Greed is the underlying reason for the terminal conditions we find ourselves in. It is an old adage that ‘money is the root of all evil, but it is true. The quest for more money is destroying our climate, and polluting our environment. It has sold our livelihoods, our lives, and our work. It is killing off our fauna and flora. Life as we knew it is over. We have passed the tipping point.
The leaders of business and industry, our politicians, and the media all knew what was happening. It has been in the public record since the 1980’s.Business leaders and politicians chose and still choose to cover it up while most media outlets simply ignore it. Large corporations are not living up to their obligations to clean up their messes. That is why I believe in an extra tax on large businesses and the wealthy.
There are many people who are culpable for our current climate and environmental problems. For me, the obvious culprit is the oil and gas industry, but politician have to share some of the blame, as well as the general populations. Yes even the people who were duped into believing the misinformation being fed to them and still are share the blame. Financial institutions share some of the blame as well for supporting businesses that choose profits over their moral responsibilities. Some people can claim ignorance, and I accept that excuse from the general population after all we have had billions of dollars’ worth of misinformation and straight lies shoved down our throats. The people who I believe are most to blame are those who knew what was happening and chose to do nothing about it, or even worse, to cover it up for the sake of immediate profits. They are the virus that is willingly destroying us.
The current Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, made this statement when he was trying to justify his government’s purchase of the Trans Mountain Pipeline and their support of the oil sands:
“No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them.”
That is a sentiment that is heard much too often as an excuse for continuing to suck oil and gas out of the ground. It values money over life. It is the classic misdirection. But stop for a moment and consider where we would be if the oil and gas industry chose to mine their resource responsible instead of only considering immediate profits. Think of what we would be doing instead of cleaning up the waste businesses are dumping on the ground and into the water.
Everyone, individuals, manufacturers, energy companies must consider about our planet’s health over profits.
The choice was made
The following is an excerpt from the Columbia University Record of October 22, 1982 regarding the Ewing Symposium, a three day gathering of 100 scientists to discuss “what the earth’s climate will be like for the next century.” Comments are from Taro Takahashi, one of the organizers of the event.
“There are three competing effects,” Takahashi said. “First, we think that the earth’s climate is warming due to the ‘greenhouse effect,’ the retention of solar heat by the discharge of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, largely by the burning of fossil fuels. Second, volcanic and industrial activity are sending dust particles into the stratosphere that shade the earth and cool it. And third, the earth’s climate has a mind of its own—there are many natural processes that have been going on for ages. Scientists will evaluate the relative strengths of these components and discuss what the climate is most likely to be like in the future.” Recent changes. in the polar ice caps will also be discussed. The symposium is being supported by the Exxon Corp., the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Climate Program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
In November of 2017, Dr. James E. Hansen wrote a forward for the book Unprecedented Crime, Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for Survival by Dr. Peter D. Carter and Elizabeth Woody. Within the forward Dr. Hansen talks about organizing that Ewing Symposium with Taro Takahashi, “a continuation of a series of such meetings on fundamental topics in Earth Sciences, named for Maurice Ewing, the founder of Lamont Doherty Geophysical Observatory (LDGO).”[i] He recounts that the most significant presentation of the complete symposium was a dinner speech by E.E. David, Jr. then President of Exxon Research and Engineering Company. Mr. David’s speech centred on; “the characteristic of the climate system that makes human-caused global warming so dangerous and such a problem”[ii]. The “critical problem” he was reporting on was the long delay before the effects of CO2 buildup would manifest themselves.
“Delayed response of the climate system, caused by the great thermal inertia of the ocean and the slow response of ice sheets to warming, creates the possibility that we could hand young people a planet undergoing changes that would be out of control.”[iii]
In order to avoid global warming he suggested that alternative renewable energy sources needed to be developed. “Fossil fuel companies would need to become energy companies—clean energy companies.”[iv]
Most fossil fuel companies (not all) chose to ignore the warning and invest decades and billions of dollars into the development of tar sands and shale oil resources.
