We Know – Really
Credit: NASA – Photo taken by astronaut William Anders aboard Apollo 8, the first crewed mission to the Moon, December 24, 1968
We have records going back nearly 200 years, so it’s with great confidence that the experts say that the seven hottest years on record are – drum roll please – the last seven years.
They brought us ever-more-catastrophic storms, killing heat and more, as well as the deafeningly loud warnings of permafrost melt, releasing methane into the atmosphere, drastic reduction in Arctic ice and a chunk of ice the size of Maryland ready to break off Antarctica and raise ocean levels significantly.
Truly, I’m so done with climate warming deniers and foot draggers. It’s time to completely ignore them or vote them out of office or send them to live in a tornado or hurricane prone place or a drought stricken new desert where they can continue to live in denial right until reality smacks them upside the head. Or all of the above.
Meanwhile, the rest of us better get to work. Here are some ideas we all know about.
- Plant a trillion trees to sequester carbon dioxide in wood. That’s how nature has always done it. That’s 1200 trees for every human being (1,000,000,000,000 trees / 7.75 billion people – somebody check my decimal point). Some can’t or won’t help, so figure to plant double that number yourself.
- End logging in all rain forests and require reforestation.
- End all subsidies, tax breaks, depletion allowances and all other support for fossil fuel extracting companies.
- Subsidize research, development, manufacturing and installation of solar, wind, tidal and other renewable energy resources.
- Subsidize construction of low carbon footprint transportation to replace fossil fuel technologies.
- Require solar panel installations on all new buildings and retrofitting them onto existing buildings. Subsidize as necessary.
- Do the research to find efficient, cost effective electricity storage methodology.
- Recycle efficiently and thoroughly. That means don’t put recyclable materials into a pile; reuse them instead of extracting yet more natural resources.
This isn’t a comprehensive list. It’s just what came to mind quickly. There are some really smart people with really great ideas who can help us out of the mess we’ve created and continue to make worse. It’s time to start listening to them and tell the people making obstacles to survival to just shut up.
Here is the irrefutable truth:
If we always do what we’ve always done, we’ll always get what we always got.
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What we’ve been doing has gotten us a planet that’s ready to hard boil itself. We can either change what we’re doing to get better results or we can stew in our own juice and end this singular, miraculous accident of the universe.
We’ve known for a long time what we have to do to survive. It’s time to choose reality over denial, survival over short term profit, courage over self-serving cowardice, cooperation over tantrums, action over self-immobilization, science over ignorance, learning over fantasies, big thinking over myopia . . . you get the idea, and surely you can add to this list of comparisons. The important thing is to take constructive action now and, really, forever, because this planet isn’t designed to tolerate our destructiveness.
Reading Assignment
Making progress on this and every other issue will require agreement on several things. Reality is primary, of course, because the price of denial is too great to bear or even survive. There is another that, in its own way, is just as critical.
Freedom is now used as a rallying cry, an absolute demand, an excuse to promote ignorance and disease and a justification of power over others. That’s dangerous stuff for our democracy and it, too, has a price too great to bear or even survive.
Read The Exploitation of ‘Freedom’ in America by Elisabeth Anker. She has managed to cobble together words to explain what I’ve been seeing, hearing and feeling for a long time. This reading assignment is mandatory and you will be tested every day.
Oxymoron of the Year (So Far)
Click me for the story
If he didn’t do anything wrong, how come he wants forgiveness? Somebody help me out.
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.The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.
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The Fine Print:
- Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings, so don’t bug me about it.
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JA
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
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