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Thanks for killing the planet, boomers!
Thanks for killing the planet, boomers!The world as we know it is ending, and the indifference by Americans, politicians and mainstream press is maddening
TIM DONOVAN
...............................
If you’re already in your mid-50s or later, and you’re lucky enough not to reside in any areas that are traditionally prone to hurricanes or flooding, you’ll miss the worst of our imminent destruction. But for those of us who are younger residents of this fragile orb, who hope to live long, healthy, happy lives — well, tough shit.
Unfortunately, the world as we know it is ending, and no one can reasonably hope to avoid the constellation of catastrophic, ecological and social disasters that are all but certain to manifest, exacerbating one another’s horrific, deadly consequences. And yet our politicians can’t be bothered to care, a substantial portion of Americans aren’t convinced that it’s even happening (despite overwhelming, unimpeachable evidence to the contrary), and the enormity of the issue is downplayed basically everywhere outside the bounds of the largely-ghettoized “environmental/green reporting,” uniformly marginalized and dismissed by the mainstream press.
It’s strange, this deep indifference to the greatest threat the industrialized world has ever faced. Imagine the global response if an asteroid half a mile wide were barreling toward Earth, and scientists were confident that it would strike our planet in 30 or 40 years. Imagine the Gene Roddenberry-esque cooperation and global oneness that would form among Earth’s peoples. Unfortunately, an apocalyptic meteor threatening our very existence is a pretty apt analogy for the ecological nightmare we’re confronting, except that in this funhouse-mirror version of reality we like to call “the real world,” our politicians are sitting on their hands as the asteroid hurtles ever closer.
By the middle of the century, the comfortable, wealthy, relatively-peaceful world as we know it simply won’t exist. The consequences of worldwide coastal devastation and the subsequent infrastructure damage from super-storms and storm surges combined with the “death” of the oceans – with ominous consequences beyond our current predictive capabilities — will ravage the world, our politics and our peace, preventing even the most insulated peoples and cultures from continuing their fat and happy early-21st-century lifestyles. And unlike every other time such apocalyptic predictions have been levied, these are based on extraordinarily well-researched, peer-reviewed studies and reports from hundreds of the world’s most well-respected scientists in their field.
MORE:
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/02/thanks_for_killing_the_planet_boomers/
72 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
So, prejudice includes me and my $95/mo total Austin utility bill, 7,900 miles/yr car-driving, -500 gal/mo water use, purchasing used clothes, $800/mo SS after Medicare deducts? Didn't know the blame game worked that way. I will report to my repentance center tomorrow.
Unfortunately, the world as we know it is ending, and no one can reasonably hope to avoid the constellation of catastrophic, ecological and social disasters that are all but certain to manifest, exacerbating one another’s horrific, deadly consequences. And yet our politicians can’t be bothered to care, a substantial portion of Americans aren’t convinced that it’s even happening (despite overwhelming, unimpeachable evidence to the contrary), and the enormity of the issue is downplayed basically everywhere outside the bounds of the largely-ghettoized “environmental/green reporting,” uniformly marginalized and dismissed by the mainstream press.
One of the few gems of real truth here(bold), though poisoned by hyperbole(underline).
It’s strange, this deep indifference to the greatest threat the industrialized world has ever faced.
I, and many others, would argue that nuclear war was the greatest threat; frankly, even a limited nuclear exchange during the Cold War would have done more damage to this planet than 3 degrees of warming. And that's saying something.
By the middle of the century, the comfortable, wealthy, relatively-peaceful world as we know it simply won’t exist.
I'm no rose-colored glasses type optimist, but Donovan is definitely wrong. Unless something like a Yellowstone eruption or Apophis impact occurs(neither of which are impossible, unfortunately), or some sort of extremely unlikely(perhaps forced?) long chain of coincidences manages to occur, then yes, the world as know it will still be here.(and no, that doesn't mean everything will be all hunky dory. It just means that barring any of the above, we won't be going into global Mad Max mode anytime within another couple of centuries, and that's in the unlikely event that AGW *doesn't* get brought under control.)
And unlike every other time such apocalyptic predictions have been levied, these are based on extraordinarily well-researched, peer-reviewed studies and reports from hundreds of the world’s most well-respected scientists in their field.
Not really, to be truthful. Global warming certainly would be no walk in the park, but virtually all of the global doomsday predictions that have come out over the past 20 years or so have been founded on nothing more than half-truths, misinterpretations(deliberate or otherwise) of scientific data, and even outright fearmongering.
Unfortunately, Americans have gained a cynicism when faced with these sorts of dire predictions, suspicious of any and all claims that the world as we know it might be ending. Between the craziness of the late ’90s — Heaven’s Gate, Y2K, David Koresh, etc. — and the earlier, heavily propagandized warnings of the “Red Threat” and “duck and cover,” from the ’50s through the ’80s, some healthy skepticism about the severity of this crisis by the casual newsreader might be understandable — even admirable.
