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#Post#: 21--------------------------------------------------
Future Earth
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: March 14, 2022, 5:02 pm
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HTML https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-191017143841.jpegWelcome<br
/>to the Sober Thinking Forum.
HTML https://www.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-301014181908.gif
This is the continuation of the Renewable Revolution Forum
HTML https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/index.php,
with the
same categories and boards arrangement. In order to provide
topic thread continuity, this post will be duplicated in
frequently viewed tpoic threads along with selected posts from
that topic
HTML https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/climate-change/future-earth/<br
/>at the Renewable Revolution Forum
HTML https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/index.php.
I will
gradually, as time permits, copy pertinent articles posted
there, update them, and post them here for your convenience.
I have no intention of closing the Renewable Revolution Forum
HTML https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/index.php,
so any
links you have to posts, articles and graphics there are valid
for the time being. Nevertheless, I advise you to 🦉 copy
and save any posts, articles and graphics that you wish to
preserve for posting somewhere else on the internet. I am 75
years old. As long as my spirit hasn't permanently left my body,
the Sober Thinking Forum will be kept open.
HTML https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-130418202709.png<br
/>
Although guests are encouraged to post and become members, this
forum is mostly a library reference of important historical
information and timeless articles that you are encouraged to
pass on, with or without attribution.
In addition, relevant recent news will be posted almost daily,
so be sure to 🧐 stop by often.
HTML https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-250817121424.gif<br
/>
I have changed the title and the front page background graphic
for two reasons:
1. My purpose, nearly a decade ago, of convincing most reality
based people everywhere that human civilization, in order to
stop and reverse (i.e getting back to 350 PPM of atmospheric
Carbon Dioxide is sine qua non) the multiple extinctions causing
biosphere degradation (i.e. the Sixth Mass Extinction Event now
upon us), must VERY rapidly transition away from Hydrocarbon
Energy Sources to Renewable Energy Sources, has been largely
achieved. I have been one small voice among many that have made
it clear that clean energy must be made available to everyone,
not just the wealthy, if we are to survive Catastrophic Climate
Change.
2. Celebrated social theorist and geographer David Harvey asked,
"Is there a way to capture what (to the detriment of human
civilization) is going on now"?
My answer: YES.
It's the SOCIAL DARWINISM, stupid!
No matter how much progress we make in cleaning up the
biosphere, as long as the egocentric, morally bankrupt, empathy
deficit disordered, Social Darwinist Ideology continues to be
embraced by TPTB, we do not have a snowball's chance in Hell of
surviving our Existential Crisis.
Social Darwinists believe that ethics based principles are
'limitations pretending to be virtues'. To them, ethics are
'feel good illusions' that humans invented to pretend our
species has empathy. To Social Darwinists, empathy is
irrefutable evidence of inexcusable weakness. To them, all who
are guided by ethics are deluded fools that should be eliminated
from the human 'apex predator' gene pool for the "good" of our
species.
The ideology of the Social Darwinist is indistinguishable from
the despicable ideology of NAZI Germany, clearly exemplified in
their brutally enforced morally bankrupt concentration camp law:
“Eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbor.”
Social Darwinism is actually based, not on "survival of the
fittest", but on fear of tomorrow, a morally bankrupt excuse for
rejecting altruism and empathy and embracing a selfish greed
dominated hoarding modus vivendi.
[center]
--- Quote ---
> Every prudent man acts with knowledge, But a fool lays open
his folly. -- Proverbs 13:16
--- End Quote ---
[/center]
[center]
HTML https://i.pinimg.com/236x/5d/52/92/5d5292e6d6d45b36832561f6a2b466d3--proverbs--jpg.jpg[/center]
--- Quote ---
> "One who fears tomorrow does not offer his bread to others.
But one who is willing to divide his food with a stranger has
already shown himself capable of fellowship and faith, the two
things from which hope is born." -- Primo Levi, author of
Survival in Auschwitz
--- End Quote ---
Social Darwinism is the world view that spawned the profit over
people and planet neoliberal ideology. Neoliberal intellectuals
like Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman
were all Social Darwinists long before they renamed
laissez-faire liberalism (that had been thoroughly discredited
by the Great Depression) with the catchy title of
"Neoliberalism".
The celebrated social theorist and geographer David Harvey
explains that neoliberal ideology serves the following
principle:
"There shall be no serious challenge to the absolute power of
money to rule absolutely. And that power is to be exercised with
one objective: Those possessed of money shall not only be
privileged to accumulate wealth endlessly at will, but they
shall have the right to inherit the earth, taking either direct
or indirect dominion, not only of the land and all the resources
and productive capacities that reside therein, but also assume
absolute command, directly or indirectly, over the labor and
creative capacities of all those others it needs. The rest of
humanity shall be deemed disposable."
"In human society, the amount of inequity is directly
proportional to the amount of iniquity." -- A. G. Gelbert
Sober Thinking requires that we all recognize the fact that a
society that is founded on altruism, not the "invisible hand" of
greed, is not optional if we wish to avoid exctinction.
Capitalism's "invisible hand" modus operandi is rooted in the
ideology of Social Darwinism.
--- Quote ---
> “Capitalism is the astounding belief, that the most wickedest
of men, will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest
good of everyone.” — John Maynard Keynes
--- End Quote ---
[center]
HTML https://www.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-080814213147.png[/center]
The main purpose of the Sober Thinking Forum is to convince you,
regardless of your religious beliefs or lack of them, to soberly
think about these two quotes, embrace altruism, reject greed,
and convince as many people as you can that altruism is not
optional for human society:
--- Quote ---
> "Look at our world, our country, our interactions with each
other……… this is not the mark of a healthy society, and if these
are the self-appointed leaders of this flaming meteor…..it’s
time to move on to new ideas and new people. Let’s relegate
these fools to history. They perpetuate a narrative that it is
right to behave in a strictly selfish, exploitative manner
towards all. We simply can’t survive it any longer. Things will
change because they have to." -- Kathleen Wallace
--- End Quote ---
"Technical knowledge of Carrying Capacity will not save us; Only
a Massive Increase in Caring Capacity will." -- A. G. Gelbert
[move]
HTML https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/2/3-221021140122.pnghttps://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-270317142022.pnghttps://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-251117174622.jpeg[/move]
#Post#: 22--------------------------------------------------
Cosmic Journeys - Earth in 1000 Years
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: March 14, 2022, 5:08 pm
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April 23, 2014
[center]
HTML https://youtu.be/V5YdsYJR5Qw[/center]
SpaceRip 884K subscribers
This edition of COSMIC JOURNEYS explores the still unfolding
story of Earth's past and the light it sheds on the science of
climate change today. While that story can tell us about the
mechanisms that can shape our climate. it's still the unique
conditions of our time that will determine sea levels, ice
coverage, and temperatures.
Ice, in its varied forms, covers as much as 16% of Earth's
surface, including 33% of land areas at the height of the
northern winter. Glaciers, sea ice, permafrost, ice sheets and
snow play an important role in Earth's climate. They reflect
energy back to space, shape ocean currents, and spawn weather
patterns.
But there are signs that Earth's great stores of ice are
beginning to melt. To find out where Earth might be headed,
scientists are drilling down into the ice, and scouring ancient
sea beds, for evidence of past climate change. What are they
learning about the fate of our planet... a thousand years into
the future and even beyond?
#Post#: 23--------------------------------------------------
Is climate change a crime against humanity? Let's go with...
Yes.
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: March 14, 2022, 5:16 pm
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Published on Thursday, May 22, 2014 by TomDispatch
[center]The 95% Doctrine: Climate Change as a Weapon of Mass
Destruction Is climate change a crime against humanity? Let's go
with... Yes.[/center]
by Tom Engelhardt
The fossil fuel industry is waging a war on the planet's
ecosystem and her people. It's not only unnecessary and obscene,
but should be considered a crime.
Who could forget? At the time, in the fall of 2002, there was
such a drumbeat of “information” from top figures in the Bush
administration about the secret Iraqi program to develop weapons
of mass destruction (WMD) and so endanger the United States. And
who -- other than a few suckers -- could have doubted that
Saddam Hussein was eventually going to get a nuclear weapon? The
only question, as our vice president suggested on “Meet the
Press,” was: Would it take one year or five? And he wasn’t alone
in his fears, since there was plenty of proof of what was going
on.
For starters, there were those “specially designed aluminum
tubes” that the Iraqi autocrat had ordered as components for
centrifuges to enrich uranium in his thriving nuclear weapons
program. Reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon hit the
front page of the New York Times with that story on September 8,
2002.
Then there were those “mushroom clouds” that Condoleezza Rice,
our national security advisor, was so publicly worried about --
the ones destined to rise over American cities if we didn’t do
something to stop Saddam. As she fretted in a CNN interview with
Wolf Blitzer on that same September 8th, “[W]e don't want the
smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” No, indeed, and nor, it
turned out, did Congress!
And just in case you weren’t anxious enough about the looming
Iraqi threat, there were those unmanned aerial vehicles --
Saddam’s drones! -- that could be armed with chemical or
biological WMD from his arsenal and flown over America’s East
Coast cities with unimaginable results. ::) President George
W. Bush went on TV to talk about them and congressional votes
were changed in favor of war thanks to hair-raising secret
administration briefings about them on Capitol Hill.
