ANOTHER $35 TRILLION: AN ACCOUNTING ERROR?

  ~hehe FOLKS ...we got PLENTY of $$$ "they" R stealing IT !!! ....WE THE PEOPLE  r  financing TWO civ's?!?     ... OUR & theirs !  ...  35 trillion 2019 , 30.7 trillion  2018 , 29 trillion  2017     ...THAT'S JUST THE LAST 3YRS !!!!!!!!!!!!!   WTF  A~merry~KA  WHAT THE FUCK

https://gizadeathstar.com/2020/01/another-35-trillion-an-accounting-error/

Yesterday I blogged about the new logo for the USA's new "Space Force," a logo that to my and many other people's eyes looks all-too-suspiciously like the "Starfleet" logo from Star Trek. Well, I suspect today's article, shared by G.P., may have something to do with yesterday's story. And it may contain another hint of that hidden system of finance and its practices as well. The story concerns yet more trillions of dollars, in this case, $35,000,000,000,000 worth of accounting errors:

Pentagon Racks Up $35 Trillion in Accounting Changes in One Year

The story is simple enough, and sadly, it's a measure of how accustomed we've become to astronomical amounts of missing money, that at best it only raises an eyebrow. Yet, there's a detail in this article that ca ught my eye, and that fuels today's high octane speculation. It seems that once again the Pentagram has mislaid a few trillions and has had to make accounting adjustments:

The Pentagon made $35 trillion in accounting adjustments last year alone -- a total that’s larger than the entire U.S. economy and underscores the Defense Department’s continuing difficulty in balancing its books.

The latest estimate is up from $30.7 trillion in 2018 and $29 trillion in 2017, the first year adjustments were tracked in a concerted way, according to Pentagon figures and a lawmaker who’s pursued the accounting morass.

In other words, we're already far afield of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's September 10, 2001 admission that the Pentagram had about $2 trillion it couldn't account for. But, says the article, you can breathe easy, because the money isn't really lost, it's just all poor accounting:

The military services make adjustments, some automatic and some manual, on a monthly and quarterly basis, and those actions are consolidated by the Pentagon’s primary finance and accounting service and submitted to the Treasury.

There were 546,433 adjustments in fiscal 2017 and 562,568 in 2018, according to figures provided by Representative Jackie Speier, who asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate. The watchdog agency will release a report on the subject Wednesday after reviewing more than 200,000 fourth-quarter 2018 adjustments totaling $15 trillion.

‘Sloppy Record-Keeping’  ~ hehe YEAH RIGHT !!! (me)

The “combined errors, shorthand, and sloppy record-keeping by DoD accountants do add up to a number nearly 1.5 times the size of the U.S. economy,” said Speier, a California Democrat. The report shows the Pentagon “employs accounting adjustments like a contractor paints over mold. Their priority is making the situation look manageable, not solving the underlying problem,” she said.

...

The GAO estimated based on a sample that at least 96% of 181,947 automatic adjustments made in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2018 “didn’t have adequate supporting documentation.”

“In layman’s terms, this means that the DoD made adjustments to accounting records without having documentation to support the need or amount for the adjustment,” said Dwrena Allen, spokeswoman for the Pentagon’s inspector general. “The size and scope of unsupported adjustments is deeply concerning because it tells a story of poor internal controls and lack of financial data integrity.”

But not so fast. There's something that caught my eye and I hope that caught yours, and it's this little detail:

“Within that $30 trillion is a lot of double, triple, and quadruple counting of the same money as it got moved between accounts,” said Todd Harrison, a Pentagon budget expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Defense Department acknowledged that it failed its first-ever audit in 2018 and then again last year, when it reviewed $2.7 trillion in assets and $2.6 trillion in liabilities. While auditors found no evidence of fraud in the review of finances that Congress required, they flagged a laundry list of problems, including accounting adjustments.

Now, there's two ways to count money two, or three, or several times: one is to do so inadvertently and by mistake, which is what we're being asked to believe here. But the other is to do it deliberately. In the banking world, where the same pile of assets are assigned to several different accounts all at the same time, it's not only fraudulent, but there is actually a word for it: re-hypothecation.