Skepticism concerning the fears of supposedly inevitable "doomsday" scenarios isn't just understandable, but based on actual facts and real evidence.
But it’s also completely misguided and dangerous.
The same thing could be said about climate doomerism, Tim....and more accurately so.
Elsewhere, apathy runs rampant. According to an oft-cited research paper by Anthony Leiserowitz, a Gallup poll recently found that “the environment” was the 16th most important issue to Americans today. Even more troubling, among environmental issues, global warming ranked 12 out of 13 — just lower than “urban sprawl.” This apathy exists in spite of poll numbers that show a vast majority of Americans believe in man-made climate change and the requisite dangers that it poses. According to Leiserowitz, since the year 2000 polls have consistently shown that 60-70 percent of people in the U.S. “believe that global warming is real and already underway (74 percent), believe that there is a scientific consensus on the reality of climate change (61 percent), and already view climate change as a somewhat to very serious problem (76 percent).”
And unfortunately, a large part of this, outside of Koch and co. agitprop, has been due to *constant* fearmongering, including that propagated by the mass media(British readers in particular may remember that James Lovelock once predicted Berlin becoming as hot as Baghdad and the Sahara actually *jumping* the Mediterranean into Italy sometime circa 2004 or so).....and, the sad irony is, this has actually provided plenty of ammunition for those who seek to *stop* combatting of climate change.....using an outlying fringe statement to discredit the whole is a story that's all too commonly seen in history.
Finding real solutions will require global initiatives, and in a world populated by governments that seem incapable of “thinking big,” it’s hard to imagine our politicians coming together to make the kind of wholesale changes to our society and economic structure necessary to bring global emissions down to a sustainable level.
This is undoubtedly true, but how are more people going to jump on the boat, as it were, when so many people insist that it's either too late to stop global warming or always pushing the "it's worse than we thought" narrative every other year(regardless of validity)?
In an article for the New Statesman, journalist, activist and all-around badass Naomi Klein highlights recent research by climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows. According to Klein, their “research shows that our entire economic paradigm is a threat to ecological stability.” Working for the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, Anderson and Bows have published papers suggesting that industrialized nations need to start cutting emissions by 10 percent annually right now if we want to have a 50/50 chance of staving off the worst effects of global warming. (Decades — centuries, really — of indifference make a certain amount of calamity and pain unavoidable, of course.) The only problem is, cuts this large to emissions have no historical precedent. Klein notes that during the Great Depression, the U.S. decreased carbon pollution at a rate of about 10 percent annually, but this was due to catastrophic economic collapse, which should give you a sense of the enormity of the challenges we face going forward.
You could have picked a better source than Kevin Anderson, TBH....he is one of the "fringe" elements, as it were.
And yet in America, the political challenges we face are significantly more ominous than the requisite practical challenges. There is a substantial faction of this country who hold enormous political power relative to their size, and will see every new storm and flood as further evidence against man-made climate change. Liberals hoping for some “Great Awakening” about this issue that might lead to meaningful change should consider a recent survey, reported by Adam Corner at the Guardian
Sadly, that is pretty much the truth(and we can all agree just which party is to blame, and it isn't the Democrats....), but it didn't help at all that even now, there is still the occasional article that blows things outta proportion and blames, entirely, *every* new *individual* storm on climate change; in fact, from what we do know, while we are able to look at long term trends, we *can't*, at this time, *conclusively* tell exactly how much of a role that climate change in any one particular event.
This is a fairly stunning revelation: Our income inequality is also a generational inequality.
What does any of this have to do with global warming? When an increasing share of our national wealth is held by an aging demographic minority, our national politics are only more likely to tilt away from confronting the “inconvenient truth” of our world’s imminent (yet slow moving) destruction. While the AARP spends over $100 million on D.C. lobbyists every year protecting sacred cows like Social Security and Medicare, no comparable institution exists to lobby on behalf of Mmillennials and “Gen Z,” the demographic groups that will face global warming’s worst consequences. We’ve been consigned to the sidelines, turned into spectators of the greatest disaster movie ever made. So go ahead: Grab a bag of popcorn and take a seat. The show has just begun.
Indeed, the reality of climate change IS an inconvenient truth. Nobody here will deny that. However, though, we continue to be hindered not just by the remainder of Big Fossil's agitprop but also by paranoiacs & bunglers, no matter how well-meaning, on our side. If we truly want to succeed in any reasonable measure, fear and loathing MUST be trumped by fact & reason, no matter how pessimistic, or optimistic, perhaps, one may be. And then, only then, can we complete the journey.
