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Heard on NPR, We Need to Get "Control of the Climate" [1]

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Date: 2023-07-18

I understand that hope is seen as the all-powerful driving force in all good things that humans do, but hope is literally killing us. On NPR, they were talking about the floods, the fires, the massive storms, and someone said that we need to get “control of the climate.”

Humans lack the capacity to control the climate. This belief, or hope, that we can at some point change the climate to benefit us is foolish. Yes, we certainly effected the climate by injecting millions and millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Does that mean we can “control” the climate? I think not.

For starters, all the carbon we’ve been shooting into the atmosphere since industrialization, that’s going to be up there for hundreds of years. Perhaps, if we stopped burning dead dinosaurs now, the next ice age will be shorter, but can we really stop it from charging straight at us?

This is how humans have approached the climate catastrophe. There’s this underlying “hope” that somehow science will save us. That we’ll figure out some clever thing that we need to do, and it puts Earth’s climate back to the way we liked it 50 years ago. Even climate scientists, for decades, have been soft-pedaling the severity and urgency of the climate change disaster. A disaster that we’re currently watching unfold right now. It’s like there’s this belief that if we tell people the truth, they will lose all hope, curl up into a ball and die. And maybe they’re right, and people can’t hear the truth. Perhaps, it’s better to just be the lobsters taking a nice warm bath in a big stainless steel pot.

What should we do?

I’m not suggesting we keep polluting because it doesn’t matter, cleaner air and cleaner water is always better for all living things. But in terms of what we need to be doing about climate change, we need to invest trillions of dollars into mitigating risks and loss of life. The fossil fuel industries need to cough up this money. It is they who benefited immensely to the destruction of Earth.

The price tag will be trillions upon trillions, because every place from small towns to big cities, to entire countries, are going to need new buildings, infrastructure, new types of transportation, some people will need to be relocated to safer places to live.

These efforts need to be underway today. This is what we need. We don’t need more oil and gas pipelines. Real leadership would make these oil and gas companies pay. At very least in the US, the government could stop subsidizing oil and gas exploration with taxpayer money.

We’re talking about mass extinction. We can’t continue to cling to hope and wishful thinking that somehow humans will one day take charge of the climate. We’re not in charge of Earth.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/18/2181878/-Heard-on-NPR-We-Need-to-Get-Control-of-the-Climate

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