What’s All This Nonsense About Saving the Planet? Part Two of Three; Everybody Knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died (Leonard Cohen)
Big Oil knew they were ruining the atmosphere nearly a hundred years ago, but it was profitable. $Millions were turning to $billions and membership at the country club was no competition for owning homes in three countries, traveling by private jet and driving a garage-full of Mercedes and Lamborghinis.
It’s been a restive century, and it seemed perfectly logical to deny what was happening and hire scientists, specialists, dreamers, schemers and politicians to carry a lie to the public. Those who didn’t sign on had their reputations trashed and jobs dropped off at the landfill.
But that was just Big Oil
And everybody knows that it's now or never
Everybody knows that it's me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
When you've done a line or two
Things Go Better with Coke, is a motto that goes far beyond your local Coca-Cola bottler. A line or two of cocaine enables bankers to redline minority mortgages, schools to graduate the functionally illiterate, corporations to move to China, courts to rule against unions, CEO salaries to equal 250 times worker wages, the national minimum wage to stagnate at $7.20, and politicians to pocket bribes, all without a shred of guilt.
Persistently absent from party-time were the minorities trying to buy a home, the kids who couldn’t get a job because they couldn’t read, and those who had a job—often a well-paying middle-class job—and lost it. What has that to do with the trashing of our planet?
Two things; first, the rise of the super-rich who bought and paid for the Congress of the United States, and second, the strategic destruction of a well-informed middle class that might have stopped the environmental rampage if they hadn’t been so distracted trying to survive.
The house was burning, and the firemen paid to stay home
Roughly 60,000 wildfires burn 8 million acres in the U.S. every year, and they’re more destructive and deadly than ever. Experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predict another above-average wildfire season in the Western states. There are a couple of reasons for this. Our warming planet means earlier and shorter springs, and that causes foliage and pine needles to dry up and turn into wildfire fuel earlier every year.
The second reason is overdevelopment in the so-called wildland-urban areas, where homeowners keep rebuilding and moving back. In California, Texas and other high-risk states insurers are abandoning the market. It’s hard to be on your own in homes costing millions, but that’s the deal.
Much of what doesn’t burn is flood-prone
Flood risk throughout the United States increases with each passing year. Weather events such as hurricanes, severe storms, flash floods and rising seas bring billions of dollars worth of damage to communities all over the country.
If you think only a few states in the U.S. run the risk of flooding, realize that in just the last 5 years every one of the 50 states experienced at least one significant flooding event. Risks don’t merely occur in coastal areas of the country. The rise in swollen rivers, bursting dams, hurricanes or even wetland removal can cause flooding. Some states may be higher risk than others, but New York, New Jersey, California, Louisiana, and Florida all rate at the top. Here again, insurance companies are beginning to leave these markets.
And everybody knows that you're in trouble
Everybody knows what you've been through
What everybody knows, is deadened by the news cycles
The Israeli Gaza war is going on at the moment, with 40,000 civilian dead, 25,000 of them women and children. Ukraine is swinging in the wind, with promises of help and politics holding it from happening. A half-million dead of heat in in Mecca, more millions in Africa, Putin snuggling up to Kim Jong Un, Trump convicted of 34 felonies, the Supreme Court shitting its own bed and Boeing can’t get its astronauts back from the Space Station.
How much can you take and keep interested? I watch all this stuff for my writing, but it’s a full-time job. For most of us there are kids to be fed and a mortgage payment to be made, 44% of Americans can’t survive a thousand-dollar emergency. It’s hard to even care about two old men running for president.
Which is what the climate destroyers count upon
China produces 14.3 % of the world’s atmospheric carbon dioxide by burning coal, but who gives a damn? China’s a long way away and I have a gas furnace. Worldwide auto production topped 92 million units last year, up 10% from the prior year. My car’s 29 years old, it’s not my fault.
And so, it goes. Twenty-five years ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists and more than 1700 independent scientists, including the majority of living Nobel laureates in the sciences, penned the 1992 “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” They called on humankind to curtail environmental destruction and cautioned that “a great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided.”
That was a quarter century ago and population, a huge environmental negative, continues to increase
Businesses and governments actually encourage another baby-boom, because “we need young workers to pay social security to an increasingly old population”
Really?
When I was 20-yrs-old, the population of the planet was two billion. Seventy years later, and 25 years after that scientific plea, we stand at the edge of eight billion. In my lifetime, four times as many humans are eating, drinking, shitting, driving, owning and, one way or another, using up what’s left of the planet’s resources.
And no one cares what the best scientific minds in the world have warned. The famed Walt Kelley POGO cartoon of 1970 heads this article. We didn’t listen then, we don’t listen now, but the truth is out there, no matter our credit-card balance.
The planet is in no trouble at all. It will reconfigure itself without so much as a hiccup…
…when it shakes us off, like water off a wet dog.
That’s the most likely outcome to this tragi-comedy of human-caused environmental decline. Is it already too late? Hard to say with the incredible rise of technological invention.
But if humanity does make it through, no human being will experience the world in which I grew up
My world of two billion was a cornucopia, compared to the planet we inhabit today. It incorporated space enough to enjoy farms at the edge of town, forests at hand to explore, animals to hunt or merely enjoy and family vacations on lakes full of fish. There were fireflies at night and stars, it seemed close enough to touch.
One of my earliest memories is my father taking me out of our house on his shoulders, into the midst of a powerful thunderstorm, to marvel at each bolt of lightning, cheer on the thunder, glory in the downpour and return, exhausted, dripping wet and exhilarated by the experience. He was determined that his son not be intimidated by nature. We may dodge the bullet, but no human born today will experience my world.
My guess is that the human experiment will last no longer than 200 more years and then, like the dinosaurs, we’ll be gone.
Part Three is coming, as soon as I catch my breath.