In the end, it turned out that Saddam had no weapons program, no
nuclear bomb in the offing, no centrifuges for those aluminum
pipes, no biological or chemical weapons caches, and no drone
aircraft to deliver his nonexistent weapons of mass destruction
(nor any ships capable of putting those nonexistent robotic
planes in the vicinity of the U.S. coast). But what if he had?
Who wanted to take that chance? Not Vice President Dick Cheney,
certainly. Inside the Bush administration he propounded
something that journalist Ron Suskind later dubbed the “one
percent doctrine.” Its essence was this:
if there was even a 1% chance of an attack on the United States,
especially involving weapons of mass destruction, it must be
dealt with as if it were a 95%-100% certainty.
Here’s the curious thing: if you look back on America's
apocalyptic fears of destruction during the first 14 years of
this century, they largely involved three city-busting weapons
that were fantasies of Washington’s fertile imperial
imagination. There was that “bomb” of Saddam’s, which provided
part of the pretext for a much-desired invasion of Iraq. There
was the “bomb” of the mullahs, the Iranian fundamentalist regime
that we’ve just loved to hate ever since they repaid us, in
1979, for the CIA’s overthrow of an elected government in 1953
and the installation of the Shah by taking the staff of the U.S.
embassy in Tehran hostage. If you believed the news from
Washington and Tel Aviv, the Iranians, too, were perilously
close to producing a nuclear weapon or at least repeatedly on
the verge of the verge of doing so. The production of that
“Iranian bomb” has, for years, been a focus of American policy
in the Middle East, the “brink” beyond which war has endlessly
loomed. And yet there was and is no Iranian bomb, nor evidence
that the Iranians were or are on the verge of producing one.
Finally, of course, there was al-Qaeda’s bomb, the “dirty bomb”
that organization might somehow assemble, transport to the U.S.,
and set off in an American city, or the “loose nuke,” maybe from
the Pakistani arsenal, with which it might do the same. This is
the third fantasy bomb that has riveted American attention in
these last years, even though there is less evidence for or
likelihood of its imminent existence than of the Iraqi and
Iranian ones.
To sum up, the strange thing about
end-of-the-world-as-we’ve-known-it scenarios from Washington,
post-9/11, is this: with a single exception, they involved only
non-existent weapons of mass destruction. A fourth weapon -- one
that existed but played a more modest role in Washington’s
fantasies -- was North Korea’s perfectly real bomb, which in
these years the North Koreans were incapable of delivering to
American shores.
The "Good News" About Climate Change
In a world in which nuclear weapons remain a crucial coin of the
realm when it comes to global power, none of these examples
could quite be classified as 0% dangers. Saddam had once had a
nuclear program, just not in 2002-2003, and also chemical
weapons, which he used against Iranian troops in his 1980s war
with their country (with the help of targeting information from
the U.S. military) and against his own Kurdish population. The
Iranians might (or might not) have been preparing their nuclear
program for a possible weapons breakout capability, and al-Qaeda
certainly would not have rejected a loose nuke, if one were
available (though that organization’s ability to use it would
still have been questionable).
In the meantime, the giant arsenals of WMD in existence, the
American, Russian, Chinese, Israeli, Pakistani, and Indian ones
that might actually have left a crippled or devastated planet
behind, remained largely off the American radar screen. In the
case of the Indian arsenal, the Bush administration actually
lent an indirect hand to its expansion. >:( So it was
twenty-first-century typical when President Obama, trying to put
Russia's recent actions in the Ukraine in perspective, said,
“Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its
immediate neighbors. I continue to be much more concerned when
it comes to our security with the prospect of a nuclear weapon
going off in Manhattan.”--
Once again, an American president was focused on a bomb that
would raise a mushroom cloud over Manhattan. And which bomb,
exactly, was that, Mr. President?
Of course, there was a weapon of mass destruction that could
indeed do staggering damage to or someday simply drown New York
City, Washington D.C., Miami, and other East coast cities. It
had its own efficient delivery systems -- no nonexistent drones
or Islamic fanatics needed. And unlike the Iraqi, Iranian, or
al-Qaeda bombs, it was guaranteed to be delivered to our shores
unless preventative action was taken soon. No one needed to hunt
for its secret facilities. It was a weapons system whose
production plants sat in full view right here in the United
States, as well as in Europe, China, and India, as well as in
Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, and other energy states.
So here’s a question I’d like any of you living in or visiting
Wyoming to ask the former vice president, should you run into
him in a state that’s notoriously thin on population: How would
he feel about acting preventively, if instead of a 1% chance
that some country with weapons of mass destruction might use
them against us, there was at least a 95% -- and likely as not a
100% -- chance of them being set off on our soil? Let’s be
conservative, since the question is being posed to a well-known
neoconservative. Ask him whether he would be in favor of
pursuing the 95% doctrine the way he was the 1% version.
After all, thanks to a grim report in 2013 from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we know that there is
now a 95%-100% likelihood that “human influence has been the
dominant cause of the observed warming [of the planet] since the
mid-20th century.” We know as well that the warming of the
planet -- thanks to the fossil fuel system we live by and the
greenhouse gases it deposits in the atmosphere -- is already
doing real damage to our world and specifically to the United
States, as a recent scientific report released by the White
House made clear. We also know, with grimly reasonable
certainty, what kinds of damage those 95%-100% odds are likely
to translate into in the decades, and even centuries, to come if
nothing changes radically: a temperature rise by century’s end
that could exceed 10 degrees Fahrenheit, cascading species
extinctions, staggeringly severe droughts across larger parts of
the planet (as in the present long-term drought in the American
West and Southwest), far more severe rainfall across other
areas, more intense storms causing far greater damage,
devastating heat waves on a scale no one in human history has
ever experienced, masses of refugees, rising global food prices,
and among other catastrophes on the human agenda, rising sea
levels that will drown coastal areas of the planet.
From two scientific studies just released, for example, comes
the news that the West Antarctic ice sheet, one of the great ice
accumulations on the planet, has now begun a process of melting
and collapse that could, centuries from now, raise world sea
levels by a nightmarish 10 to 13 feet. That mass of ice is,
according to the lead authors of one of the studies, already in
“irreversible retreat,” which means -- no matter what acts are
taken from now on -- a future death sentence for some of the
world's great cities. (And that’s without even the melting of
the Greenland ice shield, not to speak of the rest of the ice in
Antarctica.)
All of this, of course, will happen mainly because we humans
continue to burn fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate and so
annually deposit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at record
levels. In other words, we’re talking about weapons of mass
destruction of a new kind. While some of their effects are
already in play, the planetary destruction that nuclear weapons
could cause almost instantaneously, or at least (given “nuclear
winter” scenarios) within months, will, with climate change,
take decades, if not centuries, to deliver its full, devastating
planetary impact.
When we speak of WMD, we usually think of weapons -- nuclear,
biological, or chemical -- that are delivered in a measurable
moment in time. Consider climate change, then, a WMD on a
particularly long fuse, already lit and there for any of us to
see. Unlike the feared Iranian bomb or the Pakistani arsenal,
you don’t need the CIA or the NSA to ferret such "weaponry" out.
From oil wells to fracking structures, deep sea drilling rigs to
platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, the machinery that produces
this kind of WMD and ensures that it is continuously delivered
to its planetary targets is in plain sight. Powerful as it may
be, destructive as it will be, those who control it have faith
that, being so long developing, it can remain in the open
without panicking populations or calling any kind of destruction
down on them.
Continued in next post:
#Post#: 24--------------------------------------------------
Is climate change a crime against humanity? Let's go with...
Yes.
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: March 14, 2022, 5:22 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
Continued May 22, 2014 article:
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/catastrophic-climate-change/future-earth/msg23/#msg23
The companies and energy states that produce such WMD remain
remarkably open about what they’re doing. Generally speaking,
they don’t hesitate to make public, or even boast about, their
plans for the wholesale destruction of the planet, though of
course they are never described that way. Nonetheless, if an
Iraqi autocrat or Iranian mullahs spoke in similar fashion about
producing nuclear weapons and how they were to be used, they
would be toast.
Take ExxonMobil, one of the most profitable corporations in
history. In early April, it released two reports that focused on
how the company, as Bill McKibben has written, “planned to deal
with the fact that [it] and other oil giants have many times
more carbon in their collective reserves than scientists say we
can safely burn." He went on:
The company said that government restrictions that would force
it to keep its [fossil fuel] reserves in the ground were 'highly
unlikely,' and that they would not only dig them all up and burn
them, but would continue to search for more gas and oil -- a
search that currently consumes about $100 million of its
investors’ money every single day. 'Based on this analysis, we
are confident that none of our hydrocarbon reserves are now or
will become
"stranded."'
HTML http://www.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-311013200859.png
In other words, Exxon plans to exploit whatever fossil fuel
reserves it possesses to their fullest extent.
Government leaders involved in supporting the production of such
weapons of mass destruction and their use are often similarly
open about it, even while also discussing steps to mitigate
their destructive effects. Take the White House, for instance.