It's that term, plus the admission that "things" are being counted "more than once" in these accounting "adjustments", that bring me to today's high octane speculation: What if we've just been given another profound clue into the nature of the hidden system of finance? What if the practice of rehypothecation is not confined to the world of banking, but has in fact become a modus operandi of government agencies  themselves, in this case, of the Department of Defense? In my original model of this hidden system, articulated in various books and at the first Secret Space Program conference in San Mateo, California in 2014, rehypothecation formed one of the techniques by which I speculated vast amounts of fraudulent liquidity could be created and kept from the public by a kind of double-bookkeeping. This, as I suspected then, was confined to banking and to the presence in the system of hidden and undisclosed bullion acting as a secret reserve on the ledgers. Since the reserve was secret, I reasoned that it could be rehypothecated over and over again, and generate the vast amounts of liquidity that a large secret research program would require.

But that liquidity in its turn could itself become a reserve and be rehypothecated by the agencies receiving it, and with the FASAB 56 regulations, the climate of secrecy is created to allow that to be done.

In my original speculations I pointed out that President Truman's decision to secretly recover looted Japanese gold and to turn it over to the National Security Council as a top secret slush fund for covert operations and secret research put the intelligence agencies and the military into the banking business.

Perhaps, with this story, we've been given a little confirmation of that hypothesis.

SPACE: SATELLITES EXPLODE, LASERS REVEALED, AND INTERPLANETARY OPS ...                                                                                      

This has been a very odd time for space news. Odd, because the stories, taken individually, aren't all that odd. But taken or viewed together over a long period, present a very chilling picture. So, consider these stories, shared by K.M., T.M., and G.B. Firstly, there was that story of the Russian spy-satellite that exploded:

A TOP-SECRET spy satellite operated by Russia is feared to have "disintegrated" in space.

As the article indicates, the likely cause of the explosion was unused propellant in the satellite. End of story (for the moment, but we'll get back to it.)

Then there were stories about Russia(from 2018), France (from last year), and Israel(from this year) revealing powerful new ground based lasers, in France's and Russia's case, for anti-satellite capability:

High-Tech firepower: Russia develops new space laser cannon

France to develop anti-satellite laser weapons: minister

Israel hails 'breakthrough' towards laser air defence system

(Now, needless to say, ground-based Earth laser anti-satellite systems will have to have a mastery of phase conjugation to counter-balance atmospheric distortion of the laser beam. That Russia and France are revealing these systems means this is largely a solved problem.)

And finally, there's the US "Space Force":

Space Force preparing for everything, even interplanetary operations, as it sets up

What will the space force look like in the year 2100? The military is trying to figure that out.

Federal News Network

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Note from the last article these statements:

Maj. Gen. John Shaw, leader of Space Force’s Space Operations Command said the new service is building itself for the far future.

“This is a huge opportunity. We have the opportunity to create a warfighting service from scratch,” Shaw said Friday at an Air Force Association event in Washington. “I’ve been telling the team, ‘Don’t think about a warfighting service for the next decade. Create a warfighting service or the 22^nd century. What is warfighting going to look like at the end of this century and into the next?’”

That may include interplanetary operations, Shaw said. (Emphasis added)

In other words, weapons and troops and ships for interplanetary operations. But, relax, that's all for the "far future," unless, of course, one wants to factor Ben Rich's strange end-of-life statements about "finding errors in the equations" and being able to "take ET home." Or, in this context, bring war right to ET. Oh, and lest we forget, remember the American general's statement recently about having to fight "little green men?"

I submit that all of this context puts that explosion of the Russian satellite into a very different interpretive matrix. Russia isn't talking of course, but to my mind, that raises the possibility that the explosion of the satellite was not accidental to a greater likelihood. If it was accidental, there'd be little reason for the Russians not to say so, even if it was a very secret satellite with very secret mission capabilities.  And a pin-prick from a ground or space based laser system on its propellant tanks may be the cause. Perhaps it may have even been a test of Russia's ground-based anti-sat systems. But if so, again, there'd be little reason to keep it quiet, and every reason to crow about it.

So why the silence? Well, consider today's high octane scenario. It is quite likely that the Russian satellite had a very sophisticated instrumentation suite, one for example that could detect, fairly instantaneously, the heat blooming signatures of being targeted by a laser. Very likely it had some sort of "all-around" sensor suite allowing it to determine give three-dimensional 360 degree detection capability. After all, "blind spots" on a spy satellite or an anti-satellite satellite would be analogous to the chink in the armor on the HMS Hood, and we all know how badly that ended. Such all-around sensor capability would have allowed the Russians a reasonably accurate picture of where any laser or other kind of energetic attack came from, whether from the ground, or space, and done so in that short period of time between its acquisition and its destruction by "whatever." To make a long point short: if it was deliberate, then the Russians have a good idea of who did it, and how.

