Is climate change really happening because of the way we recklessly
pollute the earth so we can sustain our status quo, keep our jobs, carry on
having access to all the wonderful things the production of which requires that
we pollute the air, water and ground? Why take responsibility if the earth can
absorb the consequences of our irresponsible actions?
Is every one of the 97% of scientists who have published on climate
change a self-serving crook who ignores or hides any evidence that doesn’t
prove their point?
Has the US House Science Committee been right to hold 15 hearings on
space exploration in search of aliens and 2 on climate change over the course
of the 113th Congress? Is it just for political gain that President Obama is
focusing on Climate Change and pushing for tougher laws on fuel emissions or, worse, is it because he's a
commie or a socialist? Are Democrats who have the same vision just
fear-mongers? Is the U.S. Global
Change Research Program, which released the Third National Climate
Assessment in May 2014, just a whole lot of hot air?
Are the Koch brothers really America’s salvation instead of the
devil incarnate as they’re painted by filmmakers like Robert Greenwald and
journalists who write for the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington
Post?
The debate is useless and in and of itself it’s a clever red
herring. Because nothing gets done so
long as we get stuck in the belief that we mustn’t act unless we have 100%
consensus of 100% undeniable proof that burning fossil fuels is causing the
kind of devastation we can’t roll back and that our children and grandchildren
will suffer from exponentially more than we are suffering right now.
Some people will never face facts, so that consensus will never happen. Which is exactly what climate change deniers want. Keep ‘em
guessing. Anybody who’s taken a walk in Cairo for half an hour on a bad day
will tell you what pollution in the air does and looks like. It’s disgusting,
it makes you physically sick. If you can’t afford to visit Cairo for the
visceral experience, how about a trip to your nearest big city on a bad day when
there’s no wind and the air looks brown. Anybody who sits in a locked car with
one end of a hosepipe attached to the exhaust, the other end feeding into the
car and the engine running – well they can’t tell you anything because they’re
dead.
We shouldn’t need scientists to run tests, because nothing could be
clearer than that the products of a lot of what our whole western
lifestyle is built on are poisonous and dangerous in the long term – which term
is getting shorter by the day.
But we do need them because so many people don’t want to see what’s
in front of their faces, for so many different reasons, just a few of them being that we all hate change;
most advocates for tougher environmental laws are Democrats; the current
Democrat is an African American; a fortune has been spent on persuading people that they don’t have
to worry about climate change.
But probably the biggest problem is that a lot of people’s
livelihoods depend on extracting and burning fossil fuels and manufacturing
products that operate off them. What work will they do if we all take responsibility
and stop dead in our tracks?
It’s a very real fear and it’s where the climate change deniers get
you by the balls. It’s how they get so many to believe them, because they make
out that there are only two options in this business of climate change. The one
they punt is to keep us dependent on oil, keep drilling, fracking, burning fossil fuels, pouring crap
into the air, water and ground so you can have your job and support yourself
and your family, and keep the whole economy afloat. Because the way the earth
is reacting now is just luck of the draw or the way God planned it anyway;
there is no such thing as manmade cause and effect when it comes to climate
change.
The alternative is to believe the fear mongers and clean everything
up but be out of a job and have America truly experience another Greater Great
Depression.
But here’s the thing. There’s a third option. If you look at all the
wealth of the corporate deniers who, let’s face it, are the movers and shakers
and mostly Republican, they could give away two thirds of their wealth and they
wouldn’t personally feel it. But not everybody wants to give their wealth away
and that’s fine. They could also invest
it proactively in creating a totally different kind of industrialization
and make the changeover so that nobody lost their jobs and the world got
cleaned up. Why don’t they want to do it? Because of who they are.
They don’t actually care about your job or your lifestyle or your
children or what your grandchildren will inherit. They don’t even care what
their own grandchildren will inherit. So their argument to people who are
afraid of losing their livelihood if the fossil fuel extraction and burning
industries are eradicated is bogus.
According to Forbes in 2013 there were 442 billionaires in the US
and in March this year the Los Angeles Times stated that there are now 132,000
millionaires in the US. All these people invest their money somehow. So if they
all pooled their resources to invest in green energy and transform the
industrial sector, they’d be the ones earning all the millions and billions out
of their investments and nothing would really change for them. People now working in the fossil fuel industries would have jobs in clean energy. And we’d have a
better world. Why don’t they do it?
Why not just get on board of climate change
regardless of the debate and run with it? It would be so much easier, so much
more effective. So much better for all
of us. They’d still be billionaires and millionaires and on top of it they’d be
world heroes.
Well, a person can dream. It’s never going
to happen in that way but change will come about and those wealthy fellows won’t
be as ahead of it as they could be. It’s their loss. As for the debate about
whether climate change is man-made, thank God there are enough sensible people
in the world who want to take responsibility and who understand that they have
to act regardless of whether the debate is settled or not for everybody. Thank
God they have the courage and willpower to do what needs to be done.
