If you want to sell someone something that they are not sure they want, not sure they need and not sure they can afford, what do you do? You can tell them a story that will scare into buying, you can explain things and hope they'll believe you, or you can show them something that they can see with their own eyes that will most probably convince them so you won't need to give a very careful and informed explanation.

Global warming, greenhouse gases, tipping point, ocean acidification, carbon capture, renewable forms of green energy, pollution of the soil and the water supply and even the air we breathe by toxins including pesticides and herbicides and insecticides. What does this mean for human beings?

Ask the bee populations in Europe and the USA which are experiencing colony collapse. Bee keepers on a vast scale keep bees to harvest honey and also transport bees over vast distances by container trucks and even across oceans by air in order to pollinate crops at the appropriate time. Bees are responsible for pollinating the plants that produce most of the food we eat. Does the wind not also pollinate plants? Yes of course, but the wind is not necessarily in the right direction at exactly the right time, and bees are far more accurate and efficient.

Ask the fish in the vast oceans whose world has been invaded and contaminated by humans; contaminated with heavy metals like mercury and whose 'home', the oceans are warming and becoming more acidic. The creatures in the oceans that we love to eat and whose tissues are already contaminated with heavy metals and plastics, yes there are vast country sized suspended fields of solid plastic build up floating around in the oceans where it is ingested by seabirds and the water world inhabitants.

The water we drink and the food we eat is all contaminated to an extent. It doesn't make most of us sick right away but we are all going to die eventually, so what difference does it make if most of us die from cancers and other complications related to poor health by the time we are 60, 70, 80 years of age? Cancer is one of the big 3 death causing agents of the 20th and 21st, and we none of us remember the 19th century, so cancer just seems normal.

Yes, I know, it's time to make a point, we are supposed to talking about Copenhagen. The whole point is that all these things are why we are all huddled together in Copenhagen. The greed of big corporations, the ineffectiveness of almost every government in the world since the beginning of the industrial age, and the lack of education of everyone else, that's us, almost everyone alive. The rest of them, the scientists and the big corporation people with money to do the research have a pretty good idea what is going on. The scientists are moderate and professional people, and unfortunately not warriors, so for a long time they just politely pointed out what they thought was happening. The big corporations and the sorry governments of almost all nations on earth just hoped it wouldn't come to this.

And what is this? Well it's a long story and it begins with false promises, the wrong kind of education and too much looking in the wrong places for too long, by all of us, especially the media, whose job it should be to tell us what is going on rather than what we want to hear. False promises, the idea that we could continue to grow our economies and indulge our material desires indefinitely based on oil.

What's wrong with oil? Like the house in the bible that was built on sand, oil has been completely mismanaged forever. In most of the cities throughout the world, everything is based on oil and there is no substitute on this scale that would avert catastrophe. The lights would go out, almost all transportation would stop, the water would stop flowing - the pumps are electric and when the power stations stop producing electricity, life as we know it ends. Food won't be delivered to the stores; farmers won't be able to grow the food in the first place. Plastics are almost all made from oil and oil is everywhere. In the clothes we wear for example.

So if oil is so important surely it will last forever, otherwise there would be a Plan B. No, there is certainly disagreement about when oil will run out and more than 70 years ago a very clever man predicted something called Peak Oil and he declared that oil would run out around the middle of the 21st century. So far nobody has been able to prove otherwise, but there is no Plan B. Oil is the only plan. Why?

Lack of education, not the wrong kind of education, just not enough, not nearly enough. Why do they teach us what they do? So we can all go to work and contribute to society and earn a living, and not need to be supported by someone else. What’s missing in our education? My education taught me to think, and I learned to read and write, but not how to communicate in other ways, and of all the things I was taught, most of them have not been important in my life, have not taught me how to live or provided me with the knowledge I needed to understand the world I live in.

