Preface. This is what I saw on December 12, 2020. To see a more up-to-date list go to the Real GND website: https://www.realgnd.org/recommendations

If you’d like to know how to fund these measures, then go here. To take action, go here.

Since what I write is such devastating news to people who stumbled on this on a search, or who recently lost their energy blindness, I feel obligated to have a “What To Do” category. I was devastated for months after reading about Hubbert’s Curve in 2000 on top of already having read “Limits to Growth” and “Overshoot” decades earlier. There are actions to be taken to get through the bottleneck, and you will meet interesting and wonderful people along your journey while you learn new skills.

The “Real Green New Deal” site describes itself as “a top-down and bottom-up approach to the energy descent transformation, covering actions that governments and individuals can take. We focus predominantly on policy recommendations for government since creating change from within the system would be the most effectual and since individual behavior is constrained to such a large degree by the current system.

But we simultaneously recognize that it is the actions of everyday people that influence the governments we institute, whether through who we vote for, what information or rhetoric we chose to accept and act upon, what we do or don’t push back against, or how we respond on an individual level to the chronic psychological afflictions imposed by today’s dysfunctional world.

We suggest an initial set of recommendations – along with how to pay for them – to be pursued now, ahead of the more specific and likely radically transformative recommendations contained in the final Action Plan. Some echo those that have grown in recent popularity while others are less common or perhaps novel.”

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

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Population

• Enact a national one-child policy, encouraging the global community to do the same
• Make all forms of birth control (including those for men) free, and in the case of non-surgical forms, available over the counter
• Make abortion free and widely available
• Pay women/couples a significant financial incentive to have one child or none
• Educate children and adults alike about the harmful impacts of overpopulation and its central role in our overshoot crisis, shifting from a human-centric view of the world to an inclusive view that honors and respects all life
• Replace the taboo surrounding population with a moral imperative to make it a front-and-center social topic
• Given our moral responsibility for global restitution, provide financial assistance to countries who seek it in order to help enact similar policies

Empire

• Close all overseas military bases
• Cease all overseas military operations
• Stop military funding and arms sales to foreign countries
• Close unnecessary domestic military bases
• Reduce the size of our armed forces
• Abandon the use of Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMFs) in exchange for official declarations of war by Congress, as is its constitutional responsibility
• Dissolve NATO
• End contracting of military and defense-related products and services to private companies

Democracy

• GET MONEY OUT OF POLITICS and establish 100% publicly funded elections at all levels of government
• Enact ranked-choice-voting
• End voter discrimination laws and constitutional eviscerations
• Undo gerrymandering
• Increase voting access (e.g. Automatic Voter Registration in every state, mail-in ballots in every state, national holidays for elections)
• Ban electronic voting machines
• Eliminate the Electoral College
• Establish 100% public funding for the media

Equality of Treatment & Opportunity

• Make corporations actually pay their taxes, potentially increasing their rates
• Shut down overseas tax havens
• End subsidies to harmful industries
• Break up monopolies
• Enact a fairer tax code in which average people pay less and the very wealthy pay more
• Increase the minimum wage to $25/hour
• Enact Medicare-for-All
• Forgive all student loans and make higher education free
• End the war on drugs, pardon all drug-related offenders in prison, and decriminalize low-level possession of all illegal drugs
• Issue financial reparations to the African American and Native American communities

Money and Finance

• Put an end to interest-bearing debt
• Ban the financial markets that “Wall Street” has become a symbol for, allowing instead for community-level capital raising
• Abolish the Federal Reserve (a private corporation accountable to no one) and absorb its functions back into Congress, as dictated by the Constitution

Infrastructure

Place a moratorium on major infrastructure projects in light of:

• The significant drawbacks of so-called renewable technologies
• The need to re-design infrastructure in a highly decentralized, self-sufficient way with all life cycle needs (energy production, water acquisition, and waste treatment) handled on-site
• The likelihood that many technologies and conveniences we enjoy today will not be possible in the energy and resource constrained future we imminently face

Consumption & pollution

• Nationalize fossil fuel companies and establish a plan for phase-out
• Ban the exploration of new fossil fuel reserves (i.e. oil, shale, gas) and the development of new extraction sites
• Fine heavily toxic industrial processes
• Ban factory farming
• Offer significant financial incentives for the conversion of monoculture operations to polyculture regimes that are small-scale, humane, free of fossil fuel inputs, and implement rigorous water conservation methods
• Provide legal and financial incentives to ensure seed conservation and ban activities that threaten it
• Offer financial incentives for the expansion of hemp farming
• Offer financial incentives to businesses that source local products
• Fine major businesses that don’t make easily repairable products
• Place a tax on companies that extract metals and water
• Terminate so-called free trade agreements
• Invest in sailing ship companies and financially incentivize their use for international transportation

Ecosystem health

Endorse and begin implementing the Nature Needs Half proposal, which calls for protecting 50% of the planet by 2030 using an ecoregion approach

Significantly increase funding for ecosystem restoration projects

Individual Action

Engage in the inner transformation that goes hand-in-hand with transforming the outer world, for example

• Cultivate critical, independent thinking that inoculates against propaganda and manufactured consent
• Question and examine your mental models and change them when confronted with compelling information
• Spend as much time in nature and connecting with the non-human world as possible
• Develop practices that help you slow down, relax, and connect with the stillness and wisdom within

Learn as many self-sufficiency skills as possible and do whatever you can to be as fossil fuel free as possible, whether on a household or community level

Engage in strategic, direct action to impel system change