Here was a statement President Obama proudly made in Oklahoma in
March 2012 on his energy policy:
Now, under my administration, America is producing more oil
today than at any time in the last eight years. That's important
to know. Over the last three years, I’ve directed my
administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil
exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more
than 75% of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve
quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve
added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and
then some.
Similarly, on May 5th, just before the White House was to reveal
that grim report on climate change in America, and with a
Congress incapable of passing even the most rudimentary climate
legislation aimed at making the country modestly more energy
efficient, senior Obama adviser John Podesta appeared in the
White House briefing room to brag about the administration’s
“green” energy policy. “The United States,” he said, “is now the
largest producer of natural gas in the world and the largest
producer of gas and oil in the world. It's projected that the
United States will continue to be the largest producer of
natural gas through 2030. For six straight months now, we've
produced more oil here at home than we've imported from
overseas. So that's all a good-news story.”
Good news indeed, and from Vladmir Putin’s Russia, which just
expanded its vast oil and gas holdings by a Maine-sized chunk of
the Black Sea off Crimea, to Chinese “carbon bombs,” to Saudi
Arabian production guarantees, similar “good-news stories” are
similarly promoted. In essence, the creation of ever more
greenhouse gases -- of, that is, the engine of our future
destruction -- remains a “good news” story for ruling elites on
planet Earth.
Weapons of Planetary Destruction
We know exactly what Dick Cheney -- ready to go to war on a 1%
possibility that some country might mean us harm -- would
answer, if asked about acting on the 95% doctrine. Who can doubt
that his response would be similar to those of the giant energy
companies, which have funded so much climate-change denialism
and false science over the years? He would claim that the
science simply isn’t “certain” enough (though “uncertainty” can,
in fact, cut two ways), that before we commit vast sums to
taking on the phenomenon, we need to know far more, and that, in
any case, climate-change science is driven by a political
agenda.
For Cheney & Co., it seemed obvious that acting on a 1%
possibility was a sensible way to go in America’s “defense” and
it’s no less gospel for them that acting on at least a 95%
possibility isn’t. For the Republican Party as a whole,
climate-change denial is by now nothing less than a litmus test
of loyalty, and so even a 101% doctrine wouldn’t do when it
comes to fossil fuels and this planet.
No point, of course, in blaming this on fossil fuels or even the
carbon dioxide they give off when burned. These are no more
weapons of mass destruction than are uranium-235 and
plutonium-239.
In this case, the weaponry is the production system that’s been
set up to find, extract, sell at staggering profits, and burn
those fossil fuels, and so create a greenhouse-gas planet. With
climate change, there is no “Little Boy” or “Fat Man”
equivalent, no simple weapon to focus on. In this sense,
fracking is the weapons system, as is deep-sea drilling, as are
those pipelines, and the gas stations, and the coal-fueled power
plants, and the millions of cars filling global roads, and the
accountants of the most profitable corporations in history.
All of it -- everything that brings endless fossil fuels to
market, makes those fuels eminently burnable, and helps suppress
the development of non-fossil fuel alternatives -- is the WMD.
The CEOs of the planet's giant energy corporations are the
dangerous mullahs, the true fundamentalists, of planet Earth,
since they are promoting a faith in fossil fuels which is
guaranteed to lead us to some version of End Times.
Perhaps we need a new category of weapons with a new acronym to
focus us on the nature of our present 95%-100% circumstances.
Call them weapons of planetary destruction (WPD) or weapons of
planetary harm (WPH). Only two weapons systems would clearly fit
such categories. One would be nuclear weapons which, even in a
localized war between Pakistan and India, could create some
version of “nuclear winter” in which the planet was cut off from
the sun by so much smoke and soot that it would grow colder
fast, experience a massive loss of crops, of growing seasons,
and of life. In the case of a major exchange of such weapons, we
would be talking about “the sixth extinction” of planetary
history.
Though on a different and harder to grasp time-scale, the
burning of fossil fuels could end in a similar fashion -- with a
series of “irreversible” disasters that could essentially burn
us and much other life off the Earth. This system of destruction
on a planetary scale, facilitated by most of the ruling and
corporate elites on the planet, is becoming (to bring into play
another category not usually used in connection with climate
change) the ultimate “crime against humanity” and, in fact,
against most living things. It is becoming a “terracide.”
© 2014 TomDispatch.com
HTML http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/05/22-6
#Post#: 25--------------------------------------------------
Re: Future Earth
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: March 14, 2022, 5:31 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
May 27, 2014
[move]Syria Today Is A Preview Of Memorial Day, 2030 👀
[/move]
#Post#: 26--------------------------------------------------
Extinction is the End Game Dec 2016
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: March 14, 2022, 6:12 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
Saturday Dec 2016
[center]Extinction is the End Game[/center]
[center]
HTML https://youtu.be/5Og42ldefVc[/center]
Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change,
Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot,
Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street
Fraud
Civilizations are living organisms striving to survive and
develop through predictable stages of birth, growth, maturation,
decline and death. An often overlooked factor in the success or
failure of civilizations are cultural memes—the knowledge,
beliefs, and behaviors passed down from generation to
generation. Cultural memes are a much more significant driver of
human evolution than genetic evolution. Entire civilizations
have been weeded out when their belief system proved maladaptive
to a changing environment. One such cultural meme holding sway
over today’s governments, institutions, and society is our
economic system of capitalism. The pillars of capitalism
represent a belief system so ingrained in today’s culture that
they form a sort of cargo cult amongst its adherents. Cargo
cults are any of the various Melanesian religious groups which
focused on obtaining material wealth(manufactured Western goods
that came on cargo ships) through magical thinking, religious
rituals and practices. Today the term “cargo cult” is used to
describe a wide variety of phenomena that involve superficial
imitation of a process or system in order to fabricate a
successful outcome without even the basic understanding of its
mechanism.
The tenets of capitalism are ritually followed in the proclaimed
belief that “a rising tide lifts all boats”, i.e. so-called
improvements in the general economy will benefit all
participants in that economy. Centuries of unbridled capitalism
have demonstrated beyond any doubt that it does not lift all
boats. A new study finds that half of Americans are “shut off
from economic growth”. The rules of the game are so stacked
against the masses that this week a professor said “only all-out
thermonuclear war might fundamentally reset the existing
distribution of resources.” Capitalism’s imperative for
expansion, growing profit levels, and efficiency has ultimately
dehumanized our culture.
[center]
HTML https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/styles/renewablerevolution/files/814_31498732716_8452ea1881_b.jpeg[/center]
Not even when our basic life support systems are being torn
asunder do the vast majority question the path we are on. We are
all a captive audience to the system and those few dissident
voices are snuffed out under the wheels of “progress”.
Truth be told, the corporate elite have long written off all
those people living hand to mouth. Trump’s pick for Labor
Secretary said, unlike workers, machines are “always polite,
they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show
up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race
discrimination case.” Massive global unemployment resulting from
the automation revolution has not yet been addressed by
governments. Roughly half of all jobs in the U.S. are at risk of
automation and two-thirds in the developing countries. This is
all coming at a time when humans are fast destroying the
ecosystems underpinning the very foundation upon which human
civilization has developed over thousands of years. Mass
migration of climate refugees will only further destabilize
governments, stoke ethnic and cultural tensions, and give rise
to fascist political movements. No conspiracy is needed to
exterminate the “useless eaters”, just allow mother nature to
take its course and climate change will be killing billions by
mid century.
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Those in military planning know this and periodically express
their fear of what is coming, but business-as-usual rolls on.
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Capitalism’s constant impetus to shift costs, risks, and burdens
off industry and onto the environment and society carries on
under the guise of “being more competitive”. It’s a way of
externalizing costs to maximize profit and if these costs were
truly taken into account, none of the world’s top industries
would be profitable (Interestingly, the link to this study has
been scrubbed from the internet).
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It’s the height of magical thinking to put so much faith in some
mystical “invisible hand of the free market” to solve
existential threats such as an ever-widening wealth gap and the
wholesale destruction of planetary life-support systems. There
is no benevolent “invisible hand” turning individual
self-interest into the common good. The primary mandate of
capitalism is to protect and grow capital. The “invisible hand”
is just a bunch of people 🦀 scrambling to make as much
money as possible, not caring or oblivious to those they hurt in
the process. F u c k the invisible hand of the market. The
invisible hand of mother nature will punish those who squander
Earth’s rich but finite resources.
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It’s been clear for some time that we have past the point of no
return, triggering multiple tipping points in Earth’s living
systems. New findings are continually confirming scientists’
worst nightmares. A key glacier in the Antarctic that holds back
10 feet of sea level rise was just described as breaking apart
from the inside out. In other grim news, the long feared carbon
bomb has now been quantified and is projected to release the
emissions equivalent of an industrial country like the U.S. in
the next few decades, prompting researchers to say that “climate
change may be considerably more rapid than we thought it was.”
Biodiversity loss is another critical threshold we have
breeched: “New research shows that local extinctions have
already occurred in 47% of the 976 plant and animal species
studied.” A new study also reveals that the planet’s tallest
animal is facing extinction after its numbers have plummeted in
recent years, with the ominous warning that “many species are
slipping away before we can even describe them.” Forests are
being wiped out by armies of invasive insects. Because of a
rapidly changing climate and the vast scale of the problem, the
idea that reforestation will somehow save us is a pipe dream.