Ask yourselves how many of the really important decisions you are faced with in life and how many of the really serious challenges we all face were discussed in school and left you well prepared to discuss and deal with them. For me the answer is having been educated in Britain in the mid to late mid 2oth century, none, zero. What sort of an education is that? A standard state education that prepared me only to be a worker and made no provision for me as an individual, or as a citizen of the political world, or as a citizen of planet earth.

Looking in all the wrong places. Where has your attention been focussed? Mine has been focussed on surviving from day to day, on what the media chose to promote, and on those things I gradually came to be aware of, curious about, alarmed about. What does the media taken as a whole focus on? When was the last daily report on the plight of the bees, on the solid plastics fields in the oceans, on acidification of the oceans, on the connection between cancer and our environment and food and water supply, and on the progress of Plan B?

Let’s get real. What is the one thing we can do least about if something goes wrong and that is absolutely essential? Air, the air we breathe. We can avoid drinking and eating certain things for as long as necessary, but we can’t stop breathing if we need to until the danger of contamination is past. Whatever is in the air, we have to breathe it in. So there is an order in which we must deal with things when they go wrong if we are to survive, not just as individuals, but as a species. That is what we are talking about isn’t it, survival of our species?

So what can we all point to as an example of intervention on a grand scale when things go wrong? Remember when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on 02nd August 1990? By 17th January 1991 the heavy hitters had launched a counter strike battle force, following all the usual UN activity and all the behind the scenes stuff. What can we learn from this? Don’t call the coalition if your house is on fire, but if someone is messing with the oil supply, they’re the ones to call.

What it all comes down to in the long run apart from ideology and lack of education are two things: we are a reactionary species, that is we wait until we are sure something is broken before we fix it, and money. If it’s too expensive we won’t fix it, or we won’t fix it properly.

I have some things I’d like to sell you that I think are important and will make a big difference, but in the meantime there is ‘tipping point’ and Plan B. You know that if you push things too far, you will likely get sick and need to spend some time recovering, but that always seems to work, and by now, you have some idea of how far you can push things and not kill yourself, you have some idea of where the tipping point is. If you get it wrong, you die, and the rest of us go on as before, but with the planetary tipping point now that’s an experiment we don’t want to mess with because our understanding and our science are just no match for something on that scale. The theory goes that if we cause, or if anything else for that matter causes the planet to heat up beyond a certain temperature, we cause a runaway reaction and become like the planet Venus, one planet closer to the sun. An irreversible situation. If we really mess up and cause this to happen we are betting that it will happen slowly enough that we can advance our science and technology far enough and fast enough that some of us can escape this planet for another habitable planet.

There are some problems with this, and one is, just how much good work we can accomplish in the midst of an increasingly hostile environment. If your home is flooded, don’t expect to carry on life as normal. We don’t know how quickly the runaway scenario will take and how liveable life will be while the planet is becoming a cauldron.

Think of all the people you know that won’t take what seems to you to be not such a very great risk with their lives, like betting all their savings on the lottery. You have absolutely the best chance of winning, and if you lose, life goes on as before except you have no savings. Why are we so reluctant to take small risks but we are taking the biggest risk in history? If as has been suggested, one or two cyclical events on a scale that is thousands or tens of thousands of years long have somehow occurred around the same time so that increased levels of greenhouse gases and periodic temperature rise have coincided. It would be such a shame to read in the media that tipping point would have been avoided except for the additional half degree of temperature rise due to human activities.

Okay, what about Plan B? I would like to propose the end of the age of money and property. Many people think this is ridiculous and immediately counter with what would you replace money with? Nothing! Or nothing more than an International Charter of Human Rights and Planet Protection. I won’t go on at length about this because it’s obviously complicated and will require retraining our minds and achieving agreement between nations and ideologies on a scale never before seen or accomplished in human history, however, the reason there are so many essential projects around the planet that are not being dealt with is the excuse that we can’t afford them, which brings us back to tipping point and Plan B.

