CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #82, JULY 4, 2022
I have been reading Tom Engelhardt’s essays, books, books he edited, books he promoted for several years. This essay culminates those “antidotes” to the leaders of our nation and their mainstream media by explaining incisively the convergence of the two most catastrophic failures of our nation: our continuous wars and climate disruption. Here is the essay’s conclusion. I hope you will read the entire essay. Dick
Engelhardt, Life in Hell (Literally!). POSTED ON JULY 5, 2022.
. . . .We — and that means much of the planet, not just those of us here in the United States — need to mobilize not against each other for once, but against what’s clearly becoming the greatest disaster in human history.
Stop and think about that for a moment. Given our history, that’s saying something, isn’t it?
And yet the men — and they were men — I labeled terrarists years ago because they, and the giant oil companies they ran, seemed so utterly intent on devastating the planet (something I called “terracide”) for the most immediate profits and an all-too-high-flying life for themselves still seem to be in the saddle. Yes, in this century, Washington conducted a disastrous 20-year war against terrorism, but never, whether Republicans or Democrats were in office, against this planet’s true terrarists.
As I wrote about them almost a decade ago,
“Those who run the giant energy corporations knew perfectly well what was going on and could, of course, have read about it in the papers like the rest of us. And what did they do? They put their money into funding think tanks, politicians, foundations, and activists intent on emphasizing ‘doubts’ about the science [of climate change] (since it couldn’t actually be refuted); they and their allies energetically promoted what came to be known as climate denialism. Then they sent their agents and lobbyists and money into the political system to ensure that their plundering ways would not be interfered with. And in the meantime, they redoubled their efforts to get ever tougher and sometimes ‘dirtier’ energy out of the ground in ever tougher and dirtier ways.”
And, in truth, all too little has changed to date, as the giant energy companies in the Ukraine moment prosper, while the price of oil and natural gas only soars and the rest of us continue to swelter.
It’s not that there’s nothing to be done. The price of renewable energy has been falling steadily for years. Were governments to focus the sort of attention on changing our energy environment that now goes into wars, hot and cold, and the sort of money that now goes into the Pentagon and its global equivalents, don’t for a second doubt that we could move toward a genuinely renewable world.
We’ve been warned, again and again, by the leading scientists of this planet, that it’s not only getting bad but, unless humanity refocuses in a big-time way, that it’s only going to get so much worse. The question is: when will the pain of climate change become too great to ignore any longer and will it then be too late? I hope to hell not!
Copyright 2022 Tom Engelhardt https://tomdispatch.com/extreme-life/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=8b5638e2ad-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_07_13_02_04_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1e41682ade-8b5638e2ad-309346777#more