In social and agency relationships persons compelled to act without consent, pay, or other consideration exist in a state of involuntary servitude. Social media have never signed on to the social contract, instead data colonialism and technofascism have taken root. The Internet will be made free when participants are emancipated and have unique identities and verified consent as autonomous e>Citizens, whose financial resources and personal data cease to become the property of the technology companies and the targets of predatory capitalists, cyber criminals, and data colonialists seeking to manipulate and to take without compensation.
Cybercrime is predicted to inflict damages totaling $6 trillion USD globally in 2021. This is an amount equivalent to the world’s third-largest economy after the U.S. and China, and above Japan’s, at $5.15 trillion. That theft could be recovered, and that lost value repurposed globally and existentially for decarbonization of the atmosphere. Survival of life requires the reversal of the CO2 concentration within the water and air. Bitcoin uses vast amounts of energy, greater than the electrical energy used by the whole of Argentina, and the cryptocurrencies have gained their market share and use cases as the go to payment system for money launderers, tax evaders, hackers. and cyber criminals.
Law abiding citizens are victimized while the governments try to keep up with the fast-paced disruptors. The lax laws and anarchic technologies are a scammer’s dream. Technology problems are existential and an Internet of Regulation using emergent blockchain technologies applied to Law and Equity could be a detour from our pathway leading over the cliff’s edge.
INTRODUCTION
The same faculty of denying your death that lets you fly wildly down the highway at night, operates on a mass scale for the bulk of humanity, encouraging us to deny anthropogenic extinction. That is mass suicide by ecological poisoning of the sky and waters. Most of us cannot readily fathom that the innocent act of simply oxidizing carbon, burning fossil fuels, has turned nature against us. When I first began to argue before juries and judges in Western Oklahoma about the effects of pesticides and toxic spills in the late 80’s, I had the naive notion that I would be listened to and that I would succeed. Human beings are self-indulgent, carbon burners in our very essence. We cannot help it, slight moves begun by swiping our smart phone or starting our cars cause us to burn fossil fuels. Trying to tell people to conserve today to prolong life in the future is like insisting a dog not gnaw on the bone thrown to it. Based upon the current downward spiral due to climate disaster, financial collapse, and social media catastrophe, without intense education, strict resource allocation to avoid carbon emissions, there is a real likelihood of humans and the rest of life failing.
Railing at people seldom helps. Having grown up in rural Oklahoma and having become skilled variously as a cowboy, unconventional warfare soldier, county seat lawyer, small businessman and as a father, I have tried always to lead people (or animals) from the front or to direct them from behind as needed, pulling, pushing, and prodding them to choose the best path. “Jurisprudence”
literally means the wise choice of law. As a J.D., with a doctorate in jurisprudence, my societal duty is to be a kind of “jury doctor,” helping my clients choose the wisest choice of law, so that juries and judges will always see their side. But in the final analysis, within a free society, one must encourage citizens to go the direction they want. Folks are less like herding cattle and should be left to go wild like buffalo. But as the cowboy singer Roger Miller, once sang, “You can’t roller skate in a buffalo herd….but you can be happy if you’ve a mind to.”
While human activity is being herded through the Internet, happy trails may not be ahead, unless there are serious global interventions to regulate the Internet.
The Internet of Regulation (IOR) is a term we have coined for a technological and legal design to provide an ethical path to address computer and law code integration centered upon the issues of recording and transferring value, identity, and agreement. A legal and organizational approach is required to effectively administer the IOR. Indigenous Nations Tribal Reserve (INTR) is a specialized business organization that has a Federal Charter with sovereign intertribal attributes to help establish and regulate cooperatives and associations. We are building on that tribal sovereignty to give everyone world-wide-web citizenship (e>Citizens) within the context of a White Buffalo Alliance. The Alliance is established to help design, develop, and to use INTR’s FinTech tools within governments, industries, and institutions. The White Buffalo Alliance is an unincorporated association and has individual membership tiers and is self- governing with a constitution. The White Buffalo Coop is the business tier, with extensive by-laws.
The Coop is established for cooperative businesses to use Pay>Trak$, which are state level digital asset processors tied into an electronic fund transfer system interchange, which is all controlled by INTR using data bases and blockchain.
