sama3033 - Tumblr blog

sama3033 · 2 years ago

Text

Whistling Past the Graveyard

I think I may just have headed off my very first panic attack - ever - walking through the park this morning. I’m the first to admit, I can be maudlin at times, inclined to dwell, perhaps too deeply on things I can do little to change, like the climate crisis. I recycle avidly, even knowing that it’s largely symbolic and that almost nothing actually gets recycled; we just hand our crap over to people in the global South to deal with, which generally means throwing it in the ocean.

But, for some reason, it really hit me as I was walking, just how dark and heavy the forces arrayed against action on climate change truly are. I mean, I’ve known it without knowing it, if you get my drift.

Even having read Bill McKibben and James Hansen’s work for years, the genuine gravity of the thing hit me like a brick. I had to stop and shake it off before it became a full-blooded collapse right there, among all those toddlers and their nannies. It wouldn’t have been pretty.

I know it was, in part, brought on by the situation at home. I was born and raised in the UK you see, grew up with its incessant grey skies and torrential rain. For twenty five straight years I endured that sodding torment. At a certain point you just stop shaking your fist at that accursed sky. We lived with the never ending dampness and threat of mold. We were all inured to it.

Two weeks ago the country had its highest recorded temperatures ever and is now deeply mired in drought. The UK…in drought. We’re famous for being soggy, day in, day out so this simply doesn’t compute for us. We don’t do A/C; there’s never been the need! Now we’re having wildfires - on a much smaller scale than California, admittedly, but they’re on the rise. The Thames is drying to a trickle. When this waterlogged land starts burning, that has to be some sort of pivot point, one would think.

Then again, Siberia has been burning as well. Fucking Siberia!

The world is on fire.

A few months ago the Democrats just managed to squeak through a major piece of legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, of all things, that might, just might, begin to chip away at the vast impenetrable edifice that the fossil fuel industry has built for itself over the past forty years, trying (and usually succeeding) to convince us that they’re not the cause of these worldwide droughts and wildfires.

They are.

Paul Krugman, in the New York Times, asks if the Democrats might have just saved civilization. I think we all know that’s hyperbole but it’s a damn sight better than the nothing we had been doing. You know it has to be good when every single republican voted against the act. There’s real cause for hope.

Half the government, the conservative half, it has to be said, while only recently submitting to that which has been blindingly obvious to the rest of us, is clinging, with all its might, to the belief that the only way to mitigate climate change is through market forces.

Money.

Again.

My heart sank though when I thought of how powerful multinationals are still fighting any form of climate warming mitigation. Exxon, BP and Shell along with their government lackeys, are steadfastly resisting any change to the way they’ve gone about their business, even though they’ve been caught lying repeatedly about their complicity in all of this. They’re making more money than ever in the age of world-wide pandemic and recession. Seems there’s no global catastrophe these repellent people can’t mine for their own benefit. Disaster capitalism on only the grandest, grizzliest scale.

I ask myself how they can possibly justify this in the face of a warming world we’re now beyond certain is due to an over abundance of CO2. These are not stupid people after all; they know precisely what will happen if we continue on as we have been. Nothing short of the end of civilization. That much is undeniable. And yet they keep on keeping on. They are complicit.

The oceanographer and author, John Englander, having done years of research all over the world, has concluded that there’s too much momentum to global warming, that there’s essentially nothing we can do that will stop every last ounce of the world’s ice from melting…and then we really have a problem. His calculations are that if just ten percent of the ice in Antarctica and Greenland were to melt, which it is doing at a gathering pace by the way, then global sea levels will rise 20ft. Imagine, for a second, what that will do to the coastal cities around the planet. Englander’s book, High Tide on Main Street, is eye-popping and ought to be a wake up call for all of us.

https://youtu.be/MvqY2NcBWI8

Ten times 20ft? It will come. Probably not in my lifetime but London and New York will be little archipelagos of glass and steel by then. Florida will be entirely underwater. Bangladesh too. Island nations like the Marshall Islands and the Maldives are already looking at the extinction of their way of life. Miami is seeing high tides sloshing through downtown on a fairly regular basis.

While we’re at it, why aren’t we building huge desalination plants around the coast of every nation, sucking out seawater and turning it into badly needed irrigation for crops and drinking water? Perhaps the Colorado could actually be a river again. California should have seen this coming decades ago, surely? Isn’t this low-hanging fruit?

Some thirty years ago, NASA climatologist, James Hansen related his research to Congress and said then that any oil still in the ground needed to stay there if we were to avoid severe problems down the line. As prescient as he was, he was essentially laughed out of the building. As with so many visionary people before and after him, few would listen. Everyone thought he was nuts.

https://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/24/us/global-warming-has-begun-expert-tells-senate.html?smid=url-share

Well, not quite everyone.

Not Exxon. Exxon knew precisely what he was talking about because they’d already done their own research into what continued use of fossil fuels would do to the planet. Of course it mirrored everything Hansen was saying. So they did everything they could to push it under the rug. They’ve been funding climate change denial groups for forty years, keeping those waters just as muddy as they can possibly be.

The big tobacco playbook.

https://youtu.be/DxoZJ_NXGGk

And now here we are.

So, what are we missing? What is their reasoning, I keep asking myself. I'm dying to know.The people that run the fossil fuel companies and their flying monkey lobbyists will be just as much affected by runaway global warming as the rest of us. No amount of money is going to protect you from incessant 120 degree heat and megadroughts.

So, is it pure greed? Has a form of unabated lust for money entirely robbed them of their sanity? Are we at the whim of some extremely powerful people who have effectively lost their minds, signed on to some End of Days doom cult? I find it hard to explain otherwise.

