Imaging a Brighter Future [Live Recording]

It’s Thursday folks. Time for the live-cast where we talk about climate change. Seriously? I can see your face.

I know. There is so much going on. The pandemic. The war in Ukraine. The Russian menace of Vladimir Putin. The skyrocketing inflation and gas prices. Did I mention the threat of nuclear devastation?

But what if none of that ends badly? There is a possibility of this ending without World War III.

We could get lucky and Putin loses a few more generals and his army retreats. Ukraine wins. Joins NATO. Russians cheer quietly to avoid arrest. The price of gas goes down. Inflation soon follows. Price gouging continues. Corporations never reduce their prices. A happy ending.

But we’ll still have climate change. And the pandemic for the foreseeable future. This is why the show is important. We do this show for you. It’s about you and your future. And your kid’s future. I want it to be about you talking about what we can do to turn the ship.

I talk about climate change in a way I hope you will appreciate and understand. No nonsense. My goal is to remove it from the esoteric and bring it to the pragmatic.

What’s the story? What can we do? Where should we start? How long will it take?

Come and listen tonight. You can scroll to the bottom and just follow the instructions to be shocked, to laugh, talk, commiserate and even gripe with other people in real-time about climate change. There is always a curmudgeon or two on the call.

We don’t guarantee you will like the news. But you need to hear it. The challenges it presents aren’t twenty years in the future anymore. Summer is coming. It’s just that close. Let’s prepare.

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IMAGINING A BETTER FUTURE

The first time I ever had a glimpse of climate change was the day I heard this Cree Prophecy:

“When all the trees have been cut down,
when all the animals have been hunted,
when all the waters are polluted,
when all the air is unsafe to breathe,
only then will you discover you cannot eat money.”

I was in the New York Public Library exploring the Encyclopedia Britannica (look it up) in all their musty, hardbound glory. I would have them spread out around me trying to reference each idea with another entry. It was my idea of a fun afternoon until I found this quote in another book on Environmentalism.

I had this moment of seeing the entire world engaged in commerce just like the city I was living in, which was New York, and I thought about a world swarming with people and businesses need supermarkets, stores and cars. And I then imagined the forests getting smaller, mines getting bigger, refineries and powerplant growing larger to accommodate more Human expansion…

I knew deep in my 11 year old heart, we would never stop. I haven’t been right since.

The nightmare of my imagination dogged me my entire life because I knew there was no way we would stop trying to dominate the Earth.

We would subdue every river, mine every mountain, fish every sea. And technology would grow more sophisticated, more automated until you could cut down a tree, strip it of its limbs and put it in a pile faster than you could read this sentence in its entirety.

We can now do just that. In sixty seconds we can cut down a tree, strip it of its branches, and pile it in the back of a truck with the other trees it has cut down in the last hour. With only two men needed to do the job.

There is no place safe from us. Even the glaciers we thought would last for thousands of years have begun to recede or disappear outright in your lifetime.

But you stay so busy. So wrapped up in your day to day life. You never even noticed. You did, but you didn’t. The connected article written in 2014 was when reporting for climate change was very different than you enjoy today.

People think things were different a decade ago regarding climate change. As if it weren’t happening back then. Disasters were always happening.

You just weren’t reading about them in the mainstream news.

They were one-off articles in the climate section of the newspaper which had two articles a month like this one, where they crammed as many disasters into a single article they could get permission to print.

Eight years later, oh how things have changed. Today, you can’t go more than a few minutes on the news channels without hearing someone mention climate change or some idea related to environmental challenges, catastrophes or new sciences which might help slow the warming of the planet.

If we only understood, WE are the cause of climate change.

As long as we keep selling giant trucks that go ten miles on a gallon of gas; the same gas created by incredibly powerful and influential corporations who do their level best to slow the acceptance of renewable energies because it cuts into their monopoly; we will continue to watch the world get hotter, storms get larger and more numerous, fires which cannot be put out, left to burn because there is nothing that can be done to stop them, monsoons which wipe away entire islands and disasters so numerous even the rich and powerful cannot outrun them forever.

Not even the elusive, disaster-aware, master of escape, Ted Cruz can elude their reach.

We must make the choices, not just as individuals but as corporate powers and mightier governments who as metaphorical titans in which their every economic windfall destroys an ecosystem, collapses a rainforest, drives into extinction thousands of species a year. Profit without an understanding of the price.

Until we admit the challenges presented to us have been earned by generations of neglect and malfeasance, and direct the same energy we had to making things wrong toward making them right, we deserve nay, we have EARNED every disaster, every catastrophe, no matter how great or small.

Though the poorest of us will suffer the worst, bearing the brunt of the initial economic, ecological and social collapses occurring in slow motion all around the world, the rich shall not escape their punishment. It will be their infrastructure and quality of life which shall be lost as well. Famine will follow deserts, or floods, whatever disrupts the farming breaks the cycle of food distribution worldwide. Ultimately, their wealth is built upon our capacity to work.

When infrastructure is lost and CANNOT be replaced because disasters strike often and are terrible in their scope, money will run out long before the desire to repair the latest disaster has faded.

Insurance companies are already balking. They see the writing on the wall. If we cannot get control of the cost of climate change, they will go out of business. Wither go the insurance companies, go us all. Who can afford to run their business without insurance?

Insurance companies are economic connective tissue America is made of. If you can’t get insurance long enough, any disaster is essentially unaffordable. Go ask your insurance companies what it would cost you to run your business without insurance.

Now ask Dell. Or Apple. Or Verizon. Could they exist without insurance? Personal, industrial, commercial, medical.

“We shall be undone by the collapse of our economic infrastructure long before nature shall run out of fury.”

You may quote me.

I, on the other hand, shall quote Deloitte:

“If left unchecked, the economic cost of climate change in the United States alone could reach $14.5 trillion by 2070. Our latest report on climate change explores critical areas of US climate action and reveals steps we can take to transition to a prosperous, decarbonized economy.

“Acting now will not only save the United States from the economic cost of unchecked climate change, but could also lead to a $3 trillion increase in GDP by 2070. Our analysis shows that achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 isn’t just an aspirational goal—it’s an economic growth imperative.”

— The United States’ turning point on climate change

https://www2.deloitte.com/…/economic-cost-climate-change-tu…

The rest of the article outlines how they arrive at these numbers and what it might mean economically to redirect our economic endeavors toward cleaner, more renewable options. They paint a very clear picture of the kind of future we can have if we are proactive about it. You first have to be able to imagine it.

Or we can Mad Max. Whichever works best for you. Come as you are, bring your ideas and news articles you want to discuss. I’ll post a few in the comments.

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Come to Climate Change by the Elements THIS VERY EVENING with your hosts Thaddeus Howze and Carol Bluestein at 5:00 PM PDT – 8:00 PM EDT.

A live-cast of The Good Men Project | Publisher: Lisa Hickey
Dial-in number: 1-701-801-1220
Access code: 934-317-242 (then press #)

You can also reach the show via your computer at:
https://www.startmeeting.com/wall/934317242

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REFERENCE ARTICLE: TRUTHOUT 2014
A World of Environmental Degradation All in Just one Month
https://truthout.org/…/a-world-of-environmental-degradatio…/

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Art by Chris Karbach | A Desirable Future | Aug 26, 2019
https://www.deviantart.com/…/a…/A-desirable-Future-811070059

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This post was previously published on Facebook.com.

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