Those forests won’t stay healthy enough to serve as carbon sinks
and besides, seven times Earth’s land area would need to be in
cultivation in order to reduce the planet’s atmospheric CO2
level down to 350ppm.
[center] Biodiversity hot spots of 80% of biosphere's species
[i]endangered by Global Warming Pollution[/i][/center]
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Note that the Permian Mass extinction is estimated to have
happened anywhere over the course of 200,000 years to 15 million
years. The current 6th mass extinction is happening orders of
magnitude faster due to a multitude of factors including
deforestation, habitat fragmentation, chemical pollution,
poaching, etc., making this current disaster very unique in
Earth’s history:
The team of geologists and biologists say that our current
extinction crisis is unique in Earth’s history due to four
characteristics: the spread of non-native species around the
world; a single species (us) taking over a significant
percentage of the world’s primary production; human actions
increasingly directing evolution; and the rise of something
called the technosphere. – Link
HTML http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2016/04/donald-trump-and-collapse-of-western.html
Perhaps the fate of humans was written in stone once we stood
upright and developed tools. To a large degree, modern
technology has been an expression of the energy-dense
hydrocarbon fuels we discovered and are not willingly giving up
anytime soon. Once fossil fuels ignited the Industrial
Revolution and the Haber–Bosch process unleashed the human
population bomb, nothing could stop the deadly carbon
consumption feedback loop, not even decades of scientific
warnings.
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From a throwback to our primate ancestors, modern humans have
been hard-wired to ignore threats that are not immediate or
local; global ecological overshoot(of which climate is just one
aspect) is imperceptible to the real-time cognitive processing
of humans and represents the ultimate under-the-radar threat
able to undermine our reasoning and response:
Psychological concepts of how we view the world around us,
including ‘creeping normalcy’ or ‘landscape amnesia’, block
day-to-day comprehension of what accelerating human activities
represent—whether it is human population, the number of dammed
rivers, forest destruction, or the impact of motor car emissions
in a timespan that is geologically brief. Creeping normalcy
refers to slow trends concealed in noisy fluctuations that
people get used to without comment, while landscape amnesia
describes forgetting how different the landscape looked 20–50
years ago (Diamond 2005: 425).
In his study of how societies fail, biogeographer Jared Diamond
calls global warming a pre-eminent example of a ‘slow trend
concealed by wide up and down fluctuations’ (2005: 425). He
likens the denial of climate change impacts by leading
politicians, including former US president George W. Bush (and
his contemporary John Howard in Australia), in the late 1990s
and early 2000s to the elite of ‘the medieval Greenlanders [who]
had similar difficulties recognizing that their climate was
gradually becoming colder, and the Maya and Anasazi (in Central
and North America) [who] had trouble discerning that theirs was
becoming drier’ (2005: 425). – link
We evolved to react to imminent dangers, not slow-rolling and
seemingly invisible catastrophes as an unintended consequence of
our cushy lifestyle. From lofty corporate boardrooms to the
filthy streets of skid row, the mass of humanity is following
the same biological script of overshoot and collapse seen in
every organism from bacteria to reindeer herds. Fossil fuels
only enabled the destruction to multiply a million-fold,
culminating in one final and spectacular explosion of human
activity that will leave the planet nearly barren for eons.
Open-ended growth appears to be inherent in nature, all the way
from the DNA to the arthropods to mammals, including humans.
Open-ended growth is the psychology of a cancer cell. I am not
sure I know of a species which has learnt how to limit its own
growth. Unfortunately species which transcend their
environmental resources can hardly survive – the final arbiter
of the climate impasse will be nature itself. ~ Andrew Glikson,
Earth and paleo-climate scientist, Australian National
University
The beauty and wonder of this planet is being trashed by a naked
ape whose cleverness in tool-building has far outstripped his
ability to handle it in any restrained or judicious manner.
Nature’s rich book of life is being pancaked into a cheap,
crumpled comic book.
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Add in the development of mass consumerism, planned
obsolescence, and the hypnosis of corporate-sponsored TV and you
have a passive, malleable population happily marching towards
the slaughterhouse. It’s fitting, then, that the masses would be
swindled by a megalomaniac bankruptcy artist who dabbled in
Reality TV.
Every one of Trump’s cabinet picks is a big middle finger in the
faces
HTML http://www.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-140415130805.png<br
/>of those who fell for his pseudo-populist rhetoric:
billionaires, Wall Street sharks
HTML http://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-250817135149.gif,<br
/>Goldman Sachs alumni
HTML http://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-250817135149.gif,<br
/>and hard core laissez-faire capitalists
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/>chomping at the bit to deregulate, monetize, and privatize
every
last bit of what remains.
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The allure of capitalism has always been that you’re just one
lucky break away from becoming one of those fat cats, if only
someone would give you a chance. A prescient observation by Ugo
Bardi from earlier this year:
--- Quote ---
> Trump is a symptom of the ongoing breakdown of the social
pact…capitalizing on this breakdown by…playing on the attempt of
the white (former) middle class to maintain at least some of its
previous prosperity and privileges. Trump is…an unavoidable
consequence of resource depletion. – Link
HTML http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2016/04/donald-trump-and-collapse-of-western.html
--- End Quote ---
The bottom line is that a swing towards authoritarianism happens
when resources become scarce.
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width=640]
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Climate change is simply a symptom of humans overshooting the
planet’s carrying capacity. Free market ideologues 🦀
🦕 🦖 🐉are nearly always climate
‘skeptics’ ;)
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/>because acknowledging the reality of human-induced climate
change would be an admission that industry must be curtailed or
controlled. Left-leaning people nearly always accept the science
because it goes along with their criticisms of capitalism which
externalizes social and environmental costs for the benefit of
just a few at the top of the economic hierarchy. Thus we see
parasitic Trump 🦀 surrounding himself with right-wing,
climate denying, fossil fuel corporatists and insiders
HTML http://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-250817135149.gif<br
/>who will be doing everything in their power to [b]dismantle
health and environmental regulations including privatizing
social services which are barriers to capitalist expansion.[/b]
To be blunt, our chance of developing a sustainable culture
passed us by a long time ago. People will try to adapt until
they cannot, and myths will be created to explain away harsh
realities. A dystopic future in all its horrific glory has
arrived: baked-in biospheric collapse, the inherent and
irreconcilable contradictions of techno-capitalism, a
dysfunctional political system unable to come to terms with root
causes, and the cognitive dissonance of the masses blind to the
bigger picture.
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Our numbers are not a safeguard from extinction.
[center]
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#Post#: 27--------------------------------------------------
"What it Means to be Responsible - Reflections on Our
Responsibility for the Future" by Theresa Morris, State
University
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: March 14, 2022, 6:35 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
December 11, 2023
Agelbert NOTE: Originally published in September of 2015, I'm
reposting it, with a few graphics changes, for you to pass on to
friends and family. Its message continues to be of the utmost
importance to intelligent, caring humans.
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The following article post makes a case for the premise that
ignoring, deriding or mocking the high probability of the
existential threat we face from anthropogenic climate change is
irresponsible. Anyone who is alive after around 2040 will pay
for their present default embrace of the spiritually and
environmentally destructive [glow=maroon,2,300]Social Darwinist
Ideology[/glow]
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/sound-christian-doctrine/darwin/msg1517/#msg1517.<br
/>
Unfortunately, the innocent will suffer equally along with the
criminally negligent reprobates who support woefully inadequate
incremental measures to deal with this existential threat. Have
a nice day.
The essay, "What it Means to be Responsible - Reflections on Our
Responsibility for the Future" by Theresa Morris, State
University of New York at New Paltz references the work of
Fitzpatrick, Jonas, Aristotle and others. I have summarized the
essay to save the readers time.
Theoretical & Applied Ethics Vol. 1, Issue 42 2, Spring 2011
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[center]What it Means to be Responsible
Reflections on Our Responsibility for the Future[/center]
Theresa Morris, State University of New York at New Paltz
The concept of responsibility is a central one in ethics but it
seems to require rethinking when we consider the fact that
oftentimes the consequences of actions in contemporary,
technological society extend far into the future. To whom or
what are we responsible, and how far into the future do our
obligations extend?
In this essay, I consider the question of our possible
responsibility for the future, specifically the future state of
our planet, and the well-being of future people and other
beings. I argue that we do have responsibilities to future
people and an obligation to try to preserve and protect the
planet and its living beings for the future, and I present a new
concept of responsibility, one that provides a way of
understanding our actions in light of concern for the future.
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The central problem with an argument that considers the effects
of present actions on the future world lies in the fact that
those acting today will not exist in the world they are
affecting with their actions.
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Why should people, now living, care about the consequences of
their actions on a future world whose inhabitants are currently
non-existent? Even if held accountable by those future
generations, no price for wrongful actions can be extracted from
the dead. We lack the usual motivations for acting ethically in
situations that might impact future generations, and though we
may imagine angry voices condemning us for our lack of
forethought and care some several generations into the future,
we will never hear those words of contempt.
Despite this, Attfield (1998) argues that "intergenerational
justice remains a serious possibility, as actual future
generations which come into being, and find that they have been
deprived by earlier generations of opportunities for satisfying
some of their most basic needs, could reasonably criticize their
ancestors for failing to facilitate the satisfaction of
foreseeable vital interests" (p.211).
