Anyone who doesn’t have his head up his posterior has probably noticed that
humanity’s lease on Planet Earth is running out fast. Cataclysmic atmospheric
warming, as a direct result of human activity, is the singular life-and-death
threat the human race faces.
That understanding, repressed or sublimated into
comic book
nightmares, is the reason why so many of our arts and entertainment
narratives deal with apocalypses and dystopias, planetary disasters of all
sorts: We know this. It’s in our dreams, our movies, and our books.
Our time is running out, and our lease on Earth shortens every day in which we
do nothing to change our ways. This knowledge is lodged firmly in our
subconscious, even if the leaders chosen by fear of change refuse to acknowledge it.
Our political and corporate leaders have known about the threat posed by rapid climate change for well over 30 years now. Our leaders simply behave as if denying the truth will
somehow cause this reality to shrug and go away. It will not. No superhero can
suck the greenhouse gases out of our atmosphere and our oceans. The aliens will
not arrive to save us. The ‘rapture’ will give way to The Rupture, and our
planetary lease will be permanently broken because we couldn’t be bothered to
take care of the place.
Face it, folks, barring some apparently super-human course
correction we are living in what may prove to be the human centuries. Our descendants in subsequent centuries, if there are any, will no longer be living in the "Anthropocene," the era of human domination the planet. But in the era of human diminishment, as they struggle to survive increasingly hostile conditions. And even before the 21st century gets too much further along, our children,
grandchildren and great-grandchildren will likely be struggling with conditions those
of us born in more fortunate (though careless) times would regard as unbearable and
unimaginable.
What are the countries of the world doing to mitigate the
disaster? Making inadequate promises they fail to live up. What are our
political and business leaders doing? Sticking their heads in the sand, on
which they build their mansions of narcissistic self-absorption. “Vanity of
vanities,” sayeth the preacher. “All is vanity.”
We have known about the science of greenhouse gases and global
warming for a long time. The recent death of George H.W. Bush puts our societal
self-deception into perspective.
The last Republican President with the semblance of a working
brain, Bush helped create the ongoing governmental research project called the
National Climate Assessment. The fourth edition of this assessment was issued
(as required by law) a few weeks ago by the administration of a POTUS who
believes his innate self-regard is a surer guide to policy than science, fact,
or the requirement of an empirical basis for proclaiming truths about nature
that Western Civilization has accepted since the time of Newton.
This latest Climate Assessment basically confirms that human
civilization is doomed in the absence of what amounts to the political miracle
of a worldwide crash program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
In 1988, the year Bush senior was elected president, the New
Yorker published an essay titled “The End of Nature,” spelling out the
predictable effect of continued rapid greenhouse gas poisoning of the earth’s
atmosphere. Thirty years ago, that is, anyone who could read was likely to draw
the conclusion that rapid atmospheric warming spelled major trouble for that
planetary ‘nature’ of which we are all a part and for all the natural systems
on which human society depends.
The corporation in that day with the tightest hammerlock on the
upper reaches of the American government, Exxon, had understood the seriousness
of global atmospheric warming directly caused by the human burning of fossil
fuels since way back in 1977, when one of its senior scientists told Exxon’s
top execs that fossil fuels were driving up average global temperatures at a
rate likely to produce disastrous consequences. Further research sustained this
conclusion.
Five years later Exxon scientists told company leaders that “potentially
catastrophic events” would require “major reductions in fossil fuel and
combustion.”
[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/26/how-extreme-weather-is-shrinking-the-planetlink]
Exxon corporate execs did what corporate execs always do. They
hid the facts and spun the issue in a way to keep government away from the
problem, the public in the dark, and industry profits as high as possible.
Earlier this year the New York Times devoted an entire issue of
its weekly magazine to a story titled “Thirty years ago, we could have saved
the planet.”
Detailing the many opportunities industry and government leaders
had to make policy choices to reduce the pace of global warming during the
decade after scientific findings showed that human society was in trouble, the
report offered this summary of the consequences of inaction:
“Since 1989, the global mean temperature has increased by one
degree Fahrenheit. By 2030, the number of people worldwide affected by floods
is expected to triple. Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected cause
the deaths of roughly 250,000 people each year. By 2050, the Arctic Ocean is
expected to be largely ice-free in the summer. By that same year, a million
species will face extinction… By the turn of the next century, global sea
levels will have risen by to four feet, potentially turning hundreds of million
of people into refugees.”[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html]
Those refugee numbers will spike even higher when croplands
parched by rising temperatures can no longer feed us. In fact, world
agricultural output is already on the decline.
These are impacts that well-meaning individuals cannot deal with
by recycling more and driving cars with better mileage, or even electric cars.
