“There Is No Planet B”
from TomDispatch:
Where Is Everybody?
Why It’s So Tough to Get Your Head Around Climate Change
By Tom Engelhardt
Two Sundays ago, I traveled to the nation’s capital to attend what was billed as “the largest climate rally in history” and I haven’t been able to get the experience -- or a question that haunted me -- out of my mind. Where was everybody?
First, though, the obvious weather irony: climate change didn’t exactly come out in support of that rally. In the midst of the warmest years and some of the warmest winters on record, the demonstration, which focused on stopping the Keystone XL Pipeline -- it will bring tar-sands oil, some of the “dirtiest,” carbon-richest energy available from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast -- was the coldest I’ve ever attended. I thought I’d lose a few fingers and toes while listening to the hour-plus of speakers, including Senator Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island, who were theoretically warming the crowd up for its march around the (other) White House.
And I also experienced a moment of deep disappointment. When I arrived early at the spot in front of the Washington Monument on the National Mall where we were to assemble, my heart sank. It looked like only a few thousand protestors were gathering for what had been billed as a monster event. I had taken it for granted that I would be adding one small, aging body (and voice) to a vast crowd at a propitious moment to pressure Barack Obama to become the climate-change president he hasn’t been. After all, he has a decision to make that’s his alone: whether or not to allow that pipeline to be built. Nixing it would help keep a potentially significant contributor to climate change, those Albertan tar sands, in the ground. In other words, I hoped to play my tiny part in preserving a half-decent future for this planet, my children, and my new grandson.
.......(snip).......
“There Is No Planet B”
While protesting that Sunday, I noted one slogan on a number of hand-made signs that struck me as the most pointed (and poignant) of the march: “There is no planet B.” It seemed to sum up what was potentially at stake: a planet to live reasonably comfortably on. You really can’t get much more basic than that, which is why hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, should have been out in the streets demanding that our leaders begin to attend to climate change before it’s quite literally too late.
After all, to my mind, climate change, global warming, extreme weather -- call it what you will -- is the obvious deal-breaker in human, if not planetary, history. Everything but nuclear catastrophe pales by comparison, no matter the disaster: 9/11, 70,000 dead in Syria, failed wars, the grimmest of dictatorships, movements of hope that don’t deliver -- all of that’s familiar history. Those are the sorts of situations where you can try again, differently, or future generations can and maybe do far better. All of it involves human beings who need to be dealt with or human structures that need to be changed. While any of them may be the definition of “the worst of times,” they are also the definition of hope. ....................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175656/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_climate_change_as_history%27s_deal-breaker/#more
= new reply since forum marked as read
Industrial Disease
I must be living in a dream
how can this be reality?
Nightmare of our own creation,
some destructive inclination
All around me, stacks are smoking
and the trees ain't got no leaves ~
You call this progress? You must be joking ~
It's Industrial Disease.
Vultures on my young friends veins
she's going down with the price of heroin and cocaine
Mom and dad can't figure it out
two years divorced, and still they shout
People lying dead in the street
missile strikes are hard to beat
Red and white, black and blue ~
It's all here for me and you.
© 1983, 1999
What is, to say the least, extremely disturbing is that, right at this very moment, right on the first page of GD, we have posts here at DU expressing concern over climate alteration resulting from planetary abuse by humans, deaths caused by heroin overdoses, and drone missile strikes. Almost thirty years after that song was written in a fit of despair, after a satellite error had almost led to nuclear war, and while observing the oil refineries somewhere around Elizabeth, NJ, during the dark, hope crushing years of the Reagan era.
In my humble opinion, it is time for all of us to stop with this silly childish fantasy that these problems can be solved through the system. They can't be, and they won't be, at least not until Mother Nature solves them for us with some seriously catastrophic tough love that will kill off many of us and make the rest of us very uncomfortable. and make us wish we had done something to try to prevent the catastrophe. We must grow up, and take responsibility upon ourselves, instead of depending on a system primarily run by sociopathic, insatiable, greed driven ego/megalomaniacs to fix it for us.
Hopefully, it's not already too late to take our planet back from these insane bullies, but it's surely at least worth the effort.