So we might be looking at a very real shooting war "up there," and if the perpetrators were terrestrial, then expect similar "accidents" to occur to other nations' satellites in the future as retaliation. But if the silence continues, perhaps that's an indicator that someone else may have taken out the Russian satellite.

Just a thought.                                                                     https://gizadeathstar.com/2020/01/space-satellites-explode-lasers-revealed-and-interplanetary-ops-ebvisioned/

AUSTRALIA BURNING: DISASTER CAPITALISM OR SOMETHING ELSE?

 ~hehe    ... IS there an full~blown WAR be'in "fought" ...RIGHT BEFORE "our" eyes ??? & if so by who'm     is IT   ex~ter ...  Or are we fighting some terrestrial group?               ???  
                                     

By far and away this past week, the biggest story flooding my email inbox were the fires in Australia. That's partially understandable, as many members and readers of this website live in Australia. When these first started, though, I was skeptical of the explanations - what few there were - on the media. I did manage to hear a story from the Australian media that in one instance they had arrested two young men committing arson, who somehow managed to get the uniforms of a fire department in New South Wales.  But the lack of details thus far has been the most suspicious thing. Note that I said "thus far", because details are beginning to emerge...

...but not in the media, but rather, by Australians taking pictures and making videos.

And, yes, this in itself fits a pattern we've seen before, in California and its fires, and the patterns in Australia and California are remarkably similar, right down to the fact that lamestream corporate controlled media will not report on, much less ask the questions, raised by the apparent anomalies. But in Australia's case, there's something new(This article shared by B.H.):

OPERATION TORCH AUSTRALIA: A Special Report on the Geoengineered Firestorms and DEW-triggered Arson Fires

What concerns me here is the map at the beginning of this article, for a glance at it shows something that to my mind is mighty peculiar: the entire continent is ringed with these fires, and that means they have become an environmental disaster. In fact, one thing my local talk show radio station did report about the Australian fires is the massive loss of wildlife, to the tune of hundreds of millions of animals.  Then ask yourself this question: if these fires were deliberately planned, what kind of intelligence would ring the inhabitants - human and otherwise - of an entire continent with fire?

I suspect most of us would imply something toward the "diabolical" end of the spectrum.

Notably, in that article, there are pictures of what appear to be normal fires burning the things that fires burn: trees, brush, houses, cars, and so on.

But wait, there's more, much more; several people, P.J., V.T., and many others, sent articles with videos or pictures, and an old theme, one we've seen before in California, is being repeated: burned houses while nearby trees and brush is unburned; burned wheel rims and engine blocks, and pictures that - if not photoshopped and the genuine article - are suggesting that there is some sort of exotic technology in play, perhaps a directed energy technology:

Houses Explode and Burn While Nearby Trees Remain Untouched in Australia—Same DEW signatures as California arson fires

Are the unheard of “roaring fireballs” in Australia the product of Directed Energy Weapons?

Directed Energy Weapons Being Used in Operation Torch Australia

Explanations are few and far between, but similar to the California fires, one of them is the plans for high speed rail: burn out the people, buy up the land on the cheap, and develop:

Five new cities and a high-speed rail network are a step closer

For those who've been following these strange fires, from Greece to California, Siberia, Canada, Brazil, Bolivia, and now the fires surrounding Australia, the patterns are there for all to see. The only pattern we've not seen yet anywhere else but in California are the curious pictures of fires having been started in the junction and meter boxes connecting power lines to homes. Otherwise, we're looking at the same thing: anomalous burning and destruction of homes, while nearby shrubbery and trees appear to be untouched, wheel rims and engine blocks literally turned into puddles, while other parts of vehicles remain relatively unscathed, and most importantly, pictures showing collimated air or fire, suggesting directed energy.

