Climate change is being called a slow-motion apocalypse.
There’s no denying that it’s happening. All you have to do is go on line and
look at pictures of the Arctic taken over time, and you can see that ice that’s
been there for thousands of years has now melted and that sea routes are open
in the summer that have never been open throughout human history.
Human beings are changing the Earth so rapidly and
dramatically that our presence is becoming part of the geological record. 97
percent of climate scientists are in agreement that humans have at least sped
up global warming, if not caused it, and virtually all peer reviewed scientific
publications concur. But considering the huge amounts of methane (worse than CO2 for global warming) now
spewing into the atmosphere through gigantic cracks in the Arctic ice cover,
the thawing of the permafrost (note the prefix “perma”), the sudden melting of
glaciers and breaking free of city-sized icebergs, and the complexity and
natural changeability of weather, I think that whether we start using Al Gore
approved light bulbs or not, the horse is already out of the barn.
Vicious circles have been created and set to roll, and these
vicious circles have spawned more and increasingly vicious circles, to the
point that it might not matter what kind of response we humans make to the
problem. A lot of scientists think it’s probably already too late. Scientists
predict that island nations and low-lying nations such as Bangladesh will be
inundated with water sometime this century, and that millions of people will become
refugees. Perhaps Spain will have severe droughts, making farming there impossible.
Millions may die in Africa as soil turns to dust. Drought in the Midwest could
make America’s Depression era Dust Bowl seem like child’s play. Overpopulated
China and India, with nuclear weapons held loosely behind their backs, might face
off in competition for fresh water. While few will admit it, we are in an apocalypse, slow motion or not. However,
Jeff Syrop has a solution!
Here’s the logical truth that’s been staring us all in the
face since the end of World War 2:
The original 13 colonies were separated by days of travel
time. Even with several fast horses in relay, it took longer than a week to go
from Maine to Florida. And yet the regional leaders had the good common sense
to realize that the colonies were proximate enough to benefit from federation. Now,
all of the nations in the world are within a few hours from one another by jet—eat a meal, watch 2 movies, take a
nap, and you’re there!—yet the governments (and even the people!) hang on to
the ancient, divisive concept of nations, with all the waste, redundant
infrastructure, superfluous bureaucracy, and danger that entails. We perpetuate
the danger and chaos of the warring city-states of ancient Italy, when Venice
and Florence fielded armies to fight, kill, and enslave each other’s citizens.
The nations of the world need to federate and become states of a global
government, just as our 13 colonies federated to become the United States and
just as nations in Europe have become the European Union. It has to happen. “We
must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools”. Martin
Luther King said that.
“Federate or deteriorate”. I said that.
You can’t have a single ship commanded by several powerful
captains, each with his own corrupt crew and violent militias. Especially when
some of the most violent, powerful s militias are carrying weapons that would sink
the whole ship if they were ever used!
“It is important to recognize in the face of dire
predictions about a 2°C rise in global average temperature, that humans are a
tropical species”, writes Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore, Ph.D. “We evolved
at the equator in a climate where freezing weather did not exist. The only
reasons we can survive these cold climates are fire, clothing, and housing. It
could be said that frost and ice are the enemies of life, except for those
relatively few species that have evolved to adapt to freezing temperatures during
this Pleistocene Ice Age. It is extremely likely that a warmer temperature than
today’s would be far better than a cooler one.”
The crisis of global warming could be easily met by
compassionate people! That’s the elephant in the room. I find it amazing that
even loving progressives are behaving as if the only hope for saving humanity
from climate change involves selling carbon credits, driving hybrids, and
switching over to solar and wind power. I’m not denying that doing these things
could be a big part of the solution (in a world where humans cooperated), but
we have no idea whether it’s already too late for humans to prevent
catastrophic global warming, and no matter what
we think or know, there is no easy way, in our present political world order,
to get China and India to stop building 2 new coal-burning power plants every
week (according to a 2012 article in the New
York Times).
Under a compassionate global government, large areas of human
settlement could be relocated and the resettled humans retrained. Crops could
be rotated and adjusted for new climates. These two short sentences pretty much
spell out what humanity’s strategy should and could be!
It seems impossible for humans to live together as if Earth
were one big country (actually a much smaller country, in travel time, that the
13 original colonies!). But it’s actually just as doable as the federation of
the 13 colonies--I mean it’s not rocket science for nations to federate into a
global government. And with a constitution that gives Mother Earth rights equal
to the rights of humans, a constitution that maintains the cultures, languages,
and traditions of every nation (as long as they are not harmful to Earth,
oppressive to women, or detrimental to democracy), not only would the problems
associated with global warming be solved, but we’d be living in a much nicer
world. Racism would be as taboo as cannibalism. War would be as taboo as
incest. Torture would be a horror of the past. What is so wrong or so
impossible about having equal rights for all people on this tiny planet? When
Jefferson wrote, “All men are created equal,” he didn’t mean only white
European-American male colonists living on the east coast of North America.
The present nations would become states of the Nation Earth!
My wife Ruey and I drove our primitive internal-combustion-engine
automobile all the way to Berkeley last Saturday just to have a good
cappuccino, and we travel to Taiwan and Europe at the drop of a hat, so my
carbon footprint is just as big as the next guy’s. But I would gladly support
leadership that would melt down our cars to make amazing public transit, and require
well insulated homes that create most of their own energy. I’m not attached to
my cars. I consider them obscene. Even electric cars are obscene, since the
world obviously cannot support electric cars for everyone. I’ve read that it
would take 5 Earths for everybody to be able to have a car. We are practically
forced to be accomplices to this global crime of car ownership because of the
way our cities are designed around the car, but I believe we are guilty
nonetheless. Cars are a sin, a way of enjoying the fruits of empire on the
backs of the human beings living under the empire’s steel boots.
I hate being that loathsome character in shipwreck movies who
takes more than his share of rations on the lifeboat while the other castaways starve.
What this world can easily provide for
everyone are eyeglasses, a laptop
computer, a bicycle, a guitar, enough to eat, awesome education (with every kid
over 9 having a wireless laptop and fast Internet, and all information
available to all people), and decent medical care. And safety. No longer 200
separate armies, draining the wealth of their citizens and always, eventually,
bringing them into bloody conflagrations, which not only destroy human bodies
but the land itself. (Think of the thousands of tons of depleted uranium our
munitions have spread all over Iraq—“Thank you Amerika for 10,000 years of
birth defects! Yay for freedum!”) No, we Earthlings would have only one Earth
National Guard, made up of soldiers from all over the world, training, serving,
and bunking together, becoming like brothers and sisters and making lifetime
international friends during their time in the service.
A friend asked me if I would consider being part of a one-way
mission to live (and die) in a settlement on Mars. If I were a highly skilled
old astronaut instead of a mediocre old tech writer, I’d consider it. Living on
Earth is making me sad! It is beyond belief that we’re allowing a handful of
billionaires to squeeze the last hydrocarbon energy out of Earth by fracking (hydraulic
fracturing), simultaneously poisoning water tables across every continent! And
mountaintop coal removal! And deep-sea drilling! It makes me sick. And if you
really want to freak yourself out, listen for 50 seconds to what Harvard
scientist Michio Kaku has to say about Fukushima.
Every planet inhabited by semi-intelligent life probably
goes through its filthy energy stage. But I love it here! Earth truly is a
Garden of Eden, albeit a tainted one. We let the billionaire psychopaths get
away with it because we get something out of it too. I read somewhere that one
gallon of gas is as powerful as having 38 guys doing manual labor for you for a
week! Oil and coal are so fantastically powerful and still easy to get!
Especially coal--you just cut down a mountain, and the coal under it is
practically ready to use. It’s impossible for humans to leave the $10,000 tusks
on elephants or the magically powerful oil and coal in the ground. So I don’t
think things are going to go very well here for humans. I think the Book of
Revelations has it right: the living will envy the dead. Yes, all inhabited
planets probably go through their filthy energy stage, but on some of them—maybe
only a very small percentage—the intelligent beings might be wise enough and
compassionate enough to resolve their climate crisis before it turns into a
full-on apocalypse.
For the beasts called humans to pass this hard test we’re
facing, the idea of separate nations has to go into the junk drawer of history
along with cannibalism, slavery, foot binding, religion, sexism, torture, racism,
homophobia, child beating, animal abuse, etc. We are not doomed. The real
hard-core psychopaths who are destroying the world probably make up less than .001
percent of the population. What kind of revolutionary is too much of a sissy to
stand up to those odds? Even if only
5 percent of us woke up, we could crush their power almost effortlessly. They
are controlling us like puppets. We can break the fucking strings by simply
waking up and acknowledging the perils, most of them self-imposed, facing
humanity. Look what the band Pussy Riot managed to do in Russia. Three brave
young women got way more say and got
to exert way more clout on the global stage than even the most powerful,
corrupt Russian Parliament member! Millions of people worldwide are watching
their videos.
And don’t write me off as an idealist. We’ve already created
a global common currency. When I first married Ruey, 26 years ago, my VISA card
didn’t work in her country. We had to use her parents’ Taiwanese VISA card. But
now, whether I’m in a restaurant in Italy, a cafe in Taiwan, or a nightclub in
China, my VISA card works seamlessly. Inside a Starbucks in China, I actually
forgot I was in a foreign country and for a moment thought I was here in
Hayward. The cafe looked the same, the clerks spoke better English than a lot
of Hayward natives, and the Internet was fast!
The idea of world federation is nothing new. But it became an
especially urgent issue after the Soviet Union tested its first hydrogen bomb,
a thousand times more powerful than the cutely named atom bombs America dropped
on Japanese civilians, “Little Boy” and “Fat Man”. In those days, egotistical
people like me set about writing all kinds of declarations and constitutions,
thinking they might be the next Thomas Jefferson and that their precious
documents could actually become law. Thousands of people worldwide made an
effort to learn Esperanto, a neutral, easy-to-learn global language created in
the late 1880’s so that each human on the planet could talk to and understand every
other human on the planet. What is new is the urgency of the situation. We know
of many societies that have collapsed--the Mayans, the Incas, the Roman Empire,
Easter Island, and the kingdoms of the pharaohs in ancient Egypt. But we have
never experienced a planetary
collapse. Now we’re about to.
I’m realizing that my world was relatively clean as I was
growing up largely because America was so large and was still being settled,
e.g., Los Angeles was mostly orange groves when my mother was born. When I was
16, living in Los Angeles County, one of my chores was to change the oil in our
2 cars. When I’d finish, I did as my dad (a chemist) taught me—I dumped the used
motor oil in our back yard. This would be unthinkable nowadays—we know it goes
right into the water table. But now we’ve settled the country, and now, almost simultaneously,
we’re starting to frack our country and frack the whole world for the cheap,
plentiful natural gas that is locked in the shale 2 miles below Earth’s surface.
Fracking will poison the world’s water tables all at once. I’m realizing that
my children will spend most of their lives in a very poisonous, carcinogenic
world. Unless we federate.
Of course there is a horrible potential downside to global
federation. Think North Korea. What if our new global nation evolved to become
something like North Korea? There would be no other nation to escape to, no
other nation to ally with to fight the oppressor. Humans could make a hell so
seamless that it could last for millennia! I mention this, even though it
weakens my argument for world federation, to show that I’m not going into this
blindly. The new world constitution would have to be bulletproof, so that
corporations could never rule over humans again, so that men could never rule over
women again, and so that all children everywhere would be safe, healthy, and well
educated. We would have to treat world federation with the care that we
presently treat plutonium waste. The difference is that nothing good can ever
come from having plutonium waste sitting around, lethal for a half million
years, or from poisoning our water tables and aquifers for about as long, while
it’s at least possible for the
federation of humans to be a good thing. Think of some fun group camping trips
you’ve been on! And think of America at it’s best! Despite its flaws, America
is still perhaps the most successful experiment in human freedom ever. It might
not have gone so well if the 13 colonies had stayed separate jealous
competitive countries, each with its own militia.
Some problems have a set degree of severity, such as getting
shot in the face with a shotgun. But the actual
severity of what we’re being told is a cataclysmic doomsday problem ranges
from critical to no big deal. Apocalypse or no problemo—it all depends upon the
behavior of human beings.
The 97 percent of climate scientists along with all the
progressives and intelligent people lined up with them are treating it as a
foregone conclusion that if we don’t radically lower our rate of CO2 emissions, we will usher in an
apocalypse. And that’s not necessarily so. In the struggle for humans to learn
to live together as a civilized species, they’re throwing in the towel, as if that’s just an absolute impossibility,
when actually living together in harmony and sharing like we were taught to do
in kindergarten might be much easier than controlling the weather.
Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova attacked by Russian Cossacks with horsewhips