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Ethical arguments struggle, however, when lack of proximity is a
factor, for it is difficult to take into consideration the
impact of our actions on those spatially distant from us.
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This problem arises whenever we are asked to take into
consideration or contribute to the welfare of those who live in
distant places, those who do not share our community, and those
whose suffering we do not directly experience.
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Without the presence of the other face-to-face, without a real
relation to the other person, it is difficult to remain aware of
and concerned about his or her need.
How much more difficult then, to take into consideration those
who do not yet exist, those others we will never know and can
only imagine.
The difficulty is further complicated by the fact that often the
choices we make today, choices that involve use of finite
resources, for instance, or the use of technology that may have
deleterious aftereffects, may seem at the time to be valuable
for the comfort, health or well-being of the contemporaneous
human population. Indeed, most of our ethical deliberation is
concerned with present actions.
In what way and how can it be argued that sacrifices or
restrictions on some very useful and beneficial activities and
technologies must be made in order to benefit future peoples who
do not yet exist?
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[center]Responsibility in Aristotle[/center]
For Aristotle, the capacity human beings have to think about
what they will do is what lies at the root of our responsibility
for our actions. We are free to act, within certain necessary
limits, and we have the capacity to think about our choices,
therefore responsibility accompanies actions when, as Aristotle
says, the "source is in oneself."
Rational beings with the capacity to choose among actions and
bring about ends cannot escape from the notion of
responsibility. It is a given, provided one is free from
coercion in one's actions. Here responsibility is not
responsiveness to the Other, not responding to another's need or
want, as in Levinas. Rather, it is that since we are free to
make choices and commit acts, we must accept responsibility for
the consequences of those choices.
For Aristotle, to act responsibly is to act beautifully, because
when a person does so he or she engages the greatest capacity
available to human beings; that is "thinking things through,"
dianoia . What differentiates ethical choice from willing,
desiring, and wishing, for Aristotle, is that it involves
deliberation (NE 1112a 15).
To think things through is to look ahead and estimate
consequences using imagination and forethought and to make
judgments about possible actions based on experience and memory;
this is the kind of reasoning that responsibility requires.
Aristotle says, "We deliberate about things that are up to us
and are matters of action" (NE 1112a32). Choice is not something
that is shared by irrational beings, it is the mark of a being
with self-control (NE 1111b15).
Thus choice is firmly in the realm of practical, ethical action.
With his emphasis on dianoia, Aristotle offers one way to think
about responsibility to the future; it is the lack of "thinking
things through," in preference for shortsightedness regarding
means and ends, that results in acts of harm, both to the
environment and to future people.
If we fail to think things through to the consequences of our
actions we are not acting responsibly.
And ignorance is no justification for poor choices, for
Aristotle points out that we can be ignorant and still
responsible. If we deliberately become irrational, as when we
become drunk, or when we ought to know something and yet fail
to, we are still held responsible, "on the grounds that it is up
to people themselves not to be ignorant, since they are in
control of how much care they take" (NE 1114a).
Aristotle is rigorous in his insistence that human beings,
because they are rational and have the capacity to "think things
through," are responsible for their actions.
[center]World Bank Warns of Severe Threat to Food Supplies from
Climate Change[/I]
HTML http://www.sustainablecitiescollective.com/david-thorpe/1019761/world-bank-warns-severe-threat-food-supplies-climate-change[/center]
But perhaps, Aristotle says, "one is not the sort of person who
takes any care" (NE 1114a5). Perhaps here we have the crux of
it; that there are people who don't care, who are careless.
[center]
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[I]We must act on Global Warming: Climate Change has already
made the world [glow=red,2,300]three times[/glow] more
dangerous.[/I]
HTML http://charlescharliecharles.com/2014/08/we-must-act-on-global-warming-climate-change-has-already-made-the-world-three-times-more-dangerous/
[center]1 September 2021 🚩 Climate and weather related
[glow=red,2,300]disasters surge five-fold[/glow] over 50 years
HTML https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/09/1098662[/center]
Aristotle says such people, despite their lack of care, are
still responsible because it was always in the beginning up to
them to use their intelligence to make good choices and [b] the
fact that they don't care is the result of a long line of
deliberations that denigrated the value of their own beautiful
actions, the concerns of others, [i]and the consequences of
their actions on themselves and others.
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[center]The Problem of Responsibility Today[/center]
To think things through would be to take into account in
deliberating about our choices the realities that face us, the
sure consequences of some of our actions, those that we have
experience and knowledge enough to foresee. If the consequences
of our actions today extend far into the future, this would
require that we take that far future into consideration in our
actions.
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It is just because of this farther extension of consequences
into the future that Jonas argues that human action today
differs radically from human action in Aristotle's time. As he
says, "modern technology has introduced actions of such novel
scale, objects, and consequences that the framework of former
ethics can no longer contain them" (Jonas, 1984, p. 6). Powerful
technologies in use today have effects that extend far into the
future, and this includes harms that arise directly from their
manufacture and use, such as resource depletion and pollution
from hazardous waste, as well as harms that occur because of the
scope their reach, as in climate change. The negative effects
are not limited to the earth and its ecosystems but include
effects on communities of people whose livelihoods are harmed
and whose basic goods, such as water and air, are polluted and
rendered unusable.
These consequences affect living beings over their lifetimes,
threaten the health of the planet, and are passed down to future
generations as the integrity of the global ecosystem is damaged
over time.
Particularly, Jonas has in mind the repercussions of genetic
engineering, nuclear technologies, and other technologies that
have the capacity to impact the future in highly significant
ways: "more specifically, it will be my contention that with
certain developments of our powers the nature of human action
has changed, and since ethics is concerned with action, it
should follow that the changed nature of human action calls for
a change in ethics as well, in the more radical sense that the
qualitatively novel nature of certain of our actions has opened
up a whole new dimension of ethical relevance for which there is
no precedent in the standards and canons of traditional ethics"
(1984, p. 1).
For example, the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf had consequences
that extend far into the future, affecting marine and coastal
ecosystems, the livelihood of human beings dependent on a
healthy environment for sustenance, and marine life far from the
origin of the spill.
Ecosystems are by nature interconnected and interdependent, and
the reach of the spill was extensive. Its impact is not limited
in space or time. As well, we might ask who exactly is
responsible for the oil spill in the Gulf? Is it the technicians
and engineers, the government regulations that allow drilling to
be done in extreme conditions, the companies making a profit, or
the consumers whose desire for cheap fossil fuel drives the
market?
This kind of diffusion of responsibility, a diffuse collective
responsibility that Stephen Gardiner refers to as a
"fragmentation of agency," means that it is difficult to assign
responsibility.
As Gardiner points out, "climate change is caused not by a
single agent but by a vast number of individuals and
institutions not unified by a comprehensive structure of agency.
This is important because it poses a challenge to humanity's
ability to respond" (2010, p. 88).
How much is up to us then, to use Aristotle's term, in today's
technological, global world? The notion of collective
responsibility is pertinent because in a democratic society
responsibility for collective actions like oil drilling would
seem to rest with all citizens.
How we are to understand democratic responsibility, diffused
among many, is a significant problem given the altered nature of
human action and the extended reach of the consequences of our
actions. And because the consequences will fall primarily on
future generations, there is a disincentive to alter our
behavior, particularly if that might make current lives more
difficult.
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While a new ethical understanding that takes into consideration
the extended consequences of our actions in a technological
society seems necessary, another question arises: where do our
obligations end if we begin to think of extending them to future
beings and the future existence of a livable planet?
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How might such seemingly open-ended obligations be argued for?
And if, to be responsible, as Aristotle claims, is to "think
things through," are there limits to our capacity to be
responsible?
[center]Rethinking Responsibility[/center]
Here I think it is a good moment to turn to Jonas, who argues in
The Imperative of Responsibility that, difficult as it may seem,
we do have a responsibility for the future.
He presents an argument for responsibility based on the presence
of an objectively existing good, and he claims that fulfillment
of the human good results from taking the effects of our actions
on the future into account (Jonas, 1984, pp. 80-82).
When we are not able to predict the long-term consequences of
our actions he argues that we should proceed with prudence, even
to the extent of being guided by fear, in order to ensure that
we do not create extensive future harms.
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For Jonas, the human being occupies a special place in the
lifeworld. Jonas sees the human being as that being which is
uniquely capable of responsibility, and the presence of this
capacity entails that it must be acted on if a one is to fully
become the being one is capable of becoming.
The capacity for responsibility contributes to the "what it is
to be" a human being and as such, informs the telos[i] of human
being. Jonas says that
For Jonas, the fact that each organism desires and pursues the
continuance of its own life points to the fact that life is a
value for each being. Life is a good and as such it presents the
being with the capacity to [i]take responsibility with an
imperative to protect and preserve it, to recognize the value it
is for all living beings. The particular human good lies in the
capacity of the human being to recognize and respond to the
imperative of responsibility.
For Jonas, the imperative of responsibility commands us to
respond ethically for the sake of the good that is evidenced in
Being, a good that reveals itself in each living beings' pursuit
of its own continuance, its desire for life.