So what's going on? Thus far, I like many others have been speculating that we may have been watching some sort of "disaster capitalism" at work, and there is a certain amount of coincidental evidence to suggest that: the clustering of fires in California in regions or land slated for special projects, like the expansion of Silicon Valley northward across the bay, or high speed rail, and so on. And as seen above, we have a similar suggestion implied for some of the regions impacted in the Australian fires. But I'm unaware of similar claims or arguments in the case of fires in Greece, Canada, Bolivia or Siberia.

There is, however, another explanation, one so obvious and yet so horrible in its implications that I do not really want to mention it, but I do so because perhaps other people have been thinking  the same thing, or better, because perhaps other people have some evidence or argument to present in support of the following high octane speculation:  Could it be that what we're watching is not disaster capitalism, but a war? If so, is this the "preliminary bombardment" softening up the target before the troops are sent in and the bridgehead is established? If it is a war, who is it between? Who's doing the shooting? Are we living in some real life version of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, where Martians show up suddenly and use heat weapons to burn down whole cities? Or are we fighting some terrestrial group?

I don't know about you, but between the two high octane speculations, the one I find more tolerable is the disaster capitalism scenario. At least there we have an idea of who's behind it, and why.                                              https://gizadeathstar.com/2020/01/australia-burning-disaster-capitalism-or-something-else/

OF GEORGES SAGNAC, RING LASERS, AND TIME MACHINES

This story was spotted by M.H., and it's a lot of fun, and I knew when I saw it I'd be blogging about it; it went straight from "inbox" to this week's "finals folder" right off the bat.

But you might be asking yourself "who the heck is Georges Sagnac"? To answer that question we have to take a little stroll around Harvey's Barn, as my mother used to say. I've written a great deal of high octane speculation in my books concerning the famous Michelson-Morley experiment in physics. It's one of the most famous, if not the most famous, experiments in modern physics. In 19th century physics thinking, it was known that light traveled in waves. Physicists drew an interesting conclusion from this: all waves had to have a medium upon which to "wave" as it were. So how did electromagnetic phenomena like light propagate through "empty" space? Their conclusion was a logical one: there had to be some sort of medium permeating all "empty" space that was so "fine"  that it was not detectable to ordinary techniques of measurement and observation. Physicists named this ultra-fine medium the aether (or ether) lumeniferous, or literally, "light-carrying stuff," or even better, "light-carrying air." Obviously, the Latin sounded so much more sophisticated and academic than the English that the term stuck.

Well, the American physicists Michelson and Morley set out the measure and observe that light-carrying stuff second hand, as it were. They reasoned that as the Earth rushed through space, that it would create an "aether wind" and blow against light propagating in the opposite direction. But how to detect it? They reasoned that if the aether hypothesis was true, then it could be detected by splitting a beam of light, running one beam against the direction of the Earth's rotation, and another perpendicular to it, and then combining the beams on an interferometer. If there was an aether wind, the beam of light traveling against the Earth rotation would be slowed down, and this would show up against the other beam as an interference pattern as the two waveforms mixed. The interferometer would show a kind of checkered "ripple effect", like tossing several stones into a pound and watching the waves crisscross.

Their reasoning may be more readily appreciated by drawing an analogy to sound (and indeed, this analogy was actually used in different publications by Albert Einstein to explain their reasoning). If one stands by a railroad track as an approaching train is blowing its horn, the waves of sound will be compressed, and thus be of higher phase, and the tone of the horn will be high. As the train passes, the sound waves appear to stretch, and the tone falls.  Now take a sound sample of the same horn blowing as the train is stationary, then combine the two: one will hear a steady tone, and in addition, a high-pitched and then a falling tone. You will hear the mixing of waveforms. The only difference in Michelson and Morley's case, was that they were trying to see the two different waveforms, to take a picture of it.

But when they performed their experiment (over and over in fact), the detected no difference of wave forms from the split beam of light.

This threw such a monkey wrench into the physics of the period that we know the rest of the story: Albert Einstein stepped into the picture in 1905 to offer an explanation for the result of the experiment with Special Relativity, maintaining that the experiment showed that the speed of light was an "upper speed limit" regardless of the frame of reference. The aether wind was not detected because there was no aether, at least, not in the sense that it had been understood up to that time.

