We know the Earth is undergoing fundamental change; the changes are even accelerating, destroying the world’s climate. We know it’s from burning fossil fuels.
Even those who deny it, know it, but don’t want to know.
According to the Gaia theory, coal, oil and gas, along with peat and permafrost (rapidly melting) serendipitously (or by Divine intervention) stayed in the ground, reducing concentrations of Co2, thereby moderating the climate. Now, humans are undoing that legacy as fast as they can.
Climate change is also exacerbated by deforestation and intensive, mono-culture agriculture. All are promoted by the world’s nation-states.
So, Trump is opening up Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante for oil and gas—and “opening up” much, much more. Leasing out ancient forests for lumber, federal lands right up to National Parks, being leased as fast as the Interior Department can manage it, pipelines rammed through Native reservations….
But it’s not only Trump, and the US. Trudeau in Canada is eager to cash in on the most polluting oil of all: the tar sands. He said it ‘can’t just stay in the ground.’
Then, the Japanese are building 20 new coal power plants. Why not solar, wind, or offshore wind? And while the Chinese are ahead of everyone in solar and wind, they, too, are promoting coal power, both in and outside China. Australia, despite large parts of it burning up, because of extreme ‘warming,’ is opening a gigantic new coal mine, so it can export even more coal.
We are aware here, in the Hudson Valley, of the pressures, even on ostensibly environmentalist progressives like Governor Cuomo, to permit pipelines, and new gas power plants for the fracked gas that he’s banned from drilling here, in NY. He should remember how popular the fracking ban has been, before he provides a market for it, coming all the way from the North Dakota, as well as from PA.
People, I’m not implying Cuomo, but people in his network, look at the Hudson River valley and say, what a perfect conduit for our product, so we can sell it in the New York, New Jersey market. Some people, who probably socialize with other people, will make a lot of quick money on it.
And all this building of infrastructure for oil and gas in the US, and also coal in a lot of other countries, will commit us to consume more fossil fuels for at least the next 30 years. If there is a world by then.
Canada is still in the Paris climate agreement, but it can spend its credits to sell tar sands. A hypocritical position, and a damaging one for the planet.
Bolsonaro is enabling the destruction of one of the major carbon sinks on Earth, the Amazon rainforests.
Southeast Asian rainforests are also falling to coconut oil plantations, destroying ecosystems and adding more to Co2.
India is another big nation betting on coal, for their own power and to export.
Destructive exploitation, mining, drilling, cutting down forests, is going on everywhere, but as rapidly as possible, it seems, here, in the US, and Canada, for the big bucks. Now! “To Hell with the future!”
What the Hell is going on?
Yes, some claim to be denialists, as in Trump’s claim that global warming is a Chinese hoax. But even Trump has admitted (sometimes) that climate change is happening. Last year, his government released predictions of rising temperatures even more extreme than the scientists’ figures.
And yet, Trump and his supporters continue to push oil and gas drilling and fracking, coal mining, pipelines—in the Hudson Valley, fracking shipping companies pressed for huge docks along the Hudson, for oil/gas tanker-barges to pull up to, and wait until the price was right to deliver “the product” to buyers in NJ, or abroad.
We stopped them, this time. Horrendous spills would have been likely, in the waters our river cities use for drinking. Pipelines are still poised over ridiculous new places, like the NY harbor and another nearly on the campus of a nuclear power plant about 20 miles upriver from the city.
Yes, there are many denialists. They’re like the tobacco denialists, who swore that nicotine wouldn’t hurt you, wasn’t addictive… and many of them died of lung cancer.
But climate denialists are far worse than the most aggressive smoker. Climate denialists are forcing all of us, and not just human beings, to suffer the extremes of climate now already happening. And getting worse by the month. Billions of creatures died in the Australian bush fires. Thousands of species are in danger of going extinct: their habitat is disappearing.
Thousands of plant species may also go extinct. Witness the fantastic biodiversity of the Amazon rainforests, now being burned down.
But it suddenly strikes me that human beings are acting like the mythic lemmings, hurling ourselves off the cliffs. Lemmings supposedly became over-populated in cycles and that was the way they dealt with it—according to the myth, and a Disney movie. Lemmings just migrate en masse, however, humans seem to be acting like the myth.
Unlike the mythical lemmings, we’re taking a lot of other life forms with us.
Why the urgency to build those pipelines, to frack those wells, to lumber that old growth?
To cash in before it’s too late?
Gotta get their money before all this extraction and combustion is prohibited, when their trillions of dollars worth of oil, gas and coal reserves will become worthless. Worthless!
No wonder the fossil fuel owners are willing to spend whatever it takes, to convince as many as possible that black is white, that dirty coal is clean, that fossil fuel use is not the problem: it’s sun spots, or volcanos—or something else—causing climates to change. Nothing we can do about it. Burn more oil! Ignore climate doomsayers!
They’re cunning, not stupid. Maybe they’re planning ahead.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump’s billionaire buddies aren’t already investing in asteroids to escape to, or underground real estate developments.
The legacy they’ll leave for their grandchildren? Lord of the Rondout Underground, or Grand Mufti of X-32 Asteroid.
A “new and improved” world.
I don’t envy the survivors.
I’m 80, I have no grandchildren, three adult offspring doing well without, so far.
I worry about what they’ll have to go through, and still wish I had grandchildren, but would be even more worried for the ‘grands,’ if I did.
A baby born this year (I know of two) will be only 60 in 2100—if there is a livable world out there, somewhere, by then.
