Wednesday, April 22, 2020 is the 50th anniversary of the Earth Day movement. Climate awareness groups are calling for three days of concerted action, including student strikes. For more information contact the US Youth Climate Strike Coalition.
The Eighth Plague that the Judaic God launched against the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun in the Old Testament story of Exodus was swarms of locust. The locust covered the sun and devoured everything green in the fields. The Egyptians may have deserved their plight, but contemporary Kenyans definitely don’t.
According to the Greenhouse Gas Emission Factsheet, Kenya produces a tiny percentage, 0.13%, of the world’s atmospheric pollutants that cause global warming and climate change. Per capita, Kenya ranked 165th out of 192 countries. In fact, all East African countries rank at the bottom of the Greenhouse Emissions list.
Kenya and its neighbors in East Africa, Somalia, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Djibouti, Uganda, and Tanzania, are now trying to survive the worst desert locust infestation in at least the last seventy years. The locust swarms contain as many as 80 million adult insects. They are highly mobile, traveling as far as eighty miles a day, while devouring grasslands, pastures, crops, and the vegetation in wildlife preserves. Voracious eaters and breeders, they consume as much as 35,000 people on a daily basis. Twelve million people already experience acute food shortages and another twenty million are threatened with famine. According to a United Nations report, unless the world acts immediately to suppress them, the size of the locust swarm could increase by five hundred times by June and they can cross the Red Sea and Indian Ocean and attack heavily populated regions of Asia.
This immense locust swarm is a direct result of global warming and climate change. Warming of the Indian Ocean produced record heavy rainfall in the region from October through December, accelerating the breeding and growth of the desert locust. Warmer temperature helped the locust mature more rapidly and expanded their natural range into higher elevations. Arianne Cease, director of the Global Locust Initiative at Arizona State University warns, “Locust outbreaks are expected to become more frequent and severe under climate change.”
The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization requested $76 million from member nations to control the locusts’ spread. But so far, there has been a miserly response from the countries most responsible for the climate catastrophe.
Donald Trump, like Pharaoh Tutankhamun, turns a cold heart, vicious tongue, and empty brain towards the world’s victims and ultimately towards his own people. Under Trump the deregulation of the U.S. fossil fuel industry is expected to cause increased premature deaths and illnesses from air pollution in the United States and a sharp jump in climate-warming emissions. According to the Associated Press, Trump eliminated an Environmental Protection Agency rule requiring energy companies to reduce methane leakage; replaced an EPA rule designed to cut greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants; stopped Department of Transportation proposals for more stringent fuel efficiency standards; rescinded a Department of Transportation rule requiring railroads to install advanced electronic brakes on trains hauling hazardous fuels. And of course, Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Change Accord.
We don’t know how many plagues an angry God will visit on the United States and the world because of its desecration of the Earth and the refusal of Trump and his supporters to address climate change. We already have drought. floods, fire, tornadoes, and new epidemic diseases.
In 2020, California had its driest February on record, which will be disastrous for agriculture and drinking water, and threatens even worse wildfires this summer and fall. But California is a Blue State, so what does Trump care.
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