Chronic polluters now trying to become climate change crusaders

Editor’s Note: This is a continuation of observations of the state of the world by columnist Paul Haeder, growing efforts to silence opposition to anything, and why traditional means of protest in America no longer are effective. See Part 1 here. More headlines emerged from my February birthday reflection: • Over the past few decades, U.S. mainstream journalists have protected their careers by not offending the Right’s powerful attack apparatus. That caution/cowardice has infected global warming coverage. • Seed emergency: Patenting seeds has led to a farming and food crisis - and huge profits for U.S. biotechnology corporations. Some 95 percent of India’s cotton seed is now controlled by Monsanto. The debt trap created by being forced to buy seed every year - with royalty payments - has pushed hundreds of thousands of farmers to suicide; of the 250,000 farmer suicides, the majority are in the cotton belt. • The fall of President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives is a blow to democracy and the environment. • A small group of climate scientists, financially supported by billionaires including Bill Gates, are lobbying international bodies to manipulate the climate to avoid catastrophic climate change. • Warming-Driven Drought and Extreme Weather Emerge as Threat to Global Food Security. •Nature Journal’s piece on Dust-Bowlification and the Grave Threat to Food Security. • Oxfam’s report: Extreme Weather Has Helped Push Tens of Millions into “Hunger and Poverty” in “Grim Foretaste” of Warmed World. Finally, Bill McKibben, 350.org campaigner and author of “The End of Nature” and other books on economy, environment, climate change: “In the face of data — statistics that you can duplicate for almost every region of the planet — you’d think we’d already be in an effort to do something about climate change. Instead, we’re witnessing an all-out effort to… deny there’s a problem.” In a nutshell we’re seeing climate change work co-opted by energy polluters who dragged their heels and circumvented action with false data, fake think tanks, and politicians with profits and resource exploitation in mind. The media have dropped the ball on climate change. The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by 16 scientists and engineers saying “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” Easily debunked, especially by thinkers like Naomi Oreskes, author of “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscure the Truth about Climate Change, and professor of history and science studies, University of California, San Diego. No matter how much American media avoid climate change, we’re experiencing widespread disruption. McKibben said scientists point to a 2 degree rise in global temperatures as the most we could deal with. If we release 565 gigatons more carbon, “we will pass that reddest of red lines.” “But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons — five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground. In ecological terms it would be prudent to write off $20 trillion worth of those reserves. In economic terms, it would be a disaster, first and foremost for shareholders and executives of companies like ExxonMobil (and people in places like Venezuela),” McKibben said. “If you run an oil company, this sort of write-off is the future staring you in the face as soon as climate change is taken seriously, and that’s scarier than drought and flood, and why you’ll fund endless campaigns of lies, to avoid coming to terms with reality.” Last month the boss of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Thomas Donohue, called for burning all the country’s newly discovered coal, gas and oil — believed to be 1,800 gigatons worth of carbon from U.S. alone. Lazy, disinterested, ignorant or complicit in Big Energy’s money-making scams, media worldwide have dropped climate coverage on so many levels that the “game over” message from people like Tim DeChristopher or Derrick Jensen seems to be where the most compelling discussion can occur on any level of those five Es of sustainability: “This culture destroys landbases,” writes Jensen. “It won’t stop because we ask it nicely. I wrote an essay a couple of years ago about how when I go to something like Bioneers or Greenfest I’m supposed to end up feeling rejuvenated and inspired, but I’ve always ended up feeling discouraged, defeated and lied to. There were people talking about so-called solutions, but I was the only person who gave a presentation including power or psychopathology, and how can you talk about social change without talking about understanding that those in power have and what power means? When we talk about militants, everyone talks about violence, but one of the baselines that people don’t acknowledge is that empire is based on violence, and there is tremendous violence going on right now. We can’t talk about militant resistance without acknowledging that brown people the world over are being bombed to serve empire.” Another book – “Deep Green Resistance” by Aric McBay, Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen – declares that we’ll run out of time before enough people ready themselves to save the planet get mobilized. Jensen is known for books like “Endgame.” McBay’s “Peak Oil Survival: Preparing for Life After Gridcrash” is more recommended reading for greenies. Keith rattles some of my own cages as the scribe of “The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability.” We’ll continue to cover food justice topics at Down to EarthNW. And the false hope of geoengineering – like iron shavings dumped in the oceans to feed algae blooms or smog-generating sulfur dioxide clouds that will supposedly be sprayed 30 miles above Earth’s surface to shade the sun? We’ll critique that backward notion of stopping climate calamity: “The stakes are high and scientists are not the best people to deal with the social, ethical or political issues that geoengineering raises,” said Doug Parr, Greenpeace chief scientist. “The idea that a self-selected group should have so much influence is bizarre.” The unholy alliance of synthetic biology and genetically engineered plants carried out by companies like Monsanto with Walmart wanting to control the world’s grocery sales will be covered here too. Walmart has accepted a plan to sell Monsanto’s genetically engineered sweet corn but companies like Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods and General Mills have turned down this untested, unproven corn. Washington state has a movement of food, agriculture, sustainable eating and nutrition activists and experts working on righteous campaigns. Another birthday passes, and I end with the words of DeChristopher, shared by Terry Tempest Williams: “There’s no hope in avoiding collapse. If you look at worst-case consequences of climate change, those pretty much mean the collapse of industrial civilization. But that doesn’t mean the end of everything. It means that we’re going to be living through the most rapid, intense period of change that humanity has ever faced. That’s certainly not hopeless. It means we’ll have to build another world in the ashes of this one. And it could easily be a better world. I have hope in my generation’s ability to build a better world and I have very little doubt we’ll have to. The nice thing about that is that this culture hasn’t led to happiness anyway, it hasn’t satisfied our human needs. So there’s a lot of room for improvement.”