(Continued from last day’s section)
There simply is not enough focus or enough scale committed to control or ameliorate the deleterious impact of human-caused global warming that’s changing the climate 10xs faster than seen in any paleoclimate study of Earth’s history going back a billion years. Furthermore, cleaning up the mess is an overwhelming task from the get-go.
Meanwhile, greenhouse gases set new records by the year, every year without fail. “The observations collected by NOAA scientists in 2022 show that greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at an alarming pace and will persist in the atmosphere for thousands of years, said Rick Spinrad, Ph.D., NOAA administrator.” (Source: Greenhouse Gases Continued to Increase Rapidly in 2022, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, April 5, 2023)
Year-over-year, there’s more and more degradation, more and more greenhouse gases, more and more lip service to “hold the line at 1.5°C” by toothless global conferences, and more and more distortions of the truth, which is at epidemic levels. Distorting the truth has been, and still is, one of the biggest impediments to addressing the global warming issue.
In the recent past, telltale evidence of a profound change in how society approaches existential issues reared its ugly head four days following Donald Trump’s inauguration, which boldly and falsely claimed “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration.” Immediately thereafter sales of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949) rocketed by 10,000%, making it a No. 1 bestseller overnight. People sensed a putrid rot lingering in the air, burning nostrils.
Nineteen Eighty-Four remains the go-to source for people when “truth is mutilated… language distorted… power is abused… and when we want to know how bad things can get.” (Source: Nothing but the Truth: The Legacy of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Guardian, May 19, 2019)
Just think how unfortunately coincidental it is that (1) Orwell (2) global warming (3) overfishing and (4) Trump, the avatar of disinformation, should intersect at the same moment in history. The upshot is people question the credibility of facts and refuse to accept the truth when it matters most, thus crippling a public understanding of crucial scientific studies that should educate, not distract.
As a result, the world community doesn’t seem to know which way to turn next. It’s directionless and possibly paralyzed by the overwhelming scope of a very sticky climate problem that’s starting to haunt existence. Additionally, most people don’t live where climate change shows up first and thus find it difficult to accept the reality of the danger. For example, who lives on the Siberian permafrost or Antarctica or Greenland. Until only recently, daily life has not been impacted by the hidden reality of a fierce and rapid changing climate system afar from urban life which has only recently started encroaching upon on all continents, in 2022. Then, for the first time, the public finally saw and/or felt the impact of global warming’s influence, as trucks delivered drinking water to more than 100 parched towns and villages in the world’s most developed countries France and Italy and commercial barges sputtered in mud on commercial waterways of the Rhine, the Danube, the Po, whilst flash floods in China leveled 9,000 homes (payback for concrete supplanting wetlands) and trapped subway riders with water up to their chins. These eye-popping events happened in 2022. None of it is normal.
Meanwhile, according to a recent interview of Noam Chomsky in Boston Review: The Proto-fascist Guide to Destroying the World, “A brutal class war has devastated much of the world and led to tremendous anger, resentment, contempt for institutions… The United States is leading the way to a kind of proto-fascism.”
A primary target of proto-fascism is intelligentsia’s handwringing over climate change.
“In recent years, right-wing populists have positioned themselves as Europe’s staunchest defenders—against immigration and threats to national sovereignty; against pandemic restrictions and the influence of global institutions; and against what they regard as national governments’ hysteria over climate change, which populists have described as ‘degenerate fearmongering ‘at best and ‘totalitarian’ at worst.” (Source: The Far-Right View on Climate Politics, The Atlantic, August 10, 2021)
The populist right, or in Chomsky’s words proto-fascists, claim green policies such as fuel taxes and decarbonization incentives represent an elitist attack on the lives of regular people, thus telegraphing the issue beyond its root cause of human-generated greenhouse gases like CO2, which is becoming too obvious for outright dismissal. In similar fashion, they’ll brush off the overfishing issue, assuming it ever rings a bell with mainstream America, which is doubtful.
The ocean heat bomb is all about
the impact of global warming and overfishing,
neither of which is high enough on to-do lists of countries
to help sustain ecosystems
How is it possible to assemble a worldwide collective effort to tackle the thorny issues of climate change when disinformation muddies the waters beyond recognition?
And when is it too late to do anything?
And, at its root cause, what’s fundamentally wrong with a socio-economic system that causes, and choses to ignore, ecosystem imbalances leading to collapse?
A major scholarly study of the cause/effect of dangerous ecosystem imbalances concludes: “The evidence is clear. Long-term and concurrent human and planetary wellbeing will not be achieved in the Anthropocene if affluent overconsumption continues, spurred by economic systems that exploit nature and humans. We find that, to a large extent, the affluent lifestyles of the world’s rich determine and drive global environmental and social impact. Moreover, international trade mechanisms allow the rich world to displace its impact to the global poor. Not only can a sufficient decoupling of environmental and detrimental social impacts from economic growth not be achieved by technological innovation alone, but also the profit-driven mechanism of prevailing economic systems prevents the necessary reduction of impacts and resource utilization per se. (Source: Thomas Wiedmann, et al, Scientists’ Warning on Affluence, Nature Communications, June 19, 2020)
In other words, neoliberal capitalism’s premise that a profit-driven free market best serves society needs a major overhaul, maybe go in reverse. Evidence of its failure to account for and respect and husband a livable planet is found throughout the world with out-of-the-ordinary heat, floods, fires, and drought on every continent, all of it beyond anything normal, beyond anything resembling a normal occurrence in nature. Ipso facto, Milton Friedman’s richly decorated legacy (Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects, 1951 and The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, 1970) enacted by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher is a bust!
Neoliberalism’s not working for the planet!
There’s gotta be a better way.
(Concluded)
Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at
Source: CounterPunch