How distributed ledger technology (DLT) or blockchain tech work is not difficult and just means that there are multiple computer ledgers redundantly recording events. Thousands of copies of any information are recorded. With so many copies, it makes it more difficult for cheaters to steal identity, to falsify consent, or to counterfeit value.
Internet of Regulation (IOR). You surely have heard of the Internet of Information (email and Zoom), the Internet of Things (Alexa and Nest), or the Internet of Value (Bitcoin and Ethereum). Now, the greatest challenge is to find a sheriff to ride shot gun over the vast lawlessness of cyberspace. There needs to emerge an Internet of Regulation. An effective regulatory regime will require an Internet of Identity and an Internet of Consent. The identities and agreements between parties must be correlated, immutably determined, joined, and agreements enforced. The Internet is like the Wild West, and until there is created a regulated approach prioritizing identity and consent, there will be no process to catch, prevent, and punish cybercrimes, hacks, scams, tax evasion, black market, and identity theft. A Neural>Jural process, combining law code and merging that with computer code is needed. INTR has been designing such a Neural>Jural process and network. The design sessions bring lawyers working with coders who are together integrating use cases in the context of neural networks.
There are three programmable components to the Neural>Jural process and network:
Digital Dollar- Trak$. Digital Identity- Self>Trak$
Digital Agreement- Smar>Trak$.
You can best imagine the Neural>Jural process with the Trak$ as the digital dollar pushed along the courses of the net between where the intersection of identity and agreement join as the transfer points (Self>Trak$ and Smar>Trak$) connecting the cords in the matrix. The resultant paired digital identities and digital agreements concerning any transfers of payment, product, and custodian are immutably recorded using DLT. The programmable Self>Trak$ digital identity and Smar>Trak$ digital agreements are the basis of any dispute resolution.
Questions of identity or consent can be mediated, arbitrated, or litigated using the Smar>Trak$ and Self>Trak$ as evidence using this Neural>Jural process. The Self>Trak$ agreement is between the associate and INTR. Smar>Trak$ are digital contracts between any two parties concerning their services, payments, and things. The dispute resolution can be autonomous and programmed depending upon any conflict’s complexity.
Cowboys, lawyers, and medics are not the skill sets who generally write the books on how to merge legal, financial, and logistical technologies. But cowboys, lawyers, and medics are all about the loyal attendance to both written and unwritten oaths and traditions to act honorably and faithfully in undertaking sometimes onerous duties of trust while keeping their herds, clients, and troops out of harm’s way. Businessmen and technologists are not fiduciaries and have few ethics, their duty is to make money. Following their self-serving, predatory philosophies is a disaster in the making. Academicians, ethicists, and scholars do
not generally execute plans. The best of soldiers and lawyers are accustomed to acting to serve a higher cause. As they fix things, soldiers and lawyers adhere to their oaths to protect their charges and ensure survival of others in performing their duties in sometimes life-or-death situations. I have saved and defended peoples’ lives serving in both the military and in the law, but as a businessman my duties have never required me to sacrifice myself personally. Business involves shifting risks and blame on to others.
The survival of the individual and the group has been studied for centuries. A Malthusian survival analysis concerns itself mostly with variables of food and geography. The published study referenced below, identifies pollution as the primary reason for an impending environmental collapse, and implicitly indicates the need for more carbon sequestration and a negative carbon footprint as the cure. Thomas Malthus, an 18th-century British philosopher and economist, theorized a growth model, an exponential formula used to project population growth. Malthus theorized that food production will not be able to keep up with growth in the human population, resulting in disease, famine, war, and calamity.1
But contrary to the Malthusian hypothesis, food production is not the greatest danger threatening survival. The greatest threat is CO2 increase. To combat the possibility of such an ecological collapse, so-called ESG efforts are likely best focused in the areas of limiting atmospheric pollution from humans burning carbon. ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. The investment community has begun to apply these non-financial factors as part of their analysis process for identifying material risks and growth opportunities. Any community development efforts should place as a priority not only limiting carbon release into the atmosphere, but efforts to absorb carbon and to achieve a negative carbon emission status should be upmost. The goal is not in just becoming carbon zero.
