Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, famously said: “Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only paranoid survive.”
Grove’s sage advice hopefully rings a bell with advocates of the climate change issue. They should take heed, stop and listen to what is said, because they may be inadvertently breeding complacency when paranoia is needed more so than ever before.
Now that the Obama administration has publicized their report, 2014 National Climate Assessment, about the dangers of global warming with concomitant climate change, the Republicans have decided to informally declare war on the planet.
As such, the thesis herein is that global warming and climate change are now so widely recognized and so well defined by science that opposition to the problem is tantamount to an act of war. Furthermore, as a matter of principle, purposeful acts that serve to perpetuate global warming are acts against all of humanity.
Greenpeace recently released a report that details “how by 2050, renewable energy sources could be producing close to 97% of electricity in the U.S. and approximately 94% of the country’s needs for heating and cooling homes and businesses.” The report “presents the case for a radical and rapid energy transformation and a pathway for meeting the reduced emissions that the scientific community says is urgent.”
There are a lot of seemingly disparate things happening at various levels of scale in the world outside my window these days. But there is one color that describes them more than any other.
In recent years, a new kind of economy based on the age-old practice of sharing is flourishing across North America and Europe, and is now rapidly spreading in popularity throughout the Middle East and other world regions.
Human-caused climate change may already be out of control, as suggested in recent reports by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), confirming that a “tipping point” may already have arrived (1) with warming of the Arctic and (2) with excessive levels of CO2 causing acidification in the ocean, thereby threatening the existence of both human and marine life.
The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system.
— Derrick Jensen, Endgame Volume One: The Problem of Civilization
As the Sharing Spring kicks off, more and more people are participating in localised forms of sharing in response to the failures of government and big business. While this is right and imperative, it is equally vital that citizens call upon their political representatives to integrate the principle of sharing into governmental policies on national and global levels.
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Something is out of kilter in the ocean.
The problem is found throughout the marine food chain from the base, plankton (showing early signs of reproductive and maturation complications) to the largest fish species in the water, the whale shark (on the endangered species list.)
The ocean is not functioning properly. It’s a festering problem that will not go away. It’s called acidification, and as long as fossil fuels predominate, it will methodically, and assuredly, over time, kill the ocean.
Scientists already have evidence of trouble in the sea water.
In light of ongoing global negotiations on pressing environmental issues, it’s time for efforts to curtail the excessive influence of multinational corporations over public policy to be strengthened and scaled up at all levels – especially at the United Nations.
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