Is it too late to halt global warming? Bioremediation.
Global warming is here. It seems like we should be in crisis mode. Yet as I write this post there is a parade of decorative cars and floats rolling through the streets of Corvallis Oregon. Burning the fossil fuels which are propelling climate change so dramatically. Although I would have liked to think that the people of the USA, or any nation really, would have rallied around concepts of conservation and reduced harm, that has not been the case. Rather we continue our rituals of consumption as if the world wasn’t burning down around our ears.
The sad part is that because of our relative failure to educate the children and adults of our nation, we can’t even understand that the information we are being fed is wrong.
We are told that WE are responsible for the climate, and that us consumers need to change our ways. The reality is that the USA does produce a ridiculous amount of pollution, primarily through our military.Bombers and tanks, war ships and humvees all burn a lot of fuel. Then there are the fuels burned by the actual missiles. We act as if the war machine is a vital part of liberty in the USA, we are told that the massive deployments are needed to secure our liberty. In reality the troops are used for resource acquisition. The soldiers are deployed to protect pipelines, and poppy fields. The wars they fight are not front page news, and these wars are often fought in nations which haven’t granted our forces permission to carry out operations. We are in fact the nation which sends our soldiers to occupy foreign lands and steal the rightful property of those peoples’ in the name of corporate greed.
If you are like me, then the words corporate greed brings up certain images, Enron, Haliburton and the like. The profiteers who swoop in on the nations we have recently exploded in an effort to gain reconstruction contracts. This feeding frenzy is really the aftermath to the profits taking. The big bucks are made by the contractors for the drones, and missiles. The big bucks roll in well ahead of the securing of natural resources, the real money is made by black budget corporations.
These companies make their profits away from the public’s eye, they have top secret projects which cannot be reported on, or disclosed to the people. In that environment of secrecy their contracts and budgets are not spoken of. We only learn about them in the time after they have been deployed and become a part of the battlefield if then.
White sands missile range and area 51 are both examples of black budget development sites where private interests develop technology at enormous cost to the public. These military industrialists are precisely who Eisenhower was warning about in his famous speech about the dangers presented by the military industrial complex.
Now the environment is changing so quickly it seems there is little we can do to halt it. The hothouse earth is nearly guaranteed.
If we want to have a somewhat survivable planet for humanity, we will need to take dramatic action to sequester the greenhouse gasses which we have been pumping into the air. That is aside from halting the ongoing geocide which is manifest in the 24/7 consumer culture.Many people think that there is nothing they can do, it’s easy to feel powerless in this situation. It’s easy to stand aside from hope and just continue on this path of ecological extinction on a global level. It’s easier to accept the death of humanity than it is to decide to radically change ourselves. And clearly the idea of changing the USA’s military and somehow stopping their massive pollution of the world is unthinkable. After all they are the USA military.
My sense of urgency has been building. I can’t pretend that I am in a situation to survive the upcoming droughts and hunger, not in my current state of poverty. So I am forced into capitalism, the same earth killing capitalism that I believe we must fight.
But for me, my capitalism is on such a small scale, I can somehow justify it because the money I earn propels my ongoing resistance and awareness raising work.This brings me to the question, is it too late to plant trees? I have been seeing a clickbait post on the zuckerberg suggesting that the planets heat has become too extreme for trees to save us. Yet I have this sense that we can somehow put together enough individual actions to make a massive change.
The federal government seems unwilling to halt fossil fuels geocide, so it falls to us to work towards healing the harms done by the ruling class. The idea I have is that we can all plant trees to affect the airs quality. There are millions of us after all, and every flood is made up of individual drops of water before they merge.
The idea is to plant willow trees, they sequester carbon quickly and are fast growing. I plan to create starts this winter and put them in the ground this spring. A single willow tree in it’s first year will sequester about 2.7 pounds of carbon from the atmosphere.
The idea that we can somehow halt the world’s largest and least ethical military is unthinkable. The idea that we can each plant one or two trees is much more approachable.Finding ways to halt black budgets seems impossible, the federal government doesn’t even acknowledge their existence. However, as individuals, we can all find ways to plant trees. If you are willing to pledge to planting a tree or two, please let me know.
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Nice meeting you here in thesteemengine @tawasi! Very worrysome topic here but we can each do a little bit. We are fortunate to have a big garden with lots of trees but recently planted fruit trees (mango, avocado & wild plum) at the bottom of a bank across the road from our property (it's on a school's side boundary so they do not bother with it)
Many people are starting to grow vegetables on sidewalks as well, a great idea, but that's another issue.
Look forward to seeing more of your posts :)
Thanks for dropping by and making a thoughtful comment. Also thanks for growing trees. It's going to be a lot of work, but my sense is that we need to get going on this type of work instead of asking the government to change.
Very thought-provoking post, and I could not agree more with you here:
In fact I've said similar things in my own posts, several times. I remember the self-congratulatory political posturing at the signing of the Paris climate deal, yet this happened in the same week that the UK Parliament agreed to bomb Syria, completely against the wishes of the majority of voters, and actually ridiculing with laughter a petition against the bombing signed by more than 100,000 citizens .
Also, our governments are planning a wholesale move (managed by taxation) from petrol and diesel fuelled vehicles to electrically-powered vehicles. This will not only massively increase demand for large, unsustainable lithium-ion batteries, which use African child labour in their production, but will also make enormous demands on the National Grid. How will that help global warming?
As most of the global warming and climate change stats are funded by the government, I am pretty sceptical about the whole thing. I'm not saying it's not happening – I just question it. As a former magazine journalist, I remember huge campaigns asking people to ditch chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) due to ozone layer damage. But then the whole thing just went quiet. I'm not saying that CFSs are not bad, but there was a massive amount of consumerism associated with that campaign: people were buying new fridges, new types of aerosols and massive amounts of high-factor sunscreen. While certain types of chemicals are indeed bad for the atmosphere, I think we need to look at all of these government campaigns with a very questioning attitude, because they always seem to result in increased taxation and more spending for the consumer.
The cash for clunkers program was a fore runner of the type of policy you are talking about. They use incentives which are a benefit to the wealthy class and virtually useless to the poor. All the while using their wealth and power to perpetuate the earth's destruction.
It's past the time to begin organizing our collective resistance, but we may as well begin to heal the earth now, even if it takes seven generations to reclaim some sense of normality.
I'm definitely all for healing the earth - big job, but it has to be done.
In spite of that the military budget gets bigger and people don't really care about it or don't inquire on what is spent on!
I did not know that the willow trees have the ability to sequester more carbon than the other trees.
There is some debate over the relative carbon sequester rate, but by and large most agree that broad leaf trees do better than evergreens.
As for the military, we have been conditioned to believe that anyone who questions military spending is a coward and unpatriotic. Until we see the people of the world as being worthy of their lives, our government will continue to explode third world people for profit.
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