As well, responsibility includes protecting the possibility for
the continued existence of human freedom and ethical
responsiveness.
As Jonas says, "the secret or paradox of morality is that the
self forgets itself over the pursuit of the object, so that a
higher self (which indeed is also a good in itself) might come
into being.
As Jonas tries to show, the good of the human and the good in
the world are not separate but the same.
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[center]Rights and Responsibility[/center]
Another means of arguing for responsibilities to future
generations, one that is less metaphysical and more supportive
of political action, is to consider the question of the rights
of future people. A proponent of this view is Hiskes (2009), who
argues that "global warming and climate change have made it
abundantly clear that the human impact on the environment is an
emergent one, the product of uncounted individual decisions and
choices on one hand, and public policies and political omissions
on the other, which make every one of us responsible for putting
all the rest of us in a new situation of risk, and not only "all
of us" but those who come after us as well" (p.146).
Hiskes goes on to explain that "rights are necessarily the legal
response to harms, real or potential. The fact that they are new
and collective harms that do not fit within the traditional
individualist language of either rights or responsibility do not
alter the equation of rights as a response to harm.
New harms demand new rights. Because they are emergent harms,
the rights that they begat will share their emergent ontological
nature" (p. 146).
Future people are continually coming into existence, even as the
effects of our actions emerge over long periods of time. There
is a synchrony in terms of the emergence of future beings and
the emergence of harms.
Both are initiated in the present, in the actions of present day
beings, and both concern a time after present day actors are
gone.
Future needs are predictable and future beings are coming into
being all the time. It is not as if the future exists at some
point far into the distance, with no connection to the present.
The future is always coming into being, it follows closely on
the heels of the present, and while we see changes in each
generation, physical human beings will always need clean air to
breathe and water to drink, as well as fire to stay warm.
In a similar vein, Fitzpatrick (2007) argues that a conception
of justice based upon a notion of "mutual advantage among
cooperating parties of roughly equal power and vulnerability" is
too restrictive (p. 377).
Justice, insofar as it relates to rights and obligations, is a
concept not limited to those sharing space and time. He says
that, "attribution of rights to future generations will
therefore be legitimate if we can speak of an earlier
generation's wronging future generations by spoiling the
environment the former was given[b] and has relied upon for its
flourishing in the same way that future generations depend upon
it for theirs" (Fitzpatrick, 2007, p. 377).
Future generations have a right to inherit a healthy ecosystem,
just as we did, and this right entails an [b]obligation on the
part of the living to pass down a viable planet. The
responsibility to do so is centered in the right future
generations have to be protected from harms caused by others, as
well as the right to inherit and enjoy what previous generations
have inherited and enjoyed.
That people depend upon a healthy environment to flourish, and
that a diminished environment is harmful to people is at the
basis of Fitzpatrick's argument.
He considers future people to be the moral equals of presently
living people, and therefore claims we cannot disregard their
rights or turn aside from our responsibility not to cause them
harm.
He argues that "if we fail to conserve limited natural
resources, or to control dangerous waste, or to curb greenhouse
gas emissions, then we will be causing people harm, not merely
failing to benefit them" (Fitzpatrick, 2007, p. 377).
The fact that these people do not exist simultaneously with us
is not a reason to fail to take them into ethical consideration.
Fitzpatrick concludes by arguing that we need to reconsider the
meaning of justice rights in order to include responsibilities
to future generations in our consideration because there is
simply no justification possible for disregarding the effects of
our actions on the future.
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In the next and final section, I take a brief look at the way in
which an ethic of care might provide the needed motivation for
the difficult changes that taking future generations into
ethical consideration might require.
[center]
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[center]Motivation and[glow=green,2,300] Care[/glow][/center]
To accept the burden of responsibility for what is up to us,
difficult as it is where our technological reach is so extended
and agency is so fragmented, is to strive to fulfill the
capacity we have to respond to the good and protect and preserve
it.
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This task, however, is difficult, not only because of the extent
of effects in time and space, fragmentation of agency, and the
difficulty of predicting harms, but also because in many cases
we may benefit now from actions that result in harms to future
generations.
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What could motivate us to make the necessary sacrifices required
by responsibility of this scope and nature?
Jonas turns to the human capacity for care for an answer to this
question. He uses the analogy of the parent and child to
demonstrate that we are attuned to caring in a fundamental way
(Jonas, 1984, pp. 98-108).
Jonas sees that caring is a mode of being for the human being,
one that is demonstrated naturally in the attention and love
parents give to their children as they nourish these beings who
will exist in the future.
It can be argued that the care of children is ultimately
selfish, a way to project particular and individual genetic
material forward. Yet, at the same time, most stable societies
demonstrate their concern and care about the future through the
fostering of all children in the society and through their
concern with passing down cultural and physical artifacts to
posterity.
Jonas’ example of the statesman as a paradigm of responsibility
toward the future reflects the important role of democratic
social institutions and governments in responsibility.
Established to foster and preserve culture and enable the
orderly transfer of power from generation to generation,
governments, at their best, are concerned with bettering the
conditions of the people and ensuring that opportunities,
values, artifacts, inventions, techniques, and other "objects"
cultivated and produced by society are preserved and passed
down.
This example illustrates the presence, in social institutions,
of a fundamental care and concern with the future and future
peoples that can serve as an example and guide for a practical
ethic of responsibility for the future.
It is only through care of the future that we can extend the
reach of our grasp on life through bequeathing a planet that is
livable and viable, one that preserves and protects the cycle of
life for the beings who will inhabit it.
The natural drive toward transcendence of finitude through
leaving behind works, objects or beings of lasting value can be
engaged as a motivating force in an ethics that is concerned
with extending its reach to future generations.
[center]
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Perhaps we should reframe the question of an ethics of
responsibility for the future, because it can be argued that we
are motivated to moderate and measure our actions toward nature
and to care about the health and continued viability of the
Earth because of our love for it, and for the life it offers.
We are capable of caring not only about those potential beings
of the future who will inherit this planet but also about the
planet itself as a living being we will pass down.[1] Inspired
by the beauty of existence, fleeting though it is, we desire its
continuance even though we will not be here to enjoy its
pleasures forever, and this too is reflective of our ethical
capacity.
[center][font=times new roman]Conclusion[/center]
In the preceding I've shown what I see is a need for a
reconsidered understanding of the meaning and extent of
responsibility today, and I've talked about some of the
difficulties facing us in attempting to accept responsibility
for the future, as well as some of the motivational forces that
might help us overcome those difficulties.
To begin to take responsibility for the Earth and future
generations we can consider ourselves as caretakers, trustees or
stewards. We can pursue sustainable practices that conserve
resources and other basic goods for future generations to
benefit from and enjoy.
Recognizing the presence of the good in existence, we can
protect it by considering the long-term effects of our choices
and actions on the future. The damage we've done has been done
collectively, as Fitzpatrick points out, and the only way to
prevent further damage and protect the future is through
collective action.
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Taking responsibility will require thinking about ourselves
differently, as well. We must develop a new self understanding,
one that reflects our increasing knowledge concerning the extent
of the effects of our actions on the Earth and the future. The
human capacity for responsibility is a reflection of what Jonas
calls "the higher self," a good-in-itself that comes into being
when we recognize the value of life, reflect on the consequences
of our choices, and take responsibility for the harms we cause.
Thus, a significant aspect of the good of the human being is the
human capacity to bear responsibility.
[move]The continued existence of the good for all beings rests
on humans [glow=teal,2,300]assuming that
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-080422155559.png<br
/>responsibility[/glow], and the time for us to recognize that
is
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/>now. [/move]
If we fail to [glow=teal,2,300]take responsibility[/glow] it
will be a [glow=maroon,2,300]failure[/glow] of justice and of
love, towards both future beings and the planet.
[center][img
width=640]
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Notes
1. "When men act for the sake of a future they will not live to
see, it is for the most part out of love for persons, places and
forms of activity, a cherishing of them, nothing more grandiose.
It is indeed self-contradictory to say: 'I love him or her or
that place or that institution or that activity, but I don't
care what happens to it after my death.' To love is, amongst
other things, to care about the future of what we love"
(Passmore, 1980, p. 53
References
Adam, G. (2011). Futures Tended: Care and Future-Oriented
Responsibility. Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society,
31, 1, 17-27.
Aristotle. (2002). Nicomachean Ethics, J. Sachs (trans).
Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing.
Attfield, R. (1998). Environmental Ethics and Intergenerational
Equity. Inquiry, 41, 2, 207-222.
Fitzpatrick, W. J. (2007). Climate Change and the Rights of
Future Generations: Social Justice Beyond Mutual Advantage.
Environmental Ethics, 29, 4, 369-388.
Gardiner, S. M. (2010). A Perfect Moral Storm. In Climate
Ethics. NY: Oxford University Press.
Hiskes, R. P. (2009). The Human Right to a Green Future. NY:
Cambridge University Press.
Jonas, H. (1984). The Imperative of Responsibility. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
Passmore, J. (1980). Conservation. In Responsibilities to Future
Generations. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.