But in 1913, French physicist Georges Sagnac had a different take, and decided to reperform the Michelson-Morley experiment, but with certain modifications. He reasoned that since all major physical systems were in some state of rotation, then the Michelson-Morley experiment's interferometer had not been constructed properly, since it wasn't rotating. He therefore decided to test if there was an "aether drag" or "aether wind" that could be detected by an interferometer in rotation. Setting up his apparatus on a modified phonograph turntable in a high speed of rotation, he split a beam of light to run with the rotation and against it, and then recombined the beams to take a picture. Sure enough, this time, there was a detectable interference pattern. His experiment has since been reperformed using ring lasers in a rotating system. To borrow our sound analogy once again, imagine two trains racing in opposite directions on a rotating system of parallel tracks, blowing their horns. One sound will be modified to a particular pitch going in the same direction as the rotation, and another will have its sound dropped running in the opposite direction. The upshot is that a rotating system gave harmonic properties to wave forms propagating within it depending upon the direction of propagation.

So with that rather long trip around Harvey's Barn in mind, consider this story:

Astrophysicist Says He Knows How to Build a Time Machine But his peers are far from convinced that it'll work.

Now remember that little bit about rotating systems, light, and harmonic properties, and ponder  this from the article:

“If you can bend space, there’s a possibility of you twisting space,” Mallett told CNN. “In Einstein’s theory, what we call space also involves time — that’s why it’s called space time, whatever it is you do to space also happens to time.”

He believes it’s theoretically possible to twist time into a loop that would allow for time travel into the past. He’s even built a prototype showing how lasers might help achieve this goal.

“By studying the type of gravitational field that was produced by a ring laser,” Mallett told CNN, “this could lead to a new way of looking at the possibility of a time machine based on a circulating beam of light.”

As optimistic as Mallet might be about his work, though, his peers are skeptical that he’s on the path to a working time machine.

“I don’t think [his work is] necessarily going to be fruitful,” astrophysicist Paul Sutter told CNN, “because I do think that there are deep flaws in his mathematics and his theory, and so a practical device seems unattainable.”

Even Mallet concedes that his idea is wholly theoretical at this point. And that even if his time machine does work, he admits, it would have a severe limitation that would prevent anyone from, say, traveling back in time to kill baby Adolf Hitler.

“You can send information back,” he told CNN, “but you can only send it back to the point at which you turn the machine on.” (Emphasis added)

But for the sake of a bit of fun high octane off-the-end-of-the-twig speculation, let's assume that there has already been a large ring system of electromagnetic propagating beams in opposite directions and that it's been around and operating for a while. And let's say that you mix those streams or cause them to collide at a certain point. (CERN, anyone?) One wonders what sorts of time dilation or gravitational effects might result. One wonders, too, if we'd ever be told about it.

And for that matter, why not build a great big huge gigantic ring laser?

And while we're speculating, why not find a way to tap into large, naturally occurring rotating systems that have some sort of differential rotation within them, like, say, the Sun? Might it be possible, then, that in addition to massive objects bending space-time, one might discover eddies and currents within that overall bending? Might, indeed, the eddies and currents in the Sun's plasma be a manifestation of those deeper temporal eddies and currents? And might one be able to find a method to tap into them and "read that information" from when those systems were "turned on"? (And while I'm off the end of the twig in fantasy land, just for the record, I'm thinking of ring lasers arranged in hexagonal formation with phase conjugate mirrors on the beams, and of rotating Kohler coils, and all sorts of abstruse stuff).

Well anyway, maybe. Maybe not. Time - to coin a pun - will tell; it remains to be seen whether the public will be told. In any case, it's fun to speculate and let the imagination run wild from time to time.                     https://gizadeathstar.com/2020/01/of-georges-sagnac-ring-lasers-and-time-machines/

The Key to the Environmental Crisis Is Beneath Our Feet

Posted on December 28, 2019 by Ellen Brown                                                            https://ellenbrown.com/2019/12/28/the-key-to-the-environmental-crisis-is-beneath-our-feet/

The Green New Deal resolution that was introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives in February hit a wall in the Senate, where it was called unrealistic and unaffordable. In a Washington Post article titled “The Green New Deal Sets Us Up for Failure. We Need a Better Approach,” former Colorado governor and Democratic presidential candidate John Hickenlooper framed the problem like this:

The resolution sets unachievable goals. We do not yet have the technology needed to reach “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions” in 10 years. That’s why many wind and solar companies don’t support it. There is no clean substitute for jet fuel. Electric vehicles are growing quickly, yet are still in their infancy. Manufacturing industries such as steel and chemicals, which account for almost as much carbon emissions as transportation, are even harder to decarbonize.
Amid this technological innovation, we need to ensure that energy is not only clean but also affordable. Millions of Americans struggle with “energy poverty.” Too often, low-income Americans must choose between paying for medicine and having their heat shut off. …
If climate change policy becomes synonymous in the U.S. psyche with higher utility bills, rising taxes and lost jobs, we will have missed our shot.

