opinion@dailylobo.com
From 1913 through 2012, the world population quadrupled from 1.65 to 7 billion people. In this relatively short time frame, the Earth’s ecosystem has been stressed beyond its ability to sustain our civilization. While we swarmed the planet, dumping and pumping more and more waste, we consistently disregarded the visionaries who anticipated and warned us of the consequences of exceeding the biosphere’s carrying capacity.
In old western movies, we see locomotives chug across the plains, trailing long black clouds of sooty smoke. I bet even the horses were thinking “what the eff?” the first time they heard one of these beasts of metal, wheezing after a toxic whiff burned through their nostrils. Smokestacks from heavy industry, combined with exhausts from our numerous modes of transportation, are the main source of increasing greenhouse gases.
To nail the case that we are clueless as a race, in our continuous quest to develop the technology to kill ten times as many of our enemies in a tenth of the time for a million times the cost, we have designed the most fuel-inefficient devices on the planet:
machines of war. Moving troops and supplies all around the world produces a substantial amount of pollutants in itself; but military aircraft, warships and tanks are in a class of their own for burning massive amounts of carbon-based fuels without meeting any clean-air standards. And then there are all those nasty explosions.
In addition to two world wars, nuclear detonations and several major nuclear accidents, let us not forget Saddam Hussein’s treacherous gift to mankind — the burning oil fields in Kuwait.
Not to be outdone, we bombed his munitions depot, releasing a cloud of deadly sarin gas that drifted over our own troops, causing the largest amount of friendly-fire casualties in our military’s history.
Today, newborn babies in Beijing are immediately challenged to just survive their first day of life in a disgustingly smog-shrouded city, without the benefit of a gas mask. In recognition of the health dangers involved, their government wisely plans on building as many more coal-burning power plants as possible, in as short a time as possible, to meet the energy needs of their growing economy.
By U.S. law, a National Climate Assessment report is commissioned every four years. The latest one, about to be released, outlines the increasing economic stresses we will face, as climate change drastically reduces our ability to continue developing and expanding, and possibly even to maintain social order and discipline. The 300 or so scientists preparing the report squarely place the blame on burning fossil fuels. Additionally, they warn in no uncertain terms that the United States, the strongest economy in the world, will have great difficulty in dealing with the financial repercussions. Note that the release of these reports was completely suppressed during George W. Bush’s tenure.
The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, released in 2006, is the most highly regarded report of its kind. It outlines the long-term costs to world economies in the case that we continue forcing surface temperatures to rise. The argument is very persuasively in favor of acting now. For those who say “What about the cost to our economy if we try to slow down?” this is the response: the cost will be substantially worse if we continue to procrastinate.
So now we have squarely put ourselves in the land of “intergenerational equity.” We are trapped in a globalized system that demands continued non-sustainable development, completely disregarding the cost to nature, the environment, and our own societies. Like many individuals, governments have been living way beyond their means, financially and in terms of global resources.
The cost will be multiplied many times through the further depletion and probable collapse of much of the planet’s ecological infrastructure.
Because we are too cheap and morally corrupt to accept responsibility for what we have created and try to halt it, our descendants will be faced with depleted resources and harsher climate conditions than mankind has ever known. We face an urgent crisis of survival and an issue of justice between our generation and those that follow.
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As farmers and ranchers in record numbers of drought-stricken areas of the world can assure you, there is no substitute for water when you don’t have it. The stability of any market system relies on the continued availability of the least abundant required resource. This is well known, and scientists globally agree that human activity is the root cause of most warming. So why do we still have politicians with no scientific background claiming that climate change is a hoax?