The goal should be carbon negative, and a return to below 300 ppm CO2. These are preindustrial levels of atmospheric CO2. The “Keeling Curve,” which shows the rise of atmospheric CO2 since the late 1950s, makes it clear the problem of climate chaos is carbon dioxide increase. The climate cure is straight forward and involves strategies that take carbon out of the air. But to succeed, the resolve must be everywhere and that of total war. What is the appropriate ESG protocol and how is it possible to measure and regulate such a carbon reversal process on a grand
scale? Our INTR-Pay>Trak$-White Buffalo ecosystem could theoretically perform those tasks, by recording and regulating transfers of payment, products, services, and custodian events to achieve carbon negative status.
If there will be a decarbonization intervention, it will not likely work unless it is a very robust rationing system that every consumer-loving person hates. To preserve adherence, rewards need to be programmed, distribution must be done fairly, and the process needs to preserve civil liberties to the greatest extent possible. People’s rights must be respected, and egalitarianism preserved. Risk aversion dictates that there are ways of meeting this climate catastrophe risk scenario without endangering people’s civil rights. The fate of all life on Earth is likely in the balance. Poisoning our atmosphere and killing off life is an existential issue which is a greater danger to survival than any war, and strategies to address these dangers are needed now.
We have launched a community development deployment of the INTR- Pay>Trak$-White Buffalo organization, (which can be abbreviated to INTR Ecosystem), within one of the most conservative states in the country, which has the highest level of climate change denial. Our community development process has been ongoing in Western Oklahoma for over twenty years, and we have integrated into this book an explanation of our practical approach. Ours is a living project, and so the book is a chronicle of the evolution of our legal, organizational, and financial technology designs to aid sustainability. Since INTR’s founding in 2001, our mantra has always been to think globally and act locally. The existential problems of disruptive technologies, neo-colonialism, over- consumption, and ecological compromise require universal and comprehensive ethical uncompromising solutions.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, we have all migrated our activities onto the web.
But the Internet is lawless and the corporate outlaws that run it have sopped up a disproportionate proportion of the world’s wealth in consequence of their disruptive anarchy. The Internet could be used for reversing the process of mindless resource extraction and blind consumerism, which are pushing climate catastrophe. Corporations are structured to allow for the unbridled assertion of appetites, and are not generally known to self-regulate. The paramount duty of the corporate director or executive is to get everything they can as quickly as they can and to optimize profits. This profit optimization model is enshrined and embedded into the essential fabric of the corporate organic documents and has distorted the law of trusts and fiduciaries. It has also distorted the Internet, which is programmed to get everyone as a consumer to use more hydrocarbons and other stuff without concern for limits. Consumerism that leads to resource exhaustion, pollution, and death is not rational and is predatory capitalism per se.
Fiduciary duties, or the trust obligations owed by executives and directors to corporations, are exclusively for the benefit of the shareholders. Corporations are immortal, selfish and are not intended to benefit the rest of humanity or the planet’s flora and fauna. The executives and directors’ jobs are making money for their beneficiaries, shareholders, and executives. The corporations view the rest of us as objects to manipulate, consumers or users. Profit making has devolved into a kind of technofascism, in the context of ecological violence, overconsumption, and the military and industrial establishment. Fossil-fuel-fed, business culture, combined with inegalitarian and craven means have appropriated disproportionate control over government, media, and societies. Corporations have perpetual lives, and the net result is that the eternal drive to feed this insatiable and infinite capitalist beast will logically end up using up the limited resources of the Earth or polluting it so that life is untenable. The corporations, like the social media, appear driven by the lowest of appetitive drives and thrive on creating and feeding our basest consumer impulses, shopping until we all drop.
Any ethical aspirations are drowned out in a system where the votes that might control the runaway consumption process are co-opted by the ceaseless psychobabble of corporate media, tied to corporate wealth, which fuels an infinite uncontrolled and cancerous growth cycle. The body politic and the Earth balance have become metastatic, and homeostasis has been supplanted by a kind of planetary tapeworm. Our approach to counter corporatism is to establish cooperatives to be blended with corporatism.
Cooperative capitalism includes everyone and means we all consent to certain functions and work together. I personally favor cooperatives. I obtain the things which allow me to write this, my electricity and broad band, from a rural electric cooperative. The Oklahoma Electric Cooperative was established during the Great Depression to bring electricity to rural communities. The cooperative approach inspires consensus, accountability, and social responsibility.