The problem may be that a transition to 100% renewables is the wrong target. Reversing climate change need not mean emptying our pockets and tightening our belts. It is possible to sequester carbon and restore our collapsing ecosystem using the financial resources we already have, and it can be done while at the same time improving the quality of our food, water, air and general health.

The Larger Problem – and the Solution – Is in the Soil

Contrary to popular belief, the biggest environmental polluters are not big fossil fuel companies. They are big agribusiness and factory farming, with six powerful food industry giants – Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Dean Foods, Dow AgroSciences, Tyson and Monsanto (now merged with Bayer) – playing a major role. Oil-dependent farming, industrial livestock operations, the clearing of carbon-storing fields and forests, the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and the combustion of fuel to process and distribute food are estimated to be responsible for as much as one-half of human-caused pollution. Climate change, while partly a consequence of the excessive relocation of carbon and other elements from the earth into the atmosphere, is more fundamentally just one symptom of overall ecosystem distress from centuries of over-tilling, over-grazing, over-burning, over-hunting, over-fishing and deforestation.
Big Ag’s toxin-laden, nutrient-poor food is also a major contributor to the U.S. obesity epidemic and many other diseases. Yet these are the industries getting the largest subsidies from U.S. taxpayers, to the tune of more than $20 billion annually. We don’t hear about this for the same reason that they get the subsidies – they have massively funded lobbies capable of bribing their way into special treatment.
The story we do hear, as Judith Schwartz observes in The Guardian, is, “Climate change is global warming caused by too much CO₂ in the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels. We stop climate change by making the transition to renewable energy.” Schwartz does not discount this part of the story but points to several problems with it:

One is the uncomfortable fact that even if, by some miracle, we could immediately cut emissions to zero, due to inertia in the system it would take more than a century for CO₂ levels to drop to 350 parts per million, which is considered the safe threshold. Plus, here’s what we don’t talk about when we talk about climate: we can all go solar and drive electric cars and still have the problems – the unprecedented heat waves, the wacky weather – that we now associate with CO₂-driven climate change.

But that hasn’t stopped investors, who see the climate crisis as simply another profit opportunity. According to a study by Morgan Stanley analysts reported in Forbes in October, halting global warming and reducing net carbon emissions to zero would take an investment of $50 trillion over the next three decades, including $14 trillion for renewables; $11 trillion to build the factories, batteries and infrastructure necessary for a widespread switch to electric vehicles; $2.5 trillion for carbon capture and storage; $20 trillion to provide clean hydrogen fuel for power, cars and other industries, and $2.7 trillion for biofuels. The article goes on to highlight the investment opportunities presented by these challenges by recommending various big companies expected to lead the transition, including  Exxon, Chevron, BP, General Electric, Shell and similar corporate giants – many of them the very companies blamed by Green New Deal advocates for the crisis.

A Truly Green New Deal

There is a much cheaper and faster way to sequester carbon from the atmosphere that doesn’t rely on these corporate giants to transition us to 100% renewables. Additionally, it can be done while at the same time reducing the chronic diseases that impose an even heavier cost on citizens and governments. Our most powerful partner is nature itself, which over hundreds of millions of years has evolved the most efficient carbon sequestration system on the planet. As David Perry writes on the World Economic Forum website:

This solution leverages a natural process that every plant undergoes, powered by a source that is always available, costs little to nothing to run and does not cause further pollution. This power source is the sun, and the process is photosynthesis.
A plant takes carbon dioxide out of the air and, with the help of sunlight and water, converts it to sugars. Every bit of that plant – stems, leaves, roots – is made from carbon that was once in our atmosphere. Some of this carbon goes into the soil as roots. The roots, then, release sugars to feed soil microbes. These microbes perform their own chemical processes to convert carbon into even more stable forms.

