Global Strikes, Global Warming, Global Change
And a teenager shall lead them: Greta Thunberg
W.J. Astore
Today, Friday September 20th, is a global strike day to address global warming/climate change.
It's hard to believe we need a teenager from another country, Greta Thunberg, to remind Congress and the American people to listen to scientists on the subject of climate change, but that's the sad reality in the Land of Greedica. We all know the world is getting hotter, storms are getting more intense, birds and insects are dying in large numbers, coral reefs are dying off due to bleaching -- the list goes on. And we also know human actions are contributing to global warming.
But we also know there are trillions of dollars of fossil fuels still in the ground, or under our oceans, or in rapidly melting arctic regions, and that fossil fuel companies want the profits from the extraction, production, and sale of the same. And those companies buy as many politicians as they can, they control as much of the media as they can, they even buy scientists to present "contrary" evidence about global warming, all in the cause of greed and power.
They get away with it in part because we've been trained to think in the short term. We keep daily and even hourly calendars. The business cycle is quarterly and yearly. Even those long Communist plans of the past dealt with five-year cycles. We humans simply aren't used to thinking in terms of generations, nor are we encouraged to.
The process of global warming has been occurring slowly, gradually, over the last few generations, but it's beginning to pick up speed, with major changes occurring faster than many scientists predicted.
Speaking of generational changes, it's interesting that the Pentagon and its generals easily think in generational terms when it comes to America's wars, and encourage Americans to do the same, but we're not encouraged at all to work persistently and patiently to win the "war" on climate change. (As an aside, the fossil-fuel-driven U.S. military is obviously not helping the cause of ameliorating the impact of global warming, though the Pentagon is planning for global disruptions to be caused by climate change. With military budgets approaching a trillion a year, I'd say they're winning, even as the planet loses.)
As Tom Engelhardt noted this week at TomDispatch.com, we humans need to stop empowering the pyromaniacs who'd prefer to see the earth burn as long as they're making money off of it. We need to act globally to protect our planet from irreversible harm, or we're pretty much screwed as a species.