Thank you for reading this.
and no other country is to blame
The author no doubt will want to cut off our Social Security and Medicare because our entire generation is nothing but a bunch of entitled hippies or some other perjorative.
None of us ever fought in this country's wars or marched to end them. None of us ever joined the Peace Corps or became a public school teacher. Didn't ever get vilified as tree huggers or clean the oil off a dying bird. Surely none of us loaded newspapers and cans into our cars for all those trips to the recycling center until the state finally realized it was an idea whose time had come.
None of us had job after job outsourced, or our pensions stolen and our 401Ks devalued to penny stocks and junk bonds. None of us were foreclosed on. None of us were whipsawed by propaganda from the MSM and other formerly trusted sources.
I want to slap that little punk silly, but instead of resorting to violence or a pity party, let me just point out the author's vast blindness and who it serves: the endless greed of the 1% and the elected officials who serve them rather than serving the common good. Socio-economic class plays a much larger part in our woes than does any generational divide --- and "divide and conquer" still works like a charm.
our music was better, that's for damn sure 
There was so much amazing music.
And so much commitment and dedication to the causes of justice and equality on this little blue marble.
Modern medicine, including antibiotics and vaccines, will produce population growth: world population has nearly doubled since I started paying attention
When there are more people, more food is required: that requires better farming techniques, and pesticides and mass-produced nitrogen fertilizer provide relatively easy ways to increase crop yields
People around the world also want improved standards of living and cheaper products: with current practices, that seems to entail more industrial production and more pollution
Material considerations always produce conflict. And economic forces are enormously powerful, even without any nefarious collusion of business interests
There's no magic bullet here. Individual virtue ("I recycle!"
is important -- but it is also completely inadequate. Far-sighted ideas ("Why can't we have this utopia I imagine?" are attractive -- but they're also a lazy cop-out if there no practical path: many people will select alternatives, but only if the alternative really exists. Street activism can educate people -- but only if the activists really know their stuff, and in my experience such activism very often merely salves the activists' own consciences, allowing them to feel good as protesting prophets without simultaneously forcing them to become effective. Political engagement is essential, too -- but it's an uphill climb that currently requires gigantic investments of time and energy for what may seem small gains
The reality is that nobody is bright enough to understand -- let alone solve! -- more than one or two of the multiply interlinked issues that together keep modern industrial civilization rolling towards its collision with its own unsustainability
If you want to make a real difference, you have to pick a small piece of the puzzle and really focus on it, until you know it like your own skin, and you need to meet a lot of other people who work diligently and intelligently on different, but related, issues; you have to set aside your own prejudices and preferences somewhat in favor of asking what is doable now; and you must avoid all facile meaningless abstractions when discussing issues, in favor of explicit material facts: unfortunately, the internet can be less of a help here, and more of a hindrance, than one might think
[hr][font color="blue"][center]A ton of bricks, a ton of feathers. It's still gonna hurt.[/center][/font][hr]
Something closer to the truth would be this:
Given a species with an evolved limit-defeating brain like ours, living on a planet with a surfeit of combustible carbon and a benign climate, this outcome was utterly unavoidable. It has been in the cards since we first tamed fire, made the first stone tool, yoked the first draft animal, planted and tended the first seed, created the first village, selected the first chief, put up the first water wheel, built the first road, sailed the first boat...
The boomers just happened to be alive when we noticed that the petri dish was half full. Right about when the "Consumption" line crossed the "Carrying Capacity" line in this next graph:
It's not even population on its own we have to worry about, but the product of the number of people times the per capita consumption (I=PAT). If we use "per capita energy consumption" as the proxy for our general average human consumption, there are now the equivalent of 140 billion naked apes chewing away at the planet:
Here is a series of short essays that frame the topic from this perspective:
Carrying Capacity and Overshoot: Another Look
Thermodynamic Footprints
No Really, How Sustainable Are We?
Paradise Lost
In that boomers were those (more or less) in charge when it became very clear as to what we were confronting on climate back in the late 1980s, there's kinda sorta maybe a slice of a piece of a half-assed point here, but it's a bit more complicated than that . . .
I was born in '36 so I guess that means I am off the hook!
Too bad about the collateral damage but mission accomplished nonetheless. 
I know my old Boomer ass has never given a shit about anyone else. I got mine baby and am leaving what I don't use to my kids. 
< cause you just never know
WTH Salon?
My favorite all time argument here on DU was with a 20 something who asked me why the hell I was not out organizing against something or other that Bush** was doing because he wanted to do something but nobody had set anything up. I probably should have been kinder to him.
was educating some idiots.
(Referring to the author of the article in the OP, not the DUer who posted it.)
