Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
Ignoring Global Warming and Our Children: Are We All Simply Mad?
Most of us who are parents will live to see our children reach adulthood, and will even live to be grandparents, and yet we all spend thousands of dollars paying for life insurance, just in case we were to die before our kids get through college.
Most of us will never suffer a house fire, but over the years we spend tens of thousands of dollars insuring our houses against that disaster (we also spend huge sums of tax dollars paying for fire stations and equipment). Most of us will never have a serious accident, and yet we all spend even more money insuring our cars, just in case we do.
As a nation, we are extremely unlikely to suffer a germ-warfare attack, and yet at a cost of billions of dollars we have stockpiled smallpox and anthrax vaccines. We also spend countless billions of dollars on research to find cures to diseases like AIDS and bird flu which most of us will never contract. (For that matter, we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars fighting an alleged "terror" threat which at its worst might threaten a few hundred or thousand people, and that also might never occur.)
We spend our hard-earned cash to insure against all of these things not because they are likely to happen to us but because in the unlikely case that such things did come to pass, it would be such a personal, or a national calamity, that we need to be prepared.
So why are we, as individuals and as a nation, doing nothing or next to nothing about global warming — a disaster which is potentially worse than anything else imaginable, including nuclear war?
Even if the darker scenarios being drawn — which range
from global draught, lost coastlines and a northward march of deadly
tropical diseases to the collapse of civilization and the virtual
extinction of the human race — are unlikely, the reality that they
actually could happen should be leading us to take out some kind of
insurance policy, and should be driving us to start taking steps to
prepare, just in case.
In fact, however, we are ignoring or denying the problem —
and in fact are actively increasing the risks. Even though we know that
the polar ice caps are melting at an accelerating rate, and that the
vast regions of permafrost north of the Arctic Circle are melting, we
are not even requiring that automobiles meet strict fuel efficiency
standards. As a nation, we continue to promote a society based upon the
personal automobile, and as citizens we continue to buy earth-killing
SUVs and muscle cars. As a nation we keep heating our homes at 70
degrees in winter and air conditioning them at 65 degrees in summer,
adding ever more generating capacity that keeps pumping more and more
carbon into the atmosphere.
As a nation, we refuse even to contemplate a policy that
would actually significantly cut emissions of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere. As individuals, we refuse to alter our lifestyles to reduce
our carbon footprint.
Are we nuts?
What would we call parents
who refused to buy life insurance, or who refused to carry health
insurance when they could afford it? What do we call people who drive
their cars without having insurance? We call them selfish and stupid,
and in the latter case, even criminal.
So what should we call a society that is risking the
future of civilization, of humanity, for the selfish reason that its
people just don't want to be discomfited in the slightest?
I would say it is madness. Someone who refuses to
recognize reality, who refuses to see disaster ahead, who refuses to
act on the basis of self-preservation, but instead does things that are
likely to cause self-inflicted injuries or death, is certifiable.
That's us — certifiable, both as individuals and collectively as a nation.
In a sense, we’re lucky — our house hasn't burned down yet. We can
still act. Maybe the better analogy is the person who didn't buy life
insurance. If we'd bought it when we were young, it would be cheap to
pay the premiums, but because we're nearly at retirement age now, it
will be a lot more expensive to buy — if we can get it at all.
That's how it is with climate change. The die has been
cast. The polar caps are melting, setting in motion a raft of
irreversible changes. The permafrost melt, for example, is creating
vast swamps with unimaginable amounts of organic material which, under
water, will rot anaerobically, releasing not carbon dioxide, but
methane, a gas that has 24 times the global warming effect of CO2. The
loss of the north polar cap, and of the vast snowfalls in the arctic
north, is reducing the reflectivity of a large portion of the earth’s
surface, increasing the sun’s heating effect. Forests in temperate and
tropical zones are dying or shrinking because of decreasing rainfall,
and falling river levels.
Like an insurance policy purchased at an advanced age, the
available remedies to climate change are getting more and more costly.
Just cutting car and power plant emissions to 1990 levels
will not be enough anymore. Even if we cut emissions by 80-90 percent,
we will still likely see catastrophic sea level rises this century, and
massive global crop failures, and starvation on an unimaginable scale.
But that grim prognosis is no reason not to act. If we don't take
action — serious action — the catastrophes will be even worse.
Living in China in the early 1990s, I marvelled at how the
government there was trashing the country's environment in the name of
development and industrialization. It is clear that for the ruling
Communist Party, the short-term interest of staying in power by keeping
people happy with jobs and rising incomes trumps longer-term concerns
like gallopping desertification, life-threatening pollution and global
warming. But how different is our capitalist society and government,
really? In the name of ever-rising profits over the short-term, we too
are putting survival the nation and of the human race in jeopardy. In
fact, since Americans, 5% of the world's population, produce 25% of the
world's greenhouse gasses, we are actually worse than China, by far.
We must, as human beings, as a society, and as individuals, snap out of it, and take dramatic action.
"we’re all just plain crazy" No, not crazy, per se, but incredibly selfish. Corporate propaganda has built this consumer society on individual selfishness devoid of any sense of a commons or a common good. "Shop until you drop" is the American motto.
This culture of liberal selfishness is the one we are imposing on every other society through corporate globalisation (aka imperialism, New World Order). If they don't like it, we engage in regime change to ensure our perverted view of human society prevails.
Systemic regime change in the US and EU are needed to mitigate the coming calamity. First off, we might revoke the corporate charters of the largest transnationals. They have long violated their charters' conditions in their criminal behavior and widespread human rights abuses. Serious regulation of financial systems would be a necessary complement to this.
The corporate capitalist system is rotten to the core. The evidence is our dying planet and the many societies being made dysfunctional by the system.
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world population written by a guest,
January 17, 2007
The worst part about this article is that there are very few solutions if the world population is to stay at 6 billion. It seems that the only solution is to find alternative sources of energy in the near term, and drastically decrease the world population over the next 20 years...
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Most of us who are parents will live to see our children reach adulthood, and will even live to be grandparents, and yet we all spend thousands of dollars paying for life insurance, just in case we were to die before our kids get through college. 
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No, not crazy, per se, but incredibly selfish. Corporate propaganda has built this consumer society on individual selfishness devoid of any sense of a commons or a common good. "Shop until you drop" is the American motto.
This culture of liberal selfishness is the one we are imposing on every other society through corporate globalisation (aka imperialism, New World Order). If they don't like it, we engage in regime change to ensure our perverted view of human society prevails.
Systemic regime change in the US and EU are needed to mitigate the coming calamity. First off, we might revoke the corporate charters of the largest transnationals. They have long violated their charters' conditions in their criminal behavior and widespread human rights abuses. Serious regulation of financial systems would be a necessary complement to this.
The corporate capitalist system is rotten to the core. The evidence is our dying planet and the many societies being made dysfunctional by the system.
Blue