HTML https://blogs.montclair.edu/tae/files/2011/03/Vol.-1-Issue-2-Morris.pdf
Agelbert NOTE: The [glow=red,2,300]mens rea[/glow]
HTML http://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/fossil-fuel-folly/fossil-fuels-degraded-democracy-and-profit-over-planet-pollution/msg3875/#msg3875<br
/>of the fossil fuel industry and almost half of the world’s 100
largest companies, including Procter & Gam ble and Duke Energy,
has been recently exposed. They all funded lobbyists and
propagandists in order to obstruct climate change legislation.
I use the Latin legal expression, "mens rea", because the above
obstructionists of climate change legislation were knowledgeable
over 40 years ago of the damage that burning fossil fuels causes
to the biosphere in general and humans in particular.
As Theresa Morris made quite clear in her essay, these
corporations made the wrong choice. And they made that choice
because they refused to think things through.
Theresa Morris said, "Ethical considerations aside for a
moment, the people in these powerful corporations are not
stupid. They love their own children."
So, if they knew, because over 40 years ago ExxonMobil
scientists laid out the facts to oil executives
HTML http://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/fossil-fuel-folly/fossil-fuels-degraded-democracy-and-profit-over-planet-pollution/msg3873/#msg3873,<br
/>who then secretly joined with several other corporations to
fund
denial of climate change and obstruct climate change
legislation, why did they, with malice and aforethought, engage
in disguising the fact that they were, and are, getting an F in
viable biosphere math?
Some will say that it's a no brainer that they did it for
profit. While that is partially true, it ignores the fact that
big oil corporations DO believe their own scientists. It also
ignores the fact that fossil fuel corporations DO NOT believe
the happy talk propaganda that they fund.
They plan ahead. They plan to take advantage of the
'Fragmentation of Agency' mentioned by Stephen Gardiner. The
corporations did not get limited liability laws passed because
they wanted to be socially responsible. I believe they will use
the 'Fragmentation of Agency', in regard to biosphere damage
claims, to unjustly limit their liability in a typically
unethical "damage control" exercise.
One of the themes about human history that I have tried to
communicate to readers over and over is that predatory
capitalist corporations, while deliberately profiting from
knowingly doing something that causes pollution damage to the
populace, always plan AHEAD to socialize the costs of that
damage when they can no longer deny SOME liability for it.[/I]
Their conscience free lackey lawyers will always work the system
HTML http://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/fossil-fuel-folly/fossil-fuels-degraded-democracy-and-profit-over-planet-pollution/msg2122/#msg2122<br
/>to limit even PROVEN 100% liability.
When 100% liability is blatantly obvious, as in the Exxon Valdez
oil spill, they will shamelessly use legalese to limit the
liability. ExxonMobil pulled a fast one on the plaintiffs by
getting "punitive", rather than "compensatory" damages. See what
the learned counselor said, "The purpose of punitive awards is
to punish, not to destroy, according to the law". Ethics free
Exxon and its ethics free lawyers KNOW how the Court System
"works". JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL LAW [Vol. 18:151] The purpose
of this comment is to describe the history of the Exxon Valdez
litigation and analyze whether the courts and corresponding laws
are equipped to effectively handle mass environmental
litigation.
HTML http://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/fossil-fuel-folly/fossil-fuels-degraded-democracy-and-profit-over-planet-pollution/msg2123/#msg2123.<br
/>
While the profits are rolling in, they will claim they are "just
loyal public servants, selflessly providing a service that the
public is demanding", while they laugh all the way to the bank.
When the damage is exposed, they will claim we are "all equally
to blame" (i.e. [i]DISTORTED Fragmentation of Agency).
This is clearly false because polluting corporations, in
virtually all cases, AREN'T non-profit organizations. If they
were NOT PROFITING, THEN, and only then, could they make the
claim that "we all benefited equally so we all are equally
responsible to pay equally for the cost."
Those who presently benefit economically from the burning of
fossil fuels, despite the scientific certainty that this is
ushering in a Permian level mass extinction, will probably be
quick to grab on to a severely distorted and duplicitous version
of the 'Fragmentation of Agency' meme, in regard to assigning
the proportionate blame for the existential threat our species
is visiting on future generations.
Privatizing the profits and socializing the costs is what they
have done for over a century in the USA. They have always gotten
away with it. That is why, despite having prior knowledge that
their children would be negatively impacted by their decisions,
they decided to dispense with ethical considerations.
They assumed that, with all the profits they would accumulate
over the last 40 years (or as long as the populace can be
blinded to the truth of the existential threat), they could
protect their offspring when things got "difficult".
They know that millions to billions of people, in all
probability, will die. But they think their wealth can enable
them to survive and thrive.
As for the rest of us, who obtained a pittance in benefits in
comparison to the giant profits the polluters raked (and still
continue to rake) in, we can expect an army of corporate lawyers
descending on our government(s) demanding that all humans, in
equal portions, foot the bill for ameliorating climate change.
The lawyer speak will probably take the form of crocodile tears
about the "injustice of punitive measures" or, some double talk
legalese limiting "punitive damage claims" based on
Environmental LAW fun and games (see: "punitive" versus
"compensatory" damage claims).
This grossly unjust application of the 'Fragmentation of Agency'
is happening as we speak. The poorest humans are paying the most
with their health for the damage done by the richest. The
richest have avoided most, or all, of the deleterious effects of
climate change.
When the governments of the world finally get serious about the
funding needed to try to clean this mess up (present incremental
measures ARE NOT sufficient), the rich plan to continue
literally getting away with ecocide, and making sure they don't
pay their share of the damages for it.
As Kevin Anderson (after showing the alarming rate of increase
in CO2 emissions) states, the 1% bear about 50% of the blame.
--- Quote ---
> Consider Pareto’s 80-20 rule, which states that 80 per cent of
something relates to 20 per cent of those involved – a
surprisingly useful and robust rule of thumb. Applied to climate
change this would mean that 80 per cent of emissions derive from
roughly 20% per cent of the population. This relationship holds
fairly well within different nations as well as globally. What
if we then look at the 20 per cent group and apply Pareto to
them – and then repeat the process again? What we find is that
about 50 per cent of the world’s emissions come from about 1 per
cent of the world population.
HTML https://makewealthhistory.org/2015/04/10/climate-change-has-a-1-too/
--- End Quote ---
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Since, according to the U.N., the richest 20% of the world's
population uses 80% of the resources, the 'Fragmentation of
Agency' pie chart for the damage done to the biosphere should
look like this:
[center]
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The way the fossil fuel industry, and almost half of the world’s
100 largest companies, will want that 'Fragmentation of Agency'
pie chart to look like is as follows:
[center]
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The world of business has made many Empathy Deficit Disordered,
unethical choices. We are all paying for their rejection of
their responsibility to use [I]dianoia[/i] in their decision
making process.
But they are relatively few in number. Their chicanery would
cease from a huge public outcry if they did not have so many
people aiding and abetting their unethical biosphere destroying
modus operandi.
Those are the comfortable millions who have swallowed the
corporate happy talk propaganda.
Those are the people that continue to delay progress on the
implementation of the drastic government action we must demand,
which is desperately needed to stem, or eliminate, the length
and breadth of the climate change damage existential threat.
The people who think that this climate change horror can be
addressed by incremental measures are, as Aristotle said,
deliberately becoming irrational.
[I][glow=teal,2,300]Dianoia[/glow][/i] is sine qua non to a
[glow=blue,2,300]viable biosphere[/glow].
Please pass this on with attribution to Theresa Morris, State
University of New York at New Paltz. I just summarized her essay
and added images to enhance the gravity and importance of her
message. We are in a world of trouble.
A. G. Gelbert
Colchester, Vermont
#Post#: 28--------------------------------------------------
Duckweed as a biological RAPID Carbon Capture and Sequestering
tool is BETTER than Algea
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: March 14, 2022, 6:40 pm
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[center]Algae - natures answer to fossil fuels and plastics!!
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/>
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/> [/center]
[center]
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Just Have a Think 382K subscribers
Algae has been used by humans for thousands of years, but the
idea of using algae as a secret weapon to combat climate change
is definitely a modern day concept. The more scientists delve
into the biology of algae, the more species they find and the
more they discover just how incredibly versatile this primordial
organism really is.
Help support this channels independence at
HTML http://www.patreon.com/justhaveathink
Anthony Gelbert 25 minutes ago
Algae has two problems that make it unsuitable, both as a
bio-fuel and as a CO2 reduction type of autotroph.
1. All algea species are extremely hydrophilic, so sun drying
prior to further processing must be enhanced with electrical
energy powered heat, which lowers the Energy Return on Energy
Invested to a point where it is economically unattractive to use
algea to make bio-fuels unless governments throughout the world,
instead of giving subsidies to the hydrocarbon fuels "industry",
governments give them to a massive worldwide algea bio-fuels and
CO2 reduction project. I don't see the 🦖 fossil fuelers
letting go of the subsidy swag from all the governments
😈 they have corrupted any time soon.
2. All algea species are extremely temperature sensitive. While
it is true that their growth rate far exceeds that of any other
type of plant life, the increase in global range needed to make
algae reduce CO2 in our atmosphere is not feasable.