For informed governments and knowledgeable fossil fuel companies to ignore the warnings of science were bad enough, but the industry also chose to mount a campaign of misinformation and deceit surpassing even that done by the tobacco industry regarding the relationship of smoking to cancer.
We are witnessing Mr. David’s warnings coming true today, and still many governments continue to fight the science and try to keep people ignorant because they want or need the money that fossil fuels bring them, but they won’t be able to do it for much longer because we have passed the tipping point.
The thermal inertia that Mr. David spoke of back in the early 1980s is being measured today and the measurements are terrifying. An article by Ian Angus, originally published November 12, 2020 by Climate and Capitalism entitled Triple Crisis in the Anthropocene Ocean. Part Three: The Heat of 3.6 Billion Atom Bombs, reports on a commentary regarding the latest data by Lijing Cheng of China’s Institute of Atmospheric Physics in which he calculated that “the increase in ocean heat content over the past 25 years required the addition of 228 sextillion joules of heat”. Joules are the units used to measure the ocean’s heat content among other things. “Two hundred and twenty-eight sextillion is 228 followed by 21 zeros”. To simplify that number Mr. Angus compared it to the amount of energy released by the atomic-bomb dropped on Hiroshima and found that it is the equivalent to the heat from 3.6 billion Hiroshima atomic-bombs, roughly the explosion of five Hiroshima bombs every second for the past 25 years. And politicians continue to tell us not to worry, as they miss every ecological deadline they agree is necessary to maintain a livable environment for all the people of the world, all of us. (World population will see eight-trillion soon (November 14, 2020)).
As conditions become worse and undeniable, the media is now reporting the problems caused by global warming in general terms. We hear about warmer oceans, artic warming, loss of icecaps and glaciers, more frequent, more intense hurricanes and tornadoes, and sea level rise. While we oo and ah over the images of collapsing glaciers on our screens the oceans are experiencing marine heatwaves (MHW).
The term marine heatwaves first appeared in 2011 in a government report on “a major temperature anomaly”. “As recently as 2015 only five articles in English-language scientific journals had marine heatwave in the title, but in 2019 there were 92”.[vi]
“The 21st century has seen particularly devastating marine heatwaves in the Mediterranean (2003), Bay of Bengal (2010), western Australia (2011), northwest Atlantic (2012), northeast Pacific (2013–2016), Tasman Sea (2016), and New Zealand (2016). All had profound and lasting impacts on plant and animal life. Off the coasts of Western Australia and Tasmania, for example, high temperatures killed massive kelp forests, home to innumerable fish species, and invasive warm water sea urchins then took over the seafloor, preventing the regrowth of kelp and other plants.
The 2013–2016 northeast Pacific heatwave was the largest, longest and deadliest MHW to date. It was nicknamed The Blob after the 1958 science fiction movie, and, like its space monster namesake, it grew rapidly and destroyed much of the life it enveloped. After forming in the Gulf of Alaska in the autumn of 2013, in less than a year it expanded south to Mexico, ultimately covering about 10 million square kilometers and penetrating up to 200 meters down.”
“A major study published in December 2019 projects that the size and frequency of marine heatwaves will increase so much that many parts of the ocean will reach “a near-permanent MHW state” by late in this century. The researchers project that even if greenhouse gas emissions start falling by mid-century, by 2100 about half of the global ocean will experience heatwaves 365 days a year. If emissions don’t decline, by 2100 there will be permanent heatwaves in 90% of the ocean, and over two-thirds of those will be Category IV, the most extreme level. (For comparison: the Blob, which disrupted ecosystems in 10 million square kilometers of the Pacific, killing millions of fish, birds and marine animals and displacing millions more, was only Category III.)”[vii]
“Most people have forgotten how to live with living creatures, with living systems and that, in turn, is the reason why man, whenever he comes into contact with nature, threatens to kill the natural system in which and from which he live.” ~ Konrad Lorenz
Although the science is not understood yet, there is a lot of talk about how a warming earth is contributing to a rise in pandemics. The following excerpt is from an article in The Hill by Richard Richels, Henry Jacoby, Gary Yohe, and Ben Santer, Opinion Contributor dated May 27, 2020
“The emergence of COVID-19 suggests that global warming may present an even graver threat to human welfare than many recognize. As indicated in the scientific literature, not only could the current warming of our planet increase the likelihood of an air-borne pandemic such as COVID-19; it could also damage our health and welfare.