This is a crisis that requires a full national and international mobilization
of human effort and resources such as that required to win a world war.
To plan, initiate and organize that sort of effort, a large
representative democracy such as ours relies on its leaders. Individuals can
neither study the full extent of a life-or-death planetary crisis nor provide a
solution. That’s what governments led by elected leaders are for.
Our elected leaders have failed us. They go on failing us today.
Becoming President in 1989, Bush senior supported legislation
creating the National Climate Assessment, a project that brings 13 different
federal agencies into play. The fourth iteration of that Assessment was issued
on November 23 by the administration of a POTUS who claims for political
reasons not to see what the problem is. In fact, no one can be quite that
stupid. What he believes is that it will be someone else’s problem long after
he’s gone.
Frankly, that’s what everyone appears to believe. But ask the
Californians whose homes went up in smoke last month. Ask the people of
Florida, or Texas, or Puerto Rico who suffered similar losses in last year’s
record-setting hurricane season. Ask the citizens of the Pacific island nations
who watch their country washing away. The effects are already here, and they
will inevitably get worse.
After a good start on climate assessment, Bush senior ran away
from the clearly identified problem by failing to support a government mandated
program to reduce greenhouse emissions.
He’s had plenty of company ever since. No carbon tax, calculated
to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and make sustainable alternatives more
attractive, can achieve political traction in Washington so long as the fossil
fuel industry retains its hold on government by employing its financial power
to influence the public and bribe fossil-fuel friendly Congresses against it.
The environmental researcher and writer Alex Steffen describes
the successful industry conspiracy to block efforts to reduce carbon emission
as “perhaps the most consequential deception in mankind’s history.”
The consequence being, of course, the undermining of human
civilization.
Cornering the stock market, or dumping bad mortgages on little
banks, is child’s play in comparison.
Human beings survived an Ice Age that ended a mere 12,000 years
ago. Perhaps a few of our species will survive the current man-made polluting
of the atmosphere and consequential cataclysmic disruption of the climate to
which we contemporary humans and our societies have adapted — i.e. a livable
planet, which soon we will make unlivable. It’s a slender hope.
Bush senior’s son, Bush junior — H.W.s biggest single
mistake — played his predictable dunderhead role in leading America down the
garden path to environmental hell.
When world leaders woke to the looming global warming disaster
and held the Koyoto Convention in 1997 — twenty years after Exxon scientists
identified the problem — they reached an “accord” on limiting carbon emissions
from fossil fuels. But back in these United States lobbyists went to work on
our weak-kneed politicians. George W. Bush, a dilettante in every field he ever
entered, surrendered his thread-bare political manhood to the evil mastermind
and oil-industry stooge Dick Cheney, who cared more about oil futures than
little consequences such as the future of humanity.
Cheney had a word with the newly (and falsely) elected President,
and Bush junior obligingly dropped his election-year 2000 promise to back laws
to reduce carbon dioxide pollution. In American politics, facts that get in the
way of profits are simply made to go away. Now we are in thrall to a POTUS who
does not believe in facts, except those alternate realities of his own
invention.
Total political irresponsibility in the face of an increasingly
obvious threat of catastrophic climate change continued until Obama — America’s
last legitimately elected President; will we ever have another? — signed the
Paris Climate Accord, committing us to do something. The agreement’s goals were
not stringent enough, and most countries have already failed to meet them, but
at least the Paris Accord committed us to an international effort to mitigate
the worst impacts of a looming societal breakdown.
Ah, but this level of responsibility proved too much for
self-indulgent Americans to bear.
Our failing democracy promptly enabled the fraudulent election of
a dunderhead and schoolyard bully, who straightway tore up the agreement and
called for more drilling, digging, and all other means of rapid environmental
desecration.
But global warming is not simply a ‘political’ issue and you
can’t put all the blame on the current POTUS since a long string of lies,
obfuscation, greed and political corruption have undermined action on this
singular crisis for the future of humanity for a clearly documented 40-year
history.
It’s a problem that won’t go away, because facts don’t. Since we
can’t go back in time and change things — the only truly satisfying
intellectual solution is time-travel; a theme on which we also keep getting
screen and literary narratives — the only thing we can do now is kick away the
obstructions and distractions.
De Trompe, whose government is all obstruction and distraction,
certainly has to be yanked off stage by the hook of rational self-interest. His
supporters have to be invited to resume their displaced humanity, if they can
find where they left it. And Americans have to elect and support leaders
willing to tell corporations and other wealthy funders what to do, rather the
long-endured other way around.
I’m not sure our democracy is up to this job. Anybody know a good
candidate for benevolent dictator?
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