First, let me state for the record that this is not satire. I wish it was.
The message of the White Man March participants, or one of their messages, is that their race (or group identity if you prefer) is threatened by genocide. I wholeheartedly agree with them.<p
Let me say that again: I, Steven D, wholeheartedly agree with white supremacists that the “white race” (however you or they or I define it) is subject to an ongoing genocide.
By the way, here’s a definition of genocide:
The systematic and widespread extermination or attempted extermination of an entire national, racial, religious, or ethnic group.
But then, so is every other racial, national, religious and ethnic group in the world. The Asians. The Muslims. The Africans. The Europeans. The Jews. The Native Peoples in every nation on earth. In effect, major portions of the entire human species are slowly (for now), but methodically, being eradicated.
And the people who are responsible for these multiple genocides, or multiple democides, if you prefer that term instead of genocide, are a small cabal of obscenely wealthy individuals, corporations, their hired lackeys and the government officials whom they effectively control.
This group of international criminals persists in promoting the extraction and use of fossil fuels, denying the consequences of burning fossil fuels, and/or (as is the case with respect to the many governments who are in thrall to these profiteers and mass murderers) acknowledge the threat of the slow extermination of human beings, but take little if any significant action to do anything to stop it. If you think I’m joking, I’m not.
Even before the aforementioned NASA funded study was released, prominent climate scientists have been warning of the danger that our current path of unfettered fossil fuel use, combined with population increases, would be an unmitigated disaster, even if we are able to keep warming to 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century:
Governments have set the wrong target to limit climate change. The goal at present—to limit global warming to a maximum of two degree Celsius higher than the average for most of human history—“would have consequences that can be described as disastrous,” say 18 scientists in a review paper in the journal PLOS One. […]
[T]he stark reality is that global emissions have accelerated, and new efforts are underway to massively expand fossil fuel extractions by drilling to increasing ocean depths and into the Arctic, squeezing oil from tar sands and tar shale, hydro-fracking to expand extraction of natural gas, developing exploitation of methane hydrates and mining of coal via mountain-top removal and mechanized long wall-mining,” the scientists write. […]
Unfortunately, the current best predictions indicate that we will have a rise much higher than that:
The scientist leading the research said that unless emissions of greenhouse gases were cut, the planet would heat up by a minimum of 4C by 2100, twice the level the world’s governments deem dangerous. […]
Professor Steven Sherwood, at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, who led the new work, said: “This study breaks new ground twice: first by identifying what is controlling the cloud changes and second by strongly discounting the lowest estimates of future global warming in favour of the higher and more damaging estimates.”
“4C would likely be catastrophic rather than simply dangerous,” Sherwood told the Guardian. “For example, it would make life difficult, if not impossible, in much of the tropics, and would guarantee the eventual melting of the Greenland ice sheet and some of the Antarctic ice sheet”, with sea levels rising by many metres as a result. […]
“Climate sceptics like to criticise climate models for getting things wrong, and we are the first to admit they are not perfect,” said Sherwood. “But what we are finding is that the mistakes are being made by the models which predict less warming, not those that predict more.”
He added: “Sceptics may also point to the ‘hiatus’ of temperatures since the end of the 20th century, but there is increasing evidence that this inaptly named hiatus is not seen in other measures of the climate system, and is almost certainly temporary.”
And one of those catastrophic consequences would be the deaths of untold numbers of human beings as well as the species of plants and animals on which humanity relies for its major food sources. The result? A world that would be largely uninhabitable, and unable to support our current level of population. In plain language, billions of people will die as a direct result of changes to the climate:
Half of the world would be uninhabitable. Likely population capacity: under one billion people. Whilst the loss will be exponential and bunch towards the end of the century, on average that is a million human global warming deaths every week, every year for the next 90 years. The security implications need no discussion.
It would also, according to the World Bank, result in the collapse of our global economy. An excerpt from the rather understated concluding remarks to that well sourced and comprehensive paper:
Although no quantification of the full scale of human damage is yet possible, the picture that emerges challenges an often-implicit assumption that climate change will not significantly undermine economic growth. […]
Given that it remains uncertain whether adaptation and further progress toward development goals will be possible at this level of climate change, the projected 4°C warming simply must not be allowed to occur—the heat must be turned down. Only early, cooperative, international actions can make that happen.
Unfortunately, many of the largest nations who use fossil fuels for energy have systematically and deliberately obstructed international treaties and agreements to deal with the problem, while often pushing for the approval of methods to increase the extraction and transportation of fossil fuels. I’m afraid to say that the government of our country, the United States of America, is one of the principal offenders in this regard. Let me give you just a few recent examples of our government’s obstruction toward international agreements to reduce carbon emissions and slow the rate of climate change:
The US threatened to derail a deal on global climate change today in a public showdown with China by expressing deep opposition to the existing Kyoto protocol. The US team also urged other rich countries to join it in setting up a new legal agreement which would, unlike Kyoto, force all countries to reduce emissions. […]
[C]hief US negotiator Jonathan Pershing said … “We are not going to be in the Kyoto protocol. We are not going to be part of an agreement that we cannot meet. We say a new agreement has to [be signed] by all countries. Things have changed since Kyoto. Where countries were in 1990 and today is very different. We cannot be stuck with an agreement 20 years old. We want action from all countries.”