Let us be clear: We are not talking here about future warming, which is already of great concern. We are talking about the effects of a rise of 1oC that we have already experienced. Even with such “modest” warming, a stunning barrage of extreme events have happened in recent years, many of which cannot be explained in the absence of climate change.”[viii]
Despite assurances by President Trump and others that Civid-19 will just go away, that it is a hoax, and that it is a political lie by Democrats, it is obvious to most people that it is real and should be taken seriously. Unfortunately, due to the misinformation being spewed by many people of authority in the USA their untruths are killing people.
Today, November 17, 2020, I caught an interview with a nurse from South Dakota, on CNN. She was talking about people in the hospital being close to death but refusing to believe that covid-19 was the cause of their problems because ‘covid-19 isn’t real’. This is the same day that WorldOMeter[ix] reported; “217 Countries and Territories around the world have reported a total of 55,674,719 confirmed cases of the coronavirus COVID-19 that originated from Wuhan, China, and a death toll of 1,338,004 deaths.”
In the USA on November 17, 2020 the COVID-19 count is 11,574,332 total cases and 253,037 total deaths. Active cases in the USA on this date are, 4,287,624. How can anyone believe that covid-19 is a hoax? Especially when the doctors and nurses attending them are saying they are dying from it. The simple answer is that they are being bombarded with misinformation and no longer trust valid news agencies, preferring to get their information from social media and less than moral sources. Valid news media is trying to inform the general public, but purposeful misdirection by the Trump administration and others is keeping it from his base. The following is from an article by Doyle Rice in USA Today dated Sept. 10, 2020.
“COVID-19 may only be the beginning of global pandemics–a future scenario in which climate change may also play a role.
“We have entered a pandemic era,” said a recent study in the journal Cell. Written by Dr. Anthony Fauci and medical historian Dr. David Morens, both of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the study paints a picture of a future where pandemics become more numerous.
‘I don’t have a crystal ball, but what we are seeing looks very much like an acceleration of pandemics,’ Morens told BuzzFeed News. Causes he cited include deforestation, urban crowding and wet markets for wild game.”
“The competition between human beings destroys with cold and diabolic brutality… Under the pressure of this competitive fury we have not only forgotten what is useful to humanity as a whole, but even that which is good and advantageous to the individual. […] One asks, which is more damaging to modern humanity: the thirst for money or consuming haste… in either case, fear plays a very important role: the fear of being overtaken by one’s competitors, the fear of becoming poor, the fear of making wrong decisions or the fear of not being up to snuff…” ~ Konrad Lorenz
END of Part 1
[i] Pg 9, Unprecedented Crime, Carter and Woodworth.
[ii] Pg 10, Unprecedented Crime, Carter and Woodworth.
[iii] Pg. 10, Unprecedented Crime, Carter and Woodworth
[iv] Pg. 10 Unprecedented Crime, Carter and Woodworth.
[v] Paul Horn, Inside Climate News
[vi] Triple Crisis in the Anthropocene Ocean. Part Three: The Heat of 3.6 Billion Atom Bombs.” Ian Anguse
[vii] Triple Crisis in the Anthropocene Ocean. Part Three: The Heat of 3.6 Billion Atom Bombs.” Ian Anguse
[viii] The Hill, Richels, Jacoby, Yohe, and Santer