All of us alive today can flirt with tipping point and we won’t be around to deal with or see the consequences, I guess at any rate, this will be the legacy we leave for future generations, the sins and omissions of the elders visited on their children, so to speak. There was no Plan B because it just didn’t seem necessary, not urgent enough, so why all the excitement about the invasion of Iraq? No Plan B!

If the constraints of money were removed, Plan B and quite likely Plan C would have been available for some time. What is it exactly that all the deniers of Global Warming object to? Is it that they just don’t like all the attention being grabbed by the doom sayers? Is it that the rest of us will spend their money as well as ours on some very challenging solutions that they think are not, or might not be necessary? What is it that they want to do with this money? Do they have some other grand project in mind, or do they just not want us to spend money on this, not their money at least. If that’s all it is, then hands up if you want your government to spend your share of the money and they can hang on to theirs, whoever they are, this the collective right of both sides. What is not a right is that they try to prevent us spending our money how we wish. It’s true that they may benefit from the work we do, but that happens all the time in life everyday. If we do nothing or perhaps worse if we do the right things but we do it too late, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu alluded to, if the ship goes down, we all go down together. So far there is no lifeboat for any of us, even the moon seems to have become further away than it was last century.

Plan B will have many parts to, many stages, it and it will have many effects on us like the ripples in a pond, and it will be a challenge for decades to come. It will affect all of us in our daily lives and it will preoccupy us long after many of us are gone, but it will be important for us to refocus the attention of the media away from more trivial indulgences, to educate ourselves and to inform ourselves. Apart from education, information is one resource that is available but missing. We have been saying for some time that we need to begin to set and achieve targets. We need to know what the current situation is so we can compare it with what is being accomplished and what remains to be done and we can see if we are on schedule. The world’s leaders must consider how to advise all people and achieve consent and a constantly updating global report card that is available to all people will be instrumental in achieving our goals.

This undertaking will be as great as the mission to transport mankind to the moon for those directly involved, except it will be greater because it will require all of us to play our part, and we know from experience that there are all the inevitable spinoff advantages. One thing is certain, this undertaking will force all the nations of the world to speak to each other and co-operate with each other. A planetary solar energy based grid system as one possible solution will certainly require global co-operation. Whatever takes first place as the next great energy source, some energy sources are already present and just waiting to be tapped into, wave energy, wind energy and solar energy. We are told that two hundred and fifty times as much energy as we currently use everyday on earth falls as solar energy over the planet.

If the deniers of global warming turn out to be correct, what wrong will have been done? Surely nothing, just like calling in the repair man when you only thought something was broken but turned out not to be, and at least we will all have peace of mind, for a time, on this concern. We humans are great believers in insurance policies to protect our property and our assets. We aren’t certain that disaster is just seconds away; we generally assume that nothing will happen, but it might. Should we insure our home or just leave the money sitting in the bank? Why on earth would we not invest in an insurance policy to protect the whole planet and everything living on it and in it? When we have Plan B, or Insurance Policy A, our environment will be cleaner, more secure, and life on this planet will be more liveable.

The choice to take out an insurance policy or not often depends on the level of the risk and how much we can afford to lose, as well as how much we can afford to spend to restore the situation. If we misjudge this risk and don’t opt for the right insurance or we don’t do it soon enough, then for our descendants Plan B (which will be needed anyway when oil called black gold but cheaper than water to buy runs out) will not be sufficient. Plan C, the energy source necessary to power the lifeboat which will carry our descendants away from a dying planet and on towards a new home will be needed and will likely include options like solving the so far insoluble problem of and perfecting the use of nuclear fusion, the process which fuels the sun.

Choosing and paying for this insurance policy should be not just a practical matter but also a matter of the most fundamental and profound ethical nature. If I use a loan to buy a car, insurance is a mandatory condition of the loan unless I have other assets that secure the loan amount for the car. This could be the insurance policy that underwrites the future of this planet and all life on it, and if these are the risks, then such an insurance policy should be mandatory not optional.