Cooperatives can require that growth be plowed back into ecological sustainability. My neighbors, who have corporate supplied electrical and broad band services, do not get anywhere near the value and service I receive through membership in my rural electric cooperative. I get superior product and services at lower prices and sometimes a little cooperative rebate check arrives in the mail. My cooperative
treats me as a patron-collaborator and gives me rebates. INTR Ecosystem strategy has as its essence cooperatives and their ownership by people and businesses, but as noted, it also includes capitalism and the corporation.
The cooperative organization is not necessarily a socialist notion and can be combined with capitalist corporations in a newly emerging and statutory business association. The Uniform Limited Cooperative Association Act (ULCAA) is enacted in nearly a dozen states. The White Buffalo Coop is organized as such a limited cooperative association or LCA. Cooperatives are all about participation and sustainability. A simple example is the seed corn the farmers’ cooperative will keep back enough of each year for the next planting season. The gravity of the problem of climate catastrophe and reversing CO2 buildup will require more than just a little conservation. Intense cooperation and focus needs to take hold all over the globe and immediately if optimal reduction of CO2 is to occur.
Cooperative capitalism involves channeling greed into automatically assuaging perpetual need; transforming grease energy into green energy; taking from the greedy and giving to the needy. It will require an extremely high proportion of every dollar earned to be spent on sustainability and decarbonization. Going completely green can create many more jobs and much wealth. Decarbonization will require a higher consciousness with voluntary and enforced altruistic behaviors, attitudes, and evolved thinking. Billionaires are the A-holes blamed for this; but responsibility for saving life is on all of us. Rather than blaming the problem on the world of A-holes, transformative ethics has us transcending to Halos. (Those billionaires who have come up with compelling jingles about harnessing all the living blue planet’s wealth, to get them and their Martian friends to the dead red planet’s dearth, might use a friendly intervention too.)
Rampant, out-of-control technology can be stopped by the socially responsible use of organization, law, and technology to regulate, monitor, and enforce equitable distribution of resources. The intervention solution needs to be autonomous and ubiquitous and might be done with what we have dubbed a
“Neural>Jural” process and network, which operate as a machine perceptive and programmable logistical and payment tracking system. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) can be made immutable and can be made to use the more efficient validator nodes of “proof of trust” rather than “proof of work.” DLT can correlate payment, custodian, and service or product transfers and agreements.
Distributed ledger technologies using blockchain like Bitcoin do not work best because proof of work systems consume electricity infinitely and are network backed, speculative and can be manipulated volatile markets. The Bitcoin
whitepaper sets out to solve the problems of dispute mediation and trust with distrust. It has been implicated in ransomware, hacking, criminal syndicates, terrorists, anarchists, money launderers and tax evaders.
Our team has been helped for several years to find a trusted solution with the direct guidance of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Everyone should be able to benefit from the securities regulations that prevent Ponzis, but individuals can also get the benefit of distributed ledger that Trak$ provides, without the problems associated with most cryptocurrencies. Satoshi Nakamoto, in the Bitcoin Whitepaper, had a laudable goal of avoiding expensive mediation and creating a trustless disintermediated system. But what has devolved is a far cry from his original invention: money laundering, cyber-crime, energy inefficiency, and manipulated markets. The distributed ledger technologies like blockchain tech have great potential, but most cryptocurrency investment scams do not optimize, rather, they delegitimize the technologies.
Bitcoin is a technology that is over a decade old, ancient in the computational fields. Our SEC compliant design is more advanced than the blockchain or proof of work used in Bitcoin. Trak$ have both centralized and decentralized elements and resemble more the proof of trust validator model used by the company Ripple Labs in its XRP cryptocurrency. The INTR Ecosystem can be modified and made to use Ethereum or EOS smart contracts which enforce regulated behaviors. You should not be able to derive value from our ecosystem unless the product or service is ethically appropriate. The Kantian categorical imperative is modified by us and universalized within our smart contracts, to include as a party to any bargain, all life and the Earth itself. Our holistic approach is not simply theoretical, and sustainability can become a contractual consideration embedded in every digital contract. Our Internet of Regulation restrains the energy waste of the industrial society and avoids run-away financial speculation found in markets which risk the welfare of the Earth and place life in the balance.
Our team has designed and developed an ecologically centered ecosystem.
