Climate change is the new bogeyman, if you hadn’t heard that is. It’s hiding under your bed secreting global catastrophe as you sleep. It’s billowing above your head as you travel to work, swarming around you as you enjoy your lunch, sucking your future away before you get to enjoy it…
Well let’s look at it from another angle. In fact, let’s look at the world from another angle. It is the year 2050, Al Gore is the new “religion”, his words treated as gospel, his actions and efforts have saved us from the global catastrophe which threatened our very existence, climate change has been eradicated, carbon emissions are now down to zero, and London is once again cold in winter…What a great future we will be preserving for our children, a future which at present amounts to the following:
- 20% of the population in the developed nations consume 86% of the world’s goods.
- Half the world — nearly three billion people — live on less than two dollars a day.
- According to UNICEF, 30,000 children die each day due to poverty. And they “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.” That is about 210,000 children each week, or just under 11 million children under five years of age, each year.
- War and famine cover two thirds of the globe.
From where I am standing, it doesn’t look like much of a future to preserve for my children. The western world, funding puppet regimes and corrupt despots manipulates global activity. We all know about the political situations across the middle east, Africa and asia, we know who the caused them. We know whose colonial theft and assimilation practices treated non-whites as second and third class citizens as enslaved whole nations.
My first question is, why would we want to preserve this current state? I am not laying the blame at one nation, one religion or one state. Man is culpable, self interest has worked to exploit and manipulate millions to benefit the few. Who or what will change this situation? Centuries of warfare, colonization, civilization and politicisation have come and gone and in the twenty first century this is what we are left with.
Maybe global warming is the key. Seismic shifts in the concept and reality of global humanity can only come about as a result of seismic shifts in humanity’s physical situation. A mass catastrophe and churning of the status quo may give those in the “developing world” (a guilt free term for oppressed/enslaved people) the chance to grab some global power, resources and might that have been denied them for so long…
Back to basics though, if climate change isn’t the cure for humanities ails, then how are we going to combat it? After all, the highest polluters are the richest nations, those nations who are currently fighting the “war on terror” to keep us all safe from the now deposed bogeyman Osama.
The war on terror, perpetrated by our governments to save us from terrorism, the very same governments who in not acting quickly enough to bring shipping, air travel and heavy industry to heel in the crucial reductions of carbon emissions are saving our lives with one hand, and paradoxically killing us with the other. Friends of the earth point out that the UK Government’s current carbon emissions targets do not take into account the effects of cumulative carbon emissions. They assert that if, as the government suggests, we were to stop all carbon emissions by 2050, we would still be in trouble as carbon emissions stay in the air for a hundred years, so the emissions from now until the year 2049 would be enough to sink us, both figuratively and literally, even if when we hit the year 2050 all carbon emissions suddenly stopped.So what can we do to drastically reduce these emissions?
The following suggestions is in no way advocating terrorism. The killing of innocents is diabolical in any circumstance. But, if, as we are led to believe by recent pronouncements in the UK, terrorist groups and incidents are our greatest threat, then is there a slightly perverse beneficial side effect to be had from this war on terror? Friends of the earth have highlighted that that the only time since the industrial revolution that the west has been able to significantly reduce carbon emissions has been in the aftermath of September the eleventh when all air travel was halted…
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