There's another angle to this entire absurdity I've been looking at that's purely biological and, I admit, might seem entirely unrelated at first blush but, bear with me because I have a feeling the answer may lie in here. It has to do with an area in the brain called the amygdala. It's the part of this wonderous organ of ours that deals with fear and paranoia.

There's some serious study on the subject. You can Google it. Turns out that, in those of us who can loosely be termed conservative, the amygdala can be considerably larger, as though bloated on steroids. As a result, one can infer that the amygdala just might be working overtime and inducing a level of paranoia and delusion lacking in the rest of us.One might be more inclined to believe rabid Qanon conspiracy theories, for instance.

Is this ringing any bells? Anyone? Pizzagate. Hillary as a lizard person? Jewish space lasers. Global warming as an elaborate hoax. I'm thinking specifically of the bottom dwellers, Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Beobert here but, trust me, they're far from alone. Both of them with the IQ of a hubcap.

Anyway, even these people hew to the belief that if you throw enough money at already ridiculously rich people miracles will happen, just you wait and see.

And then we all wonder where the money went. Well, they build themselves dildo-shaped spaceships, for one thing - joy rides most of us can only dream of. Of course it will trickle down.

Hmm, okay. Maybe next time.

Nobody, as far as I know, is talking about prosecuting these powerful companies, even in the face of indisputable evidence that they’re already the cause of trillions of dollars worth of damage around the globe. Who pays when entire cities are submerged? There’s a scary logic to this that says it’s the scale of the crime that matters. If it’s of a size that’s beyond our imagining, you really can get away with it Scott free. Our minds sort of fracture. Maybe that’s what Exxon has been counting on.

The rest of us, those clinging precariously to their sanity, seem at odds as to how to deal with any of this. The whole thing is just too perplexing. The sheer scale of it has so overwhelmed us that we can’t see over it or around it. It’s just too big a thing, too thorny and complex an issue. We’ve created such a mess for ourselves that there simply is no answer. So, do we just throw up our hands and pray for rain?

I know many of us are feeling an existential dread, as yet undefined, an unease we can’t quite find the courage to dwell on. It’s fodder for so many forums on psychology right now. I’m guilty of reading more than my fair share, I’ll admit, while feeding my inner demons. Part of me believes that, in this pandemic era, we’re all tapped into the collective unconscious. In here is a slow-dawning recognition that we’ve already seen the very best of what will ever be. The pinnacle of civilization is already behind us.

Sorry, but it’s all downhill from here.

There’s clearly a level of heightened denial in everything I see in my reading on global issues. Outfits like Extinction Rebellion are screaming for action while our governments seem to be inclined to act only when the flames are actually licking at their capital doorsteps.

While we’re all pulling our hair out, looking for some sign, some recognition that we’re in actual peril here, there’s this strange immobility, this unwillingness to act, from our elected officials.

Seas are rising, rivers are drying up, ice shelves are collapsing, wildfires are raging and the permafrost is no longer frosty. Alarms are ringing people!

When are you going to fucking do something?

Sadly, this leaves the ground open for some really unsavory characters to step in and fill the void, unscrupulous people, only too willing to take advantage of our fracturedness, our disunion: kleptocrats and raging narcissists with tiny hands and orange skin.

I’m projecting and can't think of anyone in particular off the top of my head, but you get my drift.

On the brighter side, we’re finally seeing some genuine movement in the area of carbon sequestration, pulling it out of the atmosphere and sending it deep underground or repurposing it in such a way that it doesn’t do any damage and can, in some cases, be put to good use.

As encouraging as this may be, the current programs around the globe are absolutely miniscule compared to the gargantuan need. Like desalination, we need sequestration on a massive, global scale, sucking billions of tons of the stuff out of the air, day in, day out. And yet governments seem bizarrely hesitant to embark on any such programs, even after repeated, extremely dire warnings from the UN.

https://youtu.be/dRvkOFdfW7k

We’ve been pumping pollutants out into the air for the best part of two centuries after all; we’ve got some serious catch-up to do. Can we move on it…maybe today?

I know governments generally move at a glacial pace but, sweet Jesus, can we light a fucking fire under somebody with an ounce of wits and the willingness to actually tackle this thing?

I can’t get too giddy; there are dark storm clouds gathering even in this arena. Like a giant carbuncle on humanity's ass, the oil companies are sleazing their way into the sequestration game while the sleazing is still good. What’s giving them a stiffy is the idea of pumping CO2 into the ground so they can extract every last morsel of oil. Is this making sense to anyone besides the grim reaper?

Yeah, you heard me. They want to use old pollution so they can make new pollution.

Here’s the real pisser. Now they’ll be able to make money on both ends, producing all the world's pollution, then charging us a second time to suck it out again. Credit where credit is due. That is some fantastic business model. There’s a peerless, dark symmetry to it.

In my super-jaundiced future worldview though, they could hold us all to ransom by simply turning off the air scrubbers, us watching the sky turn a lovely tawny shade.

‘Pay up people…or choke to death.’

Would you put it past them? I wouldn’t. Not this bunch.

It's as if your pooch turned to you after you just scooped his poop and said, 'That's not free you know. That'll be $50 please.'

Am I alone in thinking these people should be taken to cells in a deep, lonely, disused mine and the door welded shut? No visitors, ever. Fed cold gruel through a tube in the darkness?

It feels just, to me anyway. That’s my really cranky side, reacting to the rapidly encroaching end of everything we know. Ignore it!

All I know is this. If we leave everything up to conservatives and their beloved market forces, we are all so screwed. They’re looking on as all of humanity is sliding over a cliff and wondering how they can monetize it.

Just know, I may not be able to avert the next panic attack because, I know…I’m not wrong.

#enviroment #climate and environment #climate #politics #plutocracy #fossil fuels #psychology #qanon

1 note · View note