The Washington-based Worldwatch Institute has just released its yearly State of the World report and, according to today’s British Guardian, it says we only have a generation or two rescue ourselves from global disaster. I’ll be surprised if this report gets much ink here. More of the same, after all, and it’s a busy, crisis-filled world, and we all know what’s coming, those melting icebergs, etc., even if we’re in major denial. It’s the marriage, as Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution puts it in his column on global warming today, of “willing deceiver and willingly deceived.” But global warming, disastrous as it may prove, is only part of the staggering problem we must face, later if not sooner. As the Guardian reports, in part,
“Toxic chemicals are being released in ever-increasing quantities, and global production of hazardous waste has reached more than 300m tons a year. There is only a vague idea of what damage this does to humans and natural systems, the report says…
“The state of the world’s natural life support system is perhaps the most worrying indicator for the future, says the report. About 30% of the world’s surviving forests are seriously fragmented or degraded, and they are being cut down at the rate of 50,000sq miles a year, it says. Wetlands have been reduced by 50% over the last century. Coral reefs, the world’s most diverse aquatic systems, are suffering the effects of overfishing, pollution, epidemic diseases and rising temperatures.
“A quarter of the world’s mammal species and 12% of the birds are in danger of extinction….”
To read more of this Guardian piece click here
The news is hardly hopeless as analyst Paul Rogers indicates in his weekly column for opendemocracy.net which also tackles the problem of global warming. Rogers has a quiet, sane, sober voice. You have to hang in there with him a bit, but his pieces are always well worth it. Here, among other things, he suggests some obvious ways in which global warming will exacerbate our global security problems, a subject largely unwritten about here.
The sad thing is that we’re already at the edge of a world of user-friendly, renewable energy technologies that might well begin to reverse some of these processes. (And some other trends are hopeful as well. For instance, organic farming is the fastest-growing sector of the world agricultural economy.) Instead, of course, our country is focused on waging, or threatening to wage, a series of what at heart can only be wars to control the global flow of oil, the very substance which is now imperiling our planet. Unfortunately, possibility and hope run smack into an American government whose environmental rapacity and urge to maintain the good life and fabulous profits for a relative few is unparalleled in memory. It’s the definition of bad timing on a planetary scale. Tom
Climate change and global security
Paul Rogers
Opendemocracy.net
January 2, 2003
“The state of the world’s natural life support system is perhaps the most worrying indicator for the future, says the report. About 30% of the world’s surviving forests are seriously fragmented or degraded, and they are being cut down at the rate of 50,000sq miles a year, it says. Wetlands have been reduced by 50% over the last century. Coral reefs, the world’s most diverse aquatic systems, are suffering the effects of overfishing, pollution, epidemic diseases and rising temperatures.
“A quarter of the world’s mammal species and 12% of the birds are in danger of extinction….”
To read more of this Guardian piece click here
The news is hardly hopeless as analyst Paul Rogers indicates in his weekly column for opendemocracy.net which also tackles the problem of global warming. Rogers has a quiet, sane, sober voice. You have to hang in there with him a bit, but his pieces are always well worth it. Here, among other things, he suggests some obvious ways in which global warming will exacerbate our global security problems, a subject largely unwritten about here.
The sad thing is that we’re already at the edge of a world of user-friendly, renewable energy technologies that might well begin to reverse some of these processes. (And some other trends are hopeful as well. For instance, organic farming is the fastest-growing sector of the world agricultural economy.) Instead, of course, our country is focused on waging, or threatening to wage, a series of what at heart can only be wars to control the global flow of oil, the very substance which is now imperiling our planet. Unfortunately, possibility and hope run smack into an American government whose environmental rapacity and urge to maintain the good life and fabulous profits for a relative few is unparalleled in memory. It’s the definition of bad timing on a planetary scale. Tom
Climate change and global security
Paul Rogers
Opendemocracy.net
January 2, 2003The ozone hole over the Antarctic is still with us and is only just showing signs of Every year for at least the past two decades, a ‘hole’ in the ozone layer in the stratosphere has formed over the Antarctic during the spring months. The destruction of the ozone layer allows more of the sun’s ultraviolet light to reach the earth’s surface, damaging people, animals and plants. It is caused by a reaction between ozone, a form of molecular oxygen, and man-made chemicals known as CFCs.
CFCs can quite easily be replaced with less harmful chemicals, and an international agreement that limited their production and use – the Montreal Protocol – was reached in 1987, within just a few years of the discovery of the phenomenon.
Under the Protocol, it will take decades for CFC emissions to come to an end; technically they could have been eliminated more quickly, politically the challenge has proved more intractable.
To read more Rogers click here and then click on Rogers’ name to right of screen and go to second article in list
Cold hearts deny global warming
Jay Bookman
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
January 9, 2003Whenever I hear a utility, energy or automotive executive deny the existence of global warming, I get a mental picture of those tobacco company executives sitting in front of a congressional committee a few years ago, swearing under oath and without conscience that cigarettes have nothing to do with cancer.
It’s enough to make you wonder if those same guys are working now for Exxon-Mobil or the Southern Co.
For whatever reason — institutional loyalty, personal greed, the human propensity for rationalizing our own misbehavior — energy executives and those who depend on them continue to deny the obvious truth about global warming.
And unfortunately, while the cancer caused by tobacco is truly tragic, the consequences of our duplicity about global warming will be far more profound.
Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor.