As each summer makes more and more painfully obvious, humanity's gigantic experiment with torching off the earth's millions of years worth of fossil fuels in a few brief centuries, has put us all a position of staring down the barrel of an enormous gun ready to end life as we have known it for these last few millennia of historical civilization.
As anyone who has given any thought to the matter has known for decades, greenhouse gases and the inexorable global warming they cause are now baked into the cake; even if we were to somehow cease the production of new CO2 from all the various ways that we humans consume fossil fuels today, we would still be looking at highly likely catastrophic climate change for many years in the future.
Scientist's predictions of how soon it will be how bad keep coming in as overly optimistic, as empirical data on measurable things like sea level rise and the rate of the melting of polar ice shelves always seem to turn out far worse, far sooner than even the most pessimistic predictions.
We learn about new unforeseen contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, like the one I just heard about, were, in the dark and freezing depths of the oceans, there are huge ice sheets of solid frozen methane, vast areas of which, due to just a few degrees rise in the ocean water temperature there, are evaporating, gushing enormous quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas far worse than CO2, into our atmosphere. This, of course, will inevitably cause more ocean temperature rise, causing even more and faster melting of these vast stores of frozen methane, in a nasty feedback loop.
As devastating and looming as this existential threat is, there is always that sword of Damocles threat to human civilization of a much more immediate kind; nuclear war. Humanity must have a large number of Guardian Angels watching over it; how else to explain why, with all the scores of thousands of these insane weapons all over the world, possessed by demonstrably mad regimes, overseen by deranged and incompetent militaries which have become famous for such demonstrating their vaunted competence by, say, having their gigantic warships crash into each other in the open sea, it is amazing that we're all still here! God help us!
The problem seems to be that human civilization has been pretty much taken over by the institutions whose raison d'être is the pursuit of what seems to be now, and perhaps has always been, that most profitable field of human endeavor: war.
While in its early forms, war was simply an organized looting of one relatively prosperous city or state by another willing to carry arms there in order to steal whatever wealth could be carried off, including its citizens to become slaves of the invaders, the more modern version of war seems to be the enrichment of the arms and matériel manufacturers and their stockholders. To this group of people, the actual basis for war is not even a consideration. All that matters is that the politicians successfully gin up endless conflicts one place or another around the world so that the demand for their often inherently war criminal products keeps them flying off the shelf.
Some kind of negotiated settlement in Ukraine? Hell no! They have almost finished building this vast new plant in Texas to crank out scores of thousands of artillery shells a month! Never mind that Russia's 'unprovoked' invasion of Ukraine was clearly provoked by US meddling there years ago, overthrowing the pro-Russian, democratically elected government and installing a Cold War enemy regime that would welcome NATO nuclear weapons right in to Russia's border. Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot and a Sino Russian military alliance overthrew Mexico's government and installed a pro commie regime there with missiles in Tijuana. I can just imagine how we would, of course, respect every iota of Mexico sovereignty in such a case.
Let's face it, humanity is up against the limits of Earth's ability to sustain us all. The ever-growing population with its concomitant demands for fuel, concrete, steel and all the other inputs that require environmental impact make it harder and harder to imagine a future that is not like a Mad Max dystopian hellscape. So what do we get from one significant US political constituency? Let's spend decades undermining democracy to install a gaggle of deranged religious zealots onto the highest court in the land who they can applaud for stripping away women's most basic authority over their bodies, forcing them under penalty of law to bear unwanted children that they may very well have no ability to care for. Yeah, more population, quantity, not quality, that's the answer.
As far as the absolutely essential goal of trying in every way to minimize the burning of fossil fuels, we have instead the Israeli tail that wags the American dog, demanding and getting gargantuan, unconditional supplies of military explosives of every kind to pursue what to any objective observer is clearly genocide. I couldn't believe the other day, after the Houti's, of the impoverished nation of Yemen, in a response to the ongoing genocide, were able to send a single drone into seaside Tel Aviv were it killed one and broke a lot of glass. Israel, in response, made the draconian decision to completely destroy Yemen's single vital port, torching off the nation's entire fuel depot. Yeah, that will help with global warming. Sheesh! Is there any hope for the humanity?
This and other articles are available at; https://inarationalworld2.blogspot.com/2024/08/ukraine-usrael-and-human-survival.html.
John Arteaga is a Ukiah resident.
No comments:
Post a Comment