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Financial Considerations: global warming action stalled?
big energy players and politicans enjoy the fossil fuel economy "as it is"
Date: 7/28/2007 4:12:44 PM ( 6 y ) ... viewed 842 times
We have allowed, or decided, to let the biggest financial instiutions and their directors determine the direction of our economy. After all, they are the ones who will invest the money and hire us and so on, so they must know what to do to keep the economy healthy and my job intact. We trust them because when they prosper, we prosper [or so the saying goes]. They get a economy set up that we all participate in, but where investors who took the risk get the biggest rewards - fair enough. Most of the economy is dependant on fossil fuels for the energy we need to power the economy, and the energy industry itself is dependant on fossil fuels.
Now that we must reduce the emissions from fossil fuels, there are concerns amongst the people who run the show - CEOs and politicans. There will either be added expense for energy without emissions and resulting inflation, or losses of profits due to the cost of capturing the carbon emissions. If they do not do either of those, climate change will demand that there will be a shift away from fossil fuels to renewable energy that is free of carbon emissions.
A shift to renewables might allow others to get a share of the energy monopoly that the 'fossil fuel owners' now enjoy - individuals like you and I could take 50% of that monopoly away simply by installing solar panels on their rooftops and selling excess to the grid. A threat to something so lucrative as the energy industry is will be met with resistance.
We are somewhat surprised that this resistance would go so far as to imperil the entire planet with global warming and to cause-but-not-address the resulting climate chaos. This goes beyond the right to be a major player in the financial operations of the world and steps on the rights of all living things, of the stability of the earth's climate - which WAS at its most stable period in all of earth's history, and certainly is an abuse of the people who will be most affected by climate change [geographically].
We cannot expect those financial wizards to know what global warming is, yet we allow them to direct our economy towards more and more fossil fuel burning. Our politicians would normally bridge that gap - their job is to regulate our activities so that we do not come to an untimely end, and in a way that will best insure our continued prosperity. The phrase "regulate OUR activities" means all of us, including the financial corporate types and their immense power to direct our economy away from or towards fossil fuel use. Our politicians are afriad to stand up to them however, and so we see the situation where everyone is agreed that global warming must be addressed, but then nothing changes.
Nothing is changing. The solutions to global warming are not only possible, they are evident. I would go so far as to say that the wealthy investers stand to make a lot of money from renewable energy systems - about the same as they do now by adjusting prices upwards for capital outlay, and thereby positioning themselves to stay on top of the energy industry. They do not plan to change anything, because they do not see the urgency.
The biggest players are not concerned about global warming because they have not heard the worst news about global warming. This might seem like a guess, but I have seen the proof that the CEOs of the corporations that are the biggest emitters of carbon do not know what is in store for us due to global warming.
Here are some of the conversational tidbits from talking to them:
- they are not able to name the book that Al Gore wrote about global warming
- they are not aware that the ice sheets of greenland and the arctic antarctic are about to slip into the oceans and raise sea levels 3 meters or more, within 10 years from now, due to pooling of waters beneath them in recent years due to warmer oceans temperatures.
- they dismiss GWcc with the word "huh", meaning they don't want to talk about it but strongly disagree with the idea.
They don't hear the bad news, much less the worst news - but neither do you and I The full range of possible outsomes of climate change are not being discussed or outlined. Only the 'best of the negative outcomes' are spoken of [partly so as to deflect any critisizm of the forecast being hysterical]. It is only the predicted outcomes that are on the 'least of the effects' end of the scale that are being tossed at us to chew on.
The worst outcomes and shortest possible timelines for 'the countdown to catastrophe' are much worse than we have heard, from groups like the IPCC. They are restrained, by politics and other factors, from telling us that it could be just 10 years until the oceans rise 3 meters, and that the warming will accellerate quickly once biosystems begin to die out due to heat distress if we warm by more than 2oC [which will happen when CO2 levels reach 400ppm]. These figures on temperature rise and CO2 levels were mentioned in some public media, but not the damage that will occur when that happens.
The accellerated warming comes due to "cascade effects", like when global warming causes the perma frost to melt and give up its CO2 that has been stored for eons ; or when the boreal forests die out from heat distress and gives up their carbon stores and no longer stores any new carbon as they used to do. Both of those cascade effects EACH represents another 1 to 2 degrees of warming for planet earth, and both could happen by 2020, meaning that if we do not manage to keep atmospheric CO2 levels below 400ppm before 2012 [and forever] , then we are doomed to experience a 4 or 5 oC avg. rise in temperature for planet earth.
That is why Kyoto had the date of 2012 - in 1990 they knew that these cascade effects were a certainty - but we were not let in on this little factoid. We might have become alarmed, and started demanding changes. We might have protested our "pending doom for the sake of wealthy investers in the energy industry". Is there any justification for pushing us all to the brink to satisfy the wealthiest people on the planet?
So, in conclusion, the big energy players and politicans who enjoy the fossil fuel economy "as it is" are not only fighting the solutions to global warming, but they are also unaware of the dangers we all face. We have left our fate in their hands, despite that they are ignorant of the dangers of global warming.
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