The result of that opposition? The Copenhagen conference ended in failure.
The so-called Copenhagen accord “recognises” the scientific case for keeping temperature rises to no more than 2C but does not contain commitments to emissions reductions to achieve that goal.
The way our government acted to stymie any progress on international climate change agreements was downright heavy handed and dishonest, at best, as revealed in documents obtained by Wikileaks:
The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial “Copenhagen accord”, the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009. […]
Seeking negotiating chips, the US state department sent a secret cable on 31 July 2009 seeking human intelligence from UN diplomats across a range of issues, including climate change. The request originated with the CIA. As well as countries’ negotiating positions for Copenhagen, diplomats were asked to provide evidence of UN environmental “treaty circumvention” and deals between nations. […]
Of course, our government also promised billions of dollars of financial aid to many countries at the greatest risk of immediate impacts from climate change if they would “get on board” with the US-China negotiated Copenhagen Accord, which everyone with half a brain understands is essentially useless and ineffective for making significant progress to slow, much less halt the rise in global temperatures. Then, we went back on our promises to those poor countries, and worked behind their backs to refuse them any aid from the US whatsoever at the 2013 Warsaw climate summit.
Newly leaked documents have revealed how U.S. negotiators at the U.N. climate summit in Warsaw are opposing efforts to help developing countries adapt to climate change. […]
According to an internal U.S. briefing document that was seen by Democracy Now!, the U.S. delegation is worried the talks here in Warsaw will, quote, “focus increasingly on blame and liability” and that poor nations will be, quote, “seeking redress for climate damages from sea level rise, droughts, powerful storms and other adverse impacts.” […]
The U.S. internal briefing paper reads, quote—and this is from John Kerry to the U.N.—the U.S. climate change team—the internal briefing paper reads, “As it was in last year’s meeting in Doha, the issue of Loss and Damage is likely to be one of the most contentious issues in Warsaw. Loss and Damage is an agenda item largely driven by the small islands, and more recently the least developed countries, seeking redress for climate damages from sea level rise, droughts, powerful storms and other adverse impacts. … A central issue will be whether loss and damage continues to fall within adaptation or whether it becomes a separate, third pillar … which we believe would lead the UNFCCC to focus increasingly on blame and liability, which in turn would be counterproductive.”
I recommend you read the entire interview by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now with Indian Journalist, Nitin Sethi. In effect, John Kerry, our current Secretary of State was actively working to prevent any nation adversely effected by climate change from having a legal avenue to recover damages from corporations and countries that have been the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, and specifically, the United States and major companies based in the US.
Not surprisingly, the Warsaw Climate Summit produced no significant agreements, and again represented a failure, thanks in large part to the efforts of our government, whose diplomats, despite their actions, had the audacity to claim that our country will “… continue to work with the world to save climate change from happening” even as they attempted to pressure the Indian journalist who obtained a copy of the Kerry briefing memo.
There’s a diary up at Daily Kos right now which castigates environmental activists for an implied threat that they might not vote for Democrats in the midterm elections unless Dem candidates publicly support real action for climate change. Well, I say, that is their right. Maybe the Democratic Party needs to learn in 2014 that disregarding the demands of its base will lead to political defeats. Otherwise we will be served up the same empty promises by more corporate Third Way Democratic candidates in 2016.
President Obama, in his State of the Union address, implicitly called out those Senators and Representatives in the Republican Party who actively deny climate change and put barriers in the way of reducing carbon emissions. Maybe its time for him to call out, at least privately, members in his own party, including his Secretary of State, who refuse to make taking serious actions on reducing carbon emissions a priority for the Democratic Party.
Because frankly for all his talk, and the talk of other major Democrats, most of them do not consider, or refuse to acknowledge, that climate change is an important issue. In fact, many of them barely mention it or merely give it lip service in their electoral campaigns. Unfortunately, the deliberate policies of our government, and the politically powerful people behind the climate denial machine which influences our environmental and energy policies, are fueling a runaway train to disaster.
Climate Change is already estimated by some studies to be responsible for the deaths of between 400,000 and Five Million people each year. That number will only grow larger the longer we allow our politicians to kick this issue under the rug and ignore it, while at the same time advancing the interests of the Fossil Fuel Industrial Complex.”
In short, our government is helping the people who are killing life on this planet, including millions of human lives, not only over the last several decades, but well into the future. And call me any name in the book you wish, but that to me counts as a deliberate act of genocide against all the peoples on this earth. We can stop this murderous regime of greedy oil, gas and coal profiteers, but not until we make our politicians accountable for their complicity in promoting and advancing the financial interests of a few at the expense of human lives today, and the lives of our children and grandchildren in the coming decades.
I want more and better Democrats. Democrats who work to obstruct international agreements and treaties to curb greenhouse gas emissions, who continue to tacitly or actively support subsidies for the Big Oil and Big Coal and the Utilities that burn them, or merely those who refuse to take a stand for the future of our planet and of our civilization are not better Democrats. Democrats like these are as complicit in the deaths of our fellow human beings. I sure as hell don’t want them in my party.
Why would anyone?