Perry observes that before farmland was cultivated, it had soil carbon levels of from 3% to 7%. Today, those levels are roughly 1% carbon. If every acre of farmland globally were returned to a soil carbon level of just 3%, 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide would be removed from the atmosphere and stored in the soil – equal to the amount of carbon that has been drawn into the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago. The size of the potential solution matches the size of the problem.
So how can we increase the carbon content of soil? Through “regenerative” farming practices, says Perry, including planting cover crops, no-till farming, rotating crops, reducing chemicals and fertilizers, and managed grazing (combining trees, forage plants and livestock together as an integrated system, a technique called “silvopasture”). These practices have been demonstrated to drive carbon into the soil and keep it there, resulting in carbon-enriched soils that are healthier and more resilient to extreme weather conditions and show improved water permeability, preventing the rainwater runoff that contributes to rising sea levels and rising temperatures. Evaporation from degraded, exposed soil has been shown to cause 1,600% more heat annually than all the world’s powerhouses combined. Regenerative farming methods also produce increased microbial diversity, higher yields, reduced input requirements, more nutritious harvests and increased farm profits.
These highly favorable results were confirmed by Paul Hawken and his team in the project that was the subject of his best-selling 2016 book, “Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming.” The project involved evaluating the 100 most promising solutions to the environmental crisis for cost and effectiveness. The results surprised the researchers themselves. The best-performing sector was not “Transport” or “Materials” or “Buildings and Cities” or even “Electricity Generation.” It was the sector called “Food,” including how we grow our food, market it and use it. Of the top 30 solutions, 12 were various forms of regenerative agriculture, including silvopasture, tropical staple trees, conservation agriculture, tree intercropping, managed grazing, farmland restoration and multistrata agroforestry.

How to Fund It All

If regenerative farming increases farmers’ bottom lines, why aren’t they already doing it? For one thing, the benefits of the approach are not well known. But even if they were, farmers would have a hard time making the switch. As noted in a Rolling Stone article titled “How Big Agriculture Is Preventing Farmers From Combating the Climate Crisis”:

[I]implementing these practices requires an economic flexibility most farmers don’t have, and which is almost impossible to achieve within a government-backed system designed to preserve a large-scale, corporate-farming monoculture based around commodity crops like corn and soybeans, which often cost smaller farmers more money to grow than they can make selling.

Farmers are locked into a system that is destroying their farmlands and the planet, because a handful of giant agribusinesses have captured Congress and the regulators. One proposed solution is to transfer the $20 billion in subsidies that now go mainly to Big Ag into a fund to compensate small farmers who transition to regenerative practices. We also need to enforce the antitrust laws and break up the biggest agribusinesses, something for which legislation is now pending in Congress.
At the grassroots level, we can vote with our pocketbooks by demanding truly nutritious foods. New technology is in development that can help with this grassroots approach by validating how nutrient-dense our foods really are. One such device, developed by Dan Kittredge and team, is a hand-held consumer spectrometer called a Bionutrient Meter, which tests nutrient density at point of purchase. The goal is to bring transparency to the marketplace, empowering consumers to choose their foods based on demonstrated nutrient quality, providing economic incentives to growers and grocers to drive regenerative practices across the system. Other new technology measures nutrient density in the soil, allowing farmers to be compensated in proportion to their verified success in carbon sequestration and soil regeneration.
Granted, $20 billion is unlikely to be enough to finance the critically needed transition from destructive to regenerative agriculture, but Congress can supplement this fund by tapping the deep pocket of the central bank. In the last decade, the Fed has demonstrated that its pool of financial liquidity is potentially limitless, but the chief beneficiaries of its largess have been big banks and their wealthy clients. We need a form of quantitative easing that actually serves the local productive economy. That might require modifying the Federal Reserve Act, but Congress has modified it before. The only real limit on new money creation is consumer price inflation, and there is room for a great deal more money to be pumped into the productive local economy before that ceiling is hit than is circulating in it now. For a detailed analysis of this issue, see my earlier articles here and here and latest book, “Banking on the People.”
The bottom line is that saving the planet from environmental destruction is not only achievable, but that by focusing on regenerative agriculture and tapping up the central bank for funding, the climate crisis can be addressed without raising taxes and while restoring our collective health.
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This article was first posted on Truthdig. com. Ellen Brown chairs the Public Banking Institute and has written thirteen books, including her latest, Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age.  She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.