We are piloting it first in Oklahoma within a logistical train application involving highly regulated hemp and medical marijuana, The industrial hemp is federally legal and medical marijuana is state legal. We submitted drafts of state medical marijuana legislation which was partially embraced and passed as the “Oklahoma’s Unity Act”. Our legal strategy has been to advocate for medical marijuana legislation which could use our payment and tracking ecosystem. The idea is to match law and technology to solve unique problems and to work closely at ll levels of government to achieve an integrated outcome.
I conceived of the idea of using laws, escrows, and smart contracts to stymie corruption when I was suing corrupt tribal leaders, judges, and casino operators in a federal RICO suit involving racketeering. My job was overturning a tribal government coup d’état within the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Western Oklahoma. Taking down corrupt tribal officials is a thankless, whack-a-mole activity and something I have done for thirty-five years. The Amerindian tribes are very often atavistic mafias and many move to install crime families again and again. Some tribes exhibit these autocratic tendencies as a microcosm of the larger developed and developing societies. I observed distributed ledger technologies might provide an ethical function to enforce the release or escrow of properly budgeted funds to stymie corruption. Distributed ledger technologies or blockchain could function as a truth machine, which might be applied to intervene in enforcing the appropriated funding of legislatures and tribal assemblies. Representative tribal governments are forever corrupted by rent seeking and gate keeping. Blockchain, or distributed ledger technology, referred to as the proof of trust kind, can be made to fight corruption and to account minutely for resources used.
Our federal system is “the laboratory of democracy”, and the tribes are a ready place to experiment on ecologically sustainable ecosystems using distributed ledger technologies and socially responsible revenue modeling. We filed a provisional patent for this Neural>Jural process, and the U.S. SEC helped to guide us in the securities and technologies design. We built the ecosystem legal foundation upon a sovereign tribal delegation and the highest principle is this modified Kantian ecological imperative which requires any decision consider its effect on life.
If there will be a planetary intervention, it will not likely work unless it is an all-out and ubiquitous carbon rationing system that every consumer-loving person will hate. To preserve adherence to the rules governing such a rationing
process, rewards need to be programmed into the ecosystem, distribution must be done fairly, and the processes must preserve to the greatest extent possible autonomy, consent, and identity. Jural and property relations must be respected, and egalitarianism preserved. Risk aversion dictates that we need some insurance or a way of meeting this impending climate catastrophe scenario, because the fate of all life on Earth is likely in the balance. Poisoning our atmosphere and killing off life is an existential issue which is a greater danger than any war.
The extreme hurricanes, heat domes, sea level rise, polar ice melting, droughts, floods, tornadoes, and wildfires, are the Pearl Harbor or Lusitania events in an
analogous way and justify a call to arms. These weather anomalies are thousand- year events and fall outside the scope of normalcy, and are best explained by climate modeling, which includes climate catastrophes and the CO2 rise as explanations for these events, as observed. Extreme weather events are advanced attacks, or portents, and should be warnings that we need to act decisively, now.
Recall that rationing and engaging the populace in an all-out effort is the technique of total war. Regrettably, a similar kind of approach is likely needed to combat the CO2 pollution. Ration cards in the WWI and WWII eras were a crude example of a track and trace management of the supply chain, implemented to ensure that the maximum resources were being expended on the war effort. The INTR-Pay>Trak$-White Buffalo ecosystem design uses distributed ledger technologies and artificial intelligence, and the design has incentives and disincentives, and protects the legal and civil rights of the citizens. Such a Neural>Jural process, needs to be further perfected, refined, and deployed. A rationing system of carbon sequestration and decarbonization could be built and on the shelf, so that it might be quickly activated, as the policy makers and population obtain the resolve to intervene in serious decarbonization, to reverse what seems an inevitable collapse. At the very least, a rationing capability is an insurance policy which could be deployed to de-risk and reduce the likelihood of a global collapse. We are best served to manage growth methodically to save ourselves and to avoid an unfortunate end. It is common sense and is the same as when you find a nail in your tire. You take it in to get it fixed, before it becomes critical and deflates into a collapsed flat and leaves you stranded. One must have a way of monitoring and keeping the system pumped up, but hot with pump and dumps. That is what this financial and logistical processor, INTR-Pay>Trak$- White Buffalo ecosystem, is designed to do on the both the micro and macro levels.
