Greed
has corrupted our Earth and the future of the human race is
questionable. A revolution in our thinking and our way of surviving
is inevitable, but may still be too late. The Native Americans, who
survived for thousands of years, treated the Earth as “the Mother”.
They lived “with” the Earth without destroying it. Maybe they
had it right and our mantra of “progress” was wrong. We continue
to despoil the Earth.
Excerpts
from:
Finally!
Some climate crisis honesty
Forget About a 2˚C Future; It Will be 4˚-6˚C Degrees, and Soon
Wed,
05/20/2015 - 15:50
by:
Dave
Lindorff
Clearly,
the capitalist system, fully corrupted at this point because of the
size to which global corporations have grown, and the power they have
gained to buy governments, cannot and will not rescue humanity from
itself.
The
notion that corporations and a capitalist politico-economic system
could ever take the necessary steps to halt climate disaster, for
example by adopting energy conservation and becoming "green"
companies, was always a pipedream. Just "going green,"
while still producing unneeded junk and continuing to try and grow
would never reduce total carbon emissions. It would require massively
scaling back the production of useless or polluting goods and
services, and shutting down many operations. And while the current US
Supreme Court majority may think, or pretend to think, that
corporations are people, they actually are institutions that are by
their very nature and structure devoid of conscience, devoid of
morality, and even devoid of any sense of long-term
self-preservation"
A
person who made his living trapping sea otters, might, upon learning
that the animal was in danger of going extinct, voluntarily stop
hunting them, but a corporation, informed that it us overfishing and
will wipe out an entire fish species or fishing ground, will not,
unless forced to do so, and will predictably fight and bribe
politicians and regulators to allow it to keep fishing until there
are no more fish.
At
this point, if we want to try and hold global warming to the 2˚C
limit that scientists say is the maximum increase in temperature that
would offer any hope of preventing runaway heating and the resulting
chaos of mass extinctions, huge human die-offs and the likely
collapse of civilization, we will have to halt the production of
internal combustion engines, shut down most corporate farming, close
down all coal-fired power plants, massively convert to on-site solar
and wind power generation, and most importantly, stop pumping and
digging carbon-based fuels out of the ground.
We’re
talking here in other words about a revolution -- a total shift away
from an economic model that elevates “growth” to godlike status
to one that focuses on human needs (as opposed to wants), and away
from a philosophy that sees humans as destined to conquer and exploit
nature to one that sees humans as simply one integral part of nature
-- a philosophy that requires us to figure out how to fit in with and
preserve the natural world.
In
such a new world, there can be no rich, because the rich – even the
ones who may pose in their dotage as do-gooders -- are dangerous and
self-centered parasites. Neither can there can be poor because where
there are poor, there will be inevitable demands for more -- demands
that, while understandable, will lead to destruction of the natural
world. Only if all humanity shares to ensure a decent secure life for
all can there be any hope of long-term human survival on this limited
planet.
The
enormity of what humanity faces can no longer be avoided. The methane
is already boiling or even exploding up out of the Arctic permafrost
and, even worse, out of the seafloor of the coastal continental shelf
above Siberia and North America, and over the short term, methane is
about 180 time as potent a greenhouse gas as is carbon dioxide. All
over the perimeter of Antarctica, which we were earlier told was not
showing significant warming, we are seeing the ice melting now, while
the Arctic Ocean, solidly frozen year round for the last 2.6 million
years, will be ice-free in summer, possibly this year, but assuredly
in the next couple of years. Greenland, meanwhile, once a huge sheet
of white ice a mile thick, should now be called Greyland, as the
rapidly melting ice sheet has now exposed so much of the pollution
dumped there over several centuries of Industrial-Era snowfalls, that
its surface in summer looks like the remnant snow in New York City
three days after a snowstorm: more soot than ice.
For
now, the best that can be said is that we are leaving behind the
period of denial and the false hopes. As with addiction, the first
step is acknowledging one’s sickness, and we are now beginning to
acknowledge the real sickness of our capitalist world.
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