 4 and 5C. For anyone who doubts how alarming this trajectory really is, the following IPCC statement is notable:

"By 2100 for the high-emission scenario RCP8.5, the combination of high temperature and humidity in some areas for parts of the year is projected to compromise normal human activities, including growing food or working outdoors."

As Joe Romm astutely observed about this telling, but little-noted, paragraph:


"Bottom line: We are at risk of making large parts of the planet's currently arable and populated land virtually uninhabitable for much of the year - and irreversibly so for hundreds of years."
The big breach

The problem is that the IPCC's worst-case business as usual projections are very conservative. IPCC models largely don't account for complex amplifying feedbacks, and appear to underestimate the sensitivity of the earth system to CO2 – to such an extent that a 2011 paper in Sciencepointed to paleoclimate data 30-100 million years ago showing that the earth was 16C warmer at CO2 levels we're pitched to reach by end of century.

Yet the rate of current change is far faster than ever happened in earth's history. As IPCC lead author Dr Daniela Schmidt said:

"What our findings very clearly spell out is that since the time of the dinosaurs we have not had climate change at rates as rapid as it's currently happening. So, it's the rates and the magnitudes of those changes which are really important."

What's worse is that the IPCC's forthcoming report on climate mitigation, due out mid-April, will reportedly underscore that we are well on our way to breaching the atmospheric concentrations required to maintain a safe climate at 2C. Rich countries led by the United States need to halve their emissions from 2010 levels by 2030, while fast developing countries like China and India must limit emissions to 2010 levels in the same time-frame.

But in reality most governments are nowhere near planning such deep curbs – which themselves overlook the fact that a growing body of scientific literature suggests the 2C limit is too high, implying that even deeper emissions cuts are necessary to avoid hitting the tipping point into dangerous warming.

The elephant (or rather, zombie) in the room, of course, is Big Oil – not to mention Big Gas and Big Coal. Despite occasional rosy statements vaguely indicating recognition of the reality of climate change, major agents of what Jeremy Leggett calls "the incumbency" have inadvertently made very clear where they really stand in the battle to save planet earth.
Burn, baby, burn

In a series of carefully-timed reports released on the same day as the IPCC's climate impact assessment, Exxon-Mobil said that it will continue to sell fossil fuels without restriction despite climate change, and that it was confident governments would do the same:

"… the scenario where governments restrict hydrocarbon production in a way to reduce GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions 80 percent during the Outlook period is highly unlikely. The Outlook demonstrates that the world will require all the carbon-based energy that ExxonMobil plans to produce during the Outlook period… We see population, GDP and energy needs increasing for the world over the Outlook period, and that all economically viable energy sources will be required to meet these growing needs."

Exxon-Mobil goes to almost absurd lengths to dismiss the capacity ofrenewable energy sources to challenge the hegemony of the fossil fuel incumbency:

"…. renewables will continue to comprise about 5 percent of the total energy mix by 2040. Factors limiting further penetration of renewables include scalability, geographic dispersion, intermittency (in the case of solar and wind), and cost relative to other sources. The cost limitations of renewables are likely to persist even when higher costs of carbon are considered."

So instead, we are assured that:

"Traditional energy sources have had many decades to scale up to meet the enormous energy needs of the world. As discussed above, renewable sources, such as solar and wind, despite very rapid growth rates, cannot scale up quickly enough to meet global demand growth while at the same time displacing more traditional sources of energy."

Therefore, the report concludes, "it is difficult to envision governments choosing this path [a "low carbon scenario"] in light of the negative implications for economic growth and prosperity that such a course poses, especially when other avenues may be available."
Get rich or die trying

Exxon-Mobil's sentiments appear to be shared by others, such as Royal Dutch Shell, which in 2008 identified potential scenarios for the next 40 years based on "three hard truths": the surge in energy demand, the struggle of supplies to meet demand, and intensifying environmental stresses.

One scenario, called "Blueprints," forecasts a transition to more environmentally-friendly practices. Another, "Scramble", forecasts theopposite: a lack of decisive action on climate change, coal and biofuels driving growth in developing countries with unconventional oil and gas propelling US and western growth, and intensifying climate impacts such as rising food prices and extreme weather.

Publicly, Shell has declared that the "Blueprints" scenario represents itschosen path. Privately, reports journalist McKenzie Funk - author of Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming (2014) - the head of Shell's scenario team told him in 2012: "We've gone to Scramble. This is a Scramble kind of world. This is what we're doing."

Funk's book is eye-opening. Far from denying climate change, he documents a consistent pattern of mining and agricultural companies, energy conglomerates, hedge funds, and Wall Street traders, among others, who are eagerly profiting from climate impacts in the form of rocketing resource prices. They are investing in farmland, water, raw materials, minerals and energy, at the expense of everyone else.
The walking dead vs the rest of us

But Big Oil is dead wrong. The incumbency as a whole has consistently underestimated the rise of renewables, and failed to anticipate its meteoric growth.

The truth is that the incumbency knows its both dead, and wrong, but is desperate to ensure investors know neither.

A new Citigroup report out last week hails the dawn of the "age of renewables" in the US – the world's largest electricity market – where it finds that solar and wind power are becoming cost competitive with fossil fuels, including coal and gas, and even with nuclear. Rising and volatile gas prices, and the structurally disadvantageous nature of coal and nuclear due to ageing nuclear fleets and high production costs led Citigroup to conclude:

"We predict that solar, wind, and biomass continue to gain market share from coal and nuclear into the future… As solar, wind, biomass, and other power sources gain market share from coal, nukes, and gas, the LCOE [levelised cost of energy] metric increasingly becomes important to the new build power generation decision-making."

The numbers speak for themselves and clearly "set the bar for alternative energy":

"Given the large expected increase in demand for gas, offset by production gains, gas prices are expected to rise over the long term. As a result, the bar for renewables and other fuel sources to cross continues to rise, thus making it easier for alternatives to gain market share… Solar is still early in the growth cycle, and in many countries - Germany, Spain, Portugal, Australia, and the Southwest US - residential-scale solar has already competed with average residential electricity prices. In 2013, solar was the second-largest source of new generation capacity behind natural gas - its prospects look bright in 2014 and beyond as costs continue to decline and improve the LCOE picture."

"Radical and transformative change"

It's now increasingly recognised that the transition into the post-carbon era must involve not simply "adaptation" and "mitigation" – the stale buzzwords of bureaucracy - but entail radical transformation of our societies at multiple levels.

Even the IPCC's forthcoming mitigation plan concedes: "Stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations will require large-scale transformations in human societies."

But perhaps no clearer manifesto for this transformation came from an unexpected editorial in the British Medical Journal, stating that: "The IPCC report shows the need for 'radical and transformative change.'… This is an emergency. Immediate and transformative action is needed at every level: individual, local, and national; personal, political, and financial." The editorial endorses the World Bank president's call for "divestment from fossil fuels and investment in green energy," and highlights the health benefits of change:

"More active forms of transport and the consumption of less red meat will cut death and illness from cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, and cancer. Less air pollution will cut the global burden of asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cancer, and heart disease… If we are to avoid catastrophic climate change and bequeath a sustainable planet worth living on, we must push, as individuals and as a profession, for a transformed, sustainable, and fair world."

The post-carbon era is upon us. Unfortunately, the Zombie Incumbency is in denial – but one wouldn't expect much more from the walking dead.

The only question, therefore, is what can each of us as individuals do – however small within our own context - to start becoming the change we want to see in the world? Because before every giant leap was a baby step.