After our second year exploring with the U.S. SEC the ecosystem, the SEC team with whom we were working noted that our design had morphed into an economic system. We have articulated an approach which we call “cooperative capitalism”, but to enhance the ability to succeed, the entire value, product, and custodial chain needs to be included. A means needs to be made available for insuring the ESG factors are in place and are followed. Here is a quote from a reputable study indicating that pollution is the variable most likely to cause an environmental collapse:
The two scenarios aligning most closely with observed data indicate a halt in welfare, food, and industrial production over the next decade or so, which puts
into question the suitability of continuous economic growth as humanity’s goal in the twenty-first century. Both scenarios also indicate subsequent declines in these variables, but only one—where declines are caused by pollution— depicts a collapse. 2
We have driven the design, legal infrastructure, and data architecture to apply to a real-world logistics and payment problem. INTR is entirely devoted to having the Pay>Trak$ platform practical in terms of creating a truth machine with a sustainability engine driving it. We have chosen as our launch for Oklahoma Pay>Trak$ a value train which cries for intervention using our comprehensive ecosystem within Oklahoma’s cannabis industry. We have already been involved in writing the relevant state law, which was enacted to regulate the state’s cannabis supply chain, and we have been engaging in a campaign with agencies of the state to get adoption.
We have continued the process of analyzing the complete set of Oklahoma medical marijuana laws, and marking all those provisions that are capable of being programmed. This is the first step in what we call the Neural>Jural process.
Practically speaking, it is simply downloading the entire law, and then we go through line by line, and bold in red anything which is susceptible to programming, monetizing, or recording. Then we get the data architects in and thereafter the coders. There should likewise be a behaviorist involved, to sample the events and to evaluate in focus groups diverging or converging aspects of human cognition, attitudes, and behaviors. So, our vision and quest are not merely a pipe dream, and our means and ends are practical. The Neural>Jural process is being undertaken by our team as a real grassroots effort. We think globally and act locally. An example is that we are getting all the Oklahoma county treasurers on a Zoom, so as to take their input, and then we rinse and repeat with the county commissioners, sheriffs,
and DA’s. The Neural>Jural process requires more than just reading the law and is more about creating consensus and asking permission from within the established local, tribal, state and federal government systems.
Given what is at stake, extinction prevention should become the object of
everyone’s endeavors. Thirty years ago, I helped put together a weekly publication with some enthusiastic youngsters with piercings, tattoos, and colorful hair called “Doublethink.” I recall writing an article about the “Information Superhighway”.
2 Branderhorst, Gaya. 2020. Update to Limits to Growth: Comparing the World3 Model With Empirical Data. Master’s thesis, Harvard Extension School. https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/37364868
My thesis was that somehow the way to fix the impending collapse and extinction problem was using the Internet. Now, I am out getting the homegrown “Bubbas,” and the local leaders in Oklahoma, to adopt an internet ecosystem designed to curb the problems of cannabis, which can then be pivoted to launch against the Malthusian problems with effective and tested solutions.
If this gargantuan existential challenge will be reduced, it must be taken on at every level, especially at the local level with every human being participating in decarbonization and the strategy replicated trillions of times. Climate denial is at its highest in the Western Oklahoma. This is within the area we have targeted for the launch of our pilot project. “Thirty percent of the 21,000 people in Woodward County are estimated (using a statistical model based in national surveys) to
believe that climate change isn’t happening at all,” according to the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. The county ties with six others for the highest rate of climate skepticism in the country.”3 We must get the Bubbas to do the work of Buddha.
We invite others to unite with us in the Alliance as an individual or join the Coop as a business. Once we conceived that there was a comprehensive fintech and legal solution for the herculean task of decarbonization, we have been compelled to advance its design and launch. It has been frustrating, exhausting and a somewhat thankless task. It helps so much to have others who can help test our ideals and articulate practical solutions. A design for a universal truth machine is not built in a day.
3https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/03/opinions/sutter-climate-skeptics-woodward-oklahoma/index.html “I could recount several interactions like that from my week in Woodward County, Oklahoma, one of the most climate- skeptical counties in the United States. Thirty percent of the 21,000 people in Woodward County are estimated (using a statistical model based in national surveys) to believe that climate change isn’t happening at all, according to the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. The county ties with six others for the highest rate of climate skepticism in the country.”