We were warned for decades about the death
march we are on because of global warming.
And yet, the global ruling class continues
to frog-march us towards extinction.
By Chris Hedges
July 30, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- "Scheerpost"
The
past week has seen record-breaking heat
waves across
Europe. Wildfires have
ripped through Spain, Portugal and France.
London’s fire brigade experienced its busiest
day since
World War II. The U.K. saw its hottest
day
on record of 104.54 Fahrenheit (40.3C).
In China, more than a dozen cities issued the
“highest possible heat warning” this weekend
with over 900 million people in China enduring a
scorching heat wave along with severe
flooding and landslides across large swathes
of southern China. Dozens of people have
died. Millions of Chinese have been
displaced. Economic losses run into the
billions of yuan.
Droughts, which have destroyed crops, killed
livestock and forced many to flee their
homes, are creating a
potential famine in
the Horn of Africa. More than 100 million
people in the United States are
under heat alerts in
more than two dozen states from temperatures
in the mid-to-upper 90s and low 100s.
Wildfires have destroyed thousands
of acres in California.
More than 73 percent of New
Mexico is
suffering from an “extreme” or “severe”
drought. Thousands of people had to flee
from a fast-moving brush fire near Yosemite
National Park on
Saturday and 2,000 homes and businesses lost
power.
[Related: New
Mexico’s Megafires Mark Turning Point]
It is not as if we were not warned. It is
not as if we lacked scientific evidence. It
is not as if we could not see the steady
ecological degeneration and species
extinction. And yet, we did not act. The
result will be mass death with victims
dwarfing the murderous rampages of fascism,
Stalinism and Mao Zedong’s China combined.
The desperate response is to burn more coal,
especially with the soaring cost of natural
gas and oil, and extend the life of nuclear
power plants to sustain the economy and
produce cool air. It is a self-defeating
response. President Joe Biden has approved
more new
oil drilling permits than former President
Donald Trump. Once the power outages begin,
as in India, the heat waves will exact a
grim toll.
“Half of humanity is in the danger zone,
from floods, droughts, extreme storms and
wildfires,” U.N
Secretary General António Guterres told
ministers from 40 countries meeting to
discuss the climate crisis on July 18. “No
nation is immune. Yet we continue to feed
our fossil fuel addiction.”
“We have a choice,” he added. “Collective
action or collective suicide.”
The Anthropocene Age –
the age of humans, which has caused extinctions
of plant and animal species and
the pollution of the soil, air and oceans –
is accelerating. Sea levels are rising three
times faster than predicted. The arctic ice
is vanishing at rates that were unforeseen.
Even if we stop carbon emissions today – we
have already reached 419 parts per million –
carbon dioxide concentrations will continue
to climb to as high as 550 ppm because of heat
trapped in the oceans.
Global temperatures, even in the most
optimistic of scenarios, will
rise for
at least another century. This assumes we
confront this crisis. The earth is becoming inhospitable to
most life.
Retreating to Compounds
The average global temperature has risen by
about 1.1
Celsius (1.9
degrees Fahrenheit) since 1880. We are
approaching a tipping
point of 2
degrees Celsius when
the biosphere will become so degraded
nothing can save us.
The ruling class for decades denied the
reality of the climate crisis or
acknowledged the crisis and did nothing. We
sleepwalked into catastrophe. Record
heat waves. Monster
droughts. Shifts
in rainfall patterns.
Declining crop
yields.
The melting
of the polar ice caps and
glaciers resulting in sea
level rise. Flooding. Wildfires. Pandemics.
The breakdown
of supply chains. Mass
migrations. Expanding
deserts.
The acidification
of the oceans that
extinguishes sea life, the food source for
billions of people. Feedback
loops will
see one environmental catastrophe worsen
another environmental catastrophe. The
breakdown will be nonlinear. These are the
harbingers of the future.
Social cohesion and the rule of law will
disintegrate. This is taking place in many
parts of the global south. A ruthless
security and surveillance apparatus, along
with heavily militarized police, will turn
industrial nations into climate fortresses
to keep out refugees and prevent uprisings
by an increasingly desperate public. The
ruling oligarchs will retreat to protected
compounds where they will have access to
services and amenities, including food,
water and medical care, denied to the rest
of us.
Voting, lobbying, petitioning, donating to
environmental lobby groups, divestment
campaigns and protesting to force the global
ruling class to address the climate
catastrophe proved no more effective than
scrofula victims’ superstitious appeals to
Henry VIII to cure them with a
royal touch.
In 1900 the burning of fossil fuel – mostly
coal – produced about 2
billion tons of
carbon dioxide a year. That number had risen
threefold by 1950. Today the level is 20
times higher
than the 1900 figure. During the last 60
years the increase in CO2 was an
estimated 100 times faster than what the
earth experienced during the transition from
the last ice age.
3 Future Models
The last time the earth’s temperature rose 4
degrees Celsius, the polar ice caps did not
exist and the seas were hundreds of feet
above their current levels.
[You can watch my two-part interview with
Roger Hallam, the co-founder of the
resistance group
Extinction Rebellion,
on the climate emergency here and here.]
There are three mathematical models for the
future: a massive die-off of perhaps 70
percent of the human population and then an
uneasy stabilization; extinction of humans
and most other species; an immediate and
radical reconfiguration of human society to
protect the biosphere. This third scenario
is dependent on an immediate halt to the
production and consumption of fossil fuels,
converting to a plant-based diet to end the animal
agriculture industry –
almost as large a contributor to greenhouse
gasses as the fossil fuel industry –
greening the deserts and restoring
rainforests.
We knew for decades what harnessing a
hundred million years of sunlight stored in
the form of coal and petroleum would do to
the climate. As early as
the 1930s British engineer
Guy Stewart Callendar suggested
that increased
CO2 was warming the planet. In the late
1970s into the 1980s, scientists at
companies such as Exxon and Shell determined
that the burning of fossil fuels was
contributing to rising global temperature.
“[T]here is concern among some scientific
groups that once the effects are measurable,
they might not be reversible and little
could be done to correct the situation in
the short term,” a 1982 internal
briefing for
Exxon’s management noted.
NASA’s Dr.
James Hansen told the
U.S. Senate in 1988 that the buildup of CO2
and other gasses were behind the rise in
heat.
But by 1989 Exxon, Shell and other fossil
fuel corporations decided the risks to their
profits from major curbs in fossil fuel
extraction and consumption was unacceptable.
They invested in heavy lobbying and funding
of faux research and propaganda campaigns to
discredit the
science on
the climate emergency.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning
journalist who was a foreign correspondent
for fifteen years for The New York
Times, where he served as the Middle
East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief
for the paper. He previously worked overseas
for The Dallas Morning News, The
Christian Science Monitor, and NPR.
He is the host of show The Chris
Hedges Report.
https://chrishedges.substack.com/