While I was in the waiting room of my son’s dentist, waiting for all four of his wisdom teeth to be yanked, I read a beyond-grim article in Rolling Stone on how Australia is becoming the first casualty of Global Warming. The article pictured a baked kangaroo who had been caught in a fire storm caused by the drought affecting a large part of the country, even as other parts of it are being drenched by flooding rains. Most depressing to me and anyone who has ever known the rapture of floating over one of the Pacific’s technicolor coral reefs was the news that these will all be gone — bleached to death — by 2050.
The article concluded with a quote from some scientist who said that Australia was basically supplying the climatogological rope to hang itself with by selling zillions of tons of dirty burning coal to China, which that country will use to stoke its furnaces and send zillions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the air which is THE main cause of Global Warming — which some say, if eliminated, would eliminate the problem.
And we won’t stop burning dirty coal…..why? Oh, well, you see, China and India won’t do that until their economies catch up to the U.S. And the U.S. won’t do it because that would kill jobs. And better to kill every living thing on earth in the long run than lose a few jobs in the short term. Makes sense, right?
Yeah, I know, I can talk, at least I have a job.
With the failure of the latest environmental summit down in South Africa, and the semi flop of the latest Eurozone talks, it becomes more and more apparent that the fate of the planet hinges on whether the nations of the world can sacrifice their short term interest in favor of the greater good of survival.
So far, the answer is a resounding NO!!!!!!!!!
Rupert