I have researched this thoroughly. There is no plant life that
can beat algea at rapid photosynthesis, which is the sine qua
non requirement for reaching the 350 PPM goal, but algae is so
hydrophylic (water loving) that too much energy is required to
dry it for storage. 👎 No, passive solar energy will not
work to dry algae. That has been tried unsuccessfully. Also,
algea can grow rapidly only in a very narrow range of the
biosphere.👎 Algea is not the answer.
🤔👨‍🔬
But, there is a floating plant, the tiniest angiosperm
(flowering plant) known to science, that can do the job of rapid
photosynthesis that we need on a planetary scale.
🌍🌎🌏🌞
► It is extremely hardy.
► It grows in nearly all areas of the planet, with a
longer growing season that any other plant life form except
phytoplankton.
► It doubles it's mass every 48 hours or so, depending on
the availability of Sunlight, Carbon Dioxide and cheap
fertilizer like pig feces.
► It is tiny, but not microscopic. It can easily be
harvested without heavy machinery.
► Unlike microscopic algae, Drying these tiny plants with
passive sunlight is also easily done.
► It is easily stored.
► It can even be used as animal feed AND supplemental
nutrition for humans too.
► It has been used to clean ponds and lakes of toxic heavy
metals. When used for this pupose, it becomes poisonous and must
be treated as hazardous waste.
The common name is Duckweed, of which there are a number of
species of floating plants. My favorite is Lemna minor
✨🌞
The science based case for a planet scale Lemna minor project
has actually been made by evidence of a floating plant when the
Arctic had shallow freshwater seas (millions of years ago).
Scientists now believe a rapid cooling that took place at that
time, even though the CO2 level was even higher then than it is
today, was directly caused by the proliferation of Azolla
floating plants in that sea. They rapidly lowered the CO2
levels, sinking when they died and being replaced by others,
until ice formed over them. They cooled ALL of Earth's
atmosphere ⛄ from a CO2 PPM concentration that was higher
than the one we are saddled with now.
"This freshwater surface layer allowed Azolla to repeatedly
spread across the ocean surface forming mats of vegetation
during a succession of episodes called the ‘the Arctic Azolla
Event‘. The event lasted for almost a million years from about
50 to 49 million years ago."
It happened before. We can make it happen again, and we don't
need a million years to do it. We CAN DO IT in a few decades.
💫
Learn more:
👉 Duckweed, the plant that may save mankind by enabling
our species to live symbiotically, instead of parasitically,
with the biosphere
HTML http://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/renewables/ethanol/msg217/#msg217
william armstrong 11 days ago
It is great to hear about a Carbon Capture system that for once
does not create more CO2 than they can recover from the
atmosphere, or result in more oil extration.
Anthony Gelbert > william armstrong 27 minutes ago
Agreed.
I've thought about the Carbon Dioxide issue for several years. I
have always questioned the motives behind the hydrocarbon
industry cheerleading CO2 capture and sequestration.
IMHO, after looking at this from several reality based angles
(unlike the unreality based happy talk pushing MO of the
🦕😈🦖 fossil fuelers), the fact that the
best present day technology to keep the CO2 concentration down
(which is used in Nuclear Submarines, which are forced to
surface every six months because they cannot keep CO2 below
8,000 PPM after that time period) cannot get CO2 levels anywhere
near 5,000 PPM, never mind the 350 PPM we desperately need to
get back to in order to avoid the worse effects of the Sixth
Mass Extinction now in progress from excessive GHG emissions,
evidences that the proposed CO2 reduction technology,
euphemistically called "capture and sequestration" technology,
is a fraud. 👎
IOW, all the technofixes out there refuse to admit that the GOAL
here is NOT to keep the Hydrocarbon Industry profitable. The
GOAL is 350 PPM, period. Anything else is simply wishful
thinking.
The only reality based way to solve this problem lies with
Biological solutions involving rapid photosynthesis. I think
Duckweed is better choice than algea.
🧐 Duckweed, the plant that may save mankind by enabling
our species to live symbiotically, instead of parasitically,
with the biosphere
HTML http://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/renewables/ethanol/msg217/#msg217
#Post#: 29--------------------------------------------------
Project to export 🌞 solar power from Australia’s
Northern Territory to Singapore via an undersea cable
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: March 15, 2022, 1:58 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
HTML https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-170218174357.png
March 14, 2022 By James Thornhill (Bloomberg)
[center]Could A Subsea Solar Power Cable Link Australia To
Singapore?
HTML https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-060518153110.png[/center]
Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes and iron ore magnate
Andrew Forrest have committed more cash to a A$30 billion ($21.9
billion) project to export solar power from Australia’s Northern
Territory to Singapore via an undersea cable.
Sun Cable completed a A$210 million Series B capital raising
with existing shareholders to accelerate the progress of the
Australia-Asia PowerLink, as well as other projects in its
portfolio, the company said in a statement Monday. The raising
was led by Cannon-Brookes’ investment group Grok Ventures and
Forrest’s Squadron Energy.
Sun Cable plans to lay a 4,200-kilometer (2,600-mile)
high-voltage cable to supply enough electricity to meet 15% of
Singapore’s demand from a giant solar and battery complex deep
in the Outback. The project also plans to supply power to the
northern Australian city of Darwin from late 2026.
The company now has sufficient funding to take it to financial
close on the project by the end of 2023, David Griffin, Sun
Cable’s chief executive officer, said in a phone interview. A
formal process was underway with Singapore’s Energy Market
Authority to obtain necessary import licenses, Griffin said,
adding that he expected progress on that front by the end of
this year.
“This brings Australia one step closer to realizing our
renewables exporting potential,” Cannon-Brookes said in a
statement. “We can power the world with clean energy and Sun
Cable is harnessing that at scale.”
HTML https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-250817121649.png
Transition Finance
Cannon-Brookes has been a vocal campaigner for the clean energy
transition in Australia, which still gets around 60% of its
power from coal, teaming up with investment giant Brookfield
last month in a failed bid for generation company AGL Energy
Ltd. The partners had planned to accelerate the closure of AGL’s
coal-fired plants and replace them with renewables.
Forrest is looking to transform his iron-ore empire into a major
clean energy producer over the next decade and has been scouring
the planet for opportunities to invest in renewables and green
hydrogen projects. © 2022 Bloomberg L.P.
[center]Related Video 🌞[/center]
[center]
HTML https://youtu.be/vnhnYJ-Wav4[/center]
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#Post#: 89--------------------------------------------------
"Do you like going to the beach? Too bad. They’re all
doomed."
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: March 28, 2022, 1:05 pm
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March 27, 2022 By Kim Stanley Robinson (Bloomberg) – Do you like
going to the beach? Too bad. They’re all doomed.
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[center]Science Fiction Guide To Keeping Doomsday Glacier
Hanging On May Be Within Our Technological Capabilities[/center]
SNIPPET:
I say this because beaches are by their nature located right at
sea level. Waves break on them to make their sand; tides move
that sand around. There are a few beaches around the world where
sand is so copious that giant dunes have formed, as in Namibia
or the California coast north of Santa Barbara. Those might
manage. But most form a coastal verge not much higher than the
current highest tides.
New projections released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration in the U.S. put minimum sea-level rise at 12
inches within the next 28 years. That number doubles, at least,
by the end of this century — and possibly rises to as high as 8
feet. Even the low-end estimates, almost sure to be reached
because of the anthropocentric warming that’s already occurred,
would be enough to submerge almost every beach in the world.
Kiss them goodbye. 🤦‍♂️
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This sad prospect has haunted me for a long time. Beaches saved
my suburban youth. Many people love them, as I do, for their
ease and beauty. They contribute to a big part of the world’s
tourist economy, and they mean even more to the people who
depend on them for their livelihood. The coastal life is an
ancient one, which still feeds and supports millions.
And, of course, every coastal city is built right to sea level.
So the coming rise, even in its earliest phases, will devastate
a major part of human civilization. Why this oncoming disaster
isn’t discussed more is a mystery to me. Possibly it’s because
people feel it’s too far in the future to worry about or too sad
to contemplate. Maybe it’s because we think there’s nothing to
be done about it.
For me it’s been like a recurring nightmare, portrayed again and
again in my science fiction over almost three decades. I first
had a volcano erupt under the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet,
causing it to break up and float away. A billionaire near the
end of Green Mars looks down from a space plane on the
disintegration: “That’s it for every beach in the world,” he
says. Fictional engineers in another book, as a stopgap measure,
try to pump water back up onto Antarctica so it will refreeze
there. In 2312, published in 2012, planners of the future are
building dams to save glaciers in Greenland. I’ve also depicted
restorations in the aftermath of lost glaciers, such as sucking
sand out of the shallows to rebuild the beaches on higher
ground, or figuring out how to coexist with ocean water sloshing
over most of Lower Manhattan.
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Now the latest findings show things are speeding up more than
seemed possible. The ice shelf floating off the Thwaites Glacier
in Antarctica , for instance, looks like it might break up in
the next five years. Whenever it happens, the giant glacier’s
ice will slide into the sea unimpeded, at a much faster speed
than before. The loss of Thwaites alone would raise sea level by
2 feet.
This doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do. Of course, rapid
decarbonization is the main thing. But there are other methods
within our power to slow the big glaciers down. These are
untested, obviously, but well within our technological
capabilities.
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Full article:
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