Even if humanity slams on the brakes, stopped emitting carbon dioxide and goes back to horses and buggies, global warming will continue for at least a few more decades. So although Donald Trump and his rolling back of air pollution emissions standards are annoying, it’s probably too late anyway.
Sorry but It Really Is Too Late to Save the World
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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I, too, think we – i e, H sapiens sapiens – are well and truly screwed, Ted, and that the measures we’ve taken and are planning to take are a day late and a dollar short. But let’s do what we can now to miitigate the crisis – perhaps some of our species somewhere will survive….
Henri
I sure would like a definition of “save the world.” I’m hardly one for strained nuance but the problem under discussion can NEVER be understood, much less alleviated, with such a vague and intrinsically intimidating stated goal.
Whatever air pollution emissions standards His Hairness (aka “Trump”) may have rolled back were, without doubt, totally (if intentionally) useless approaches to the problem. To thus suggest only HH is to blame for the problem is a bit “liberal.”
The conclusion that nothing can be done, therefore nothing need be done, is rather strange given the repeated wailing on these pages about how poorly previous generations have sold out the
more recent ones. Presumably the post-millennials and their offspring, and theirs, can simply go suck eggs?
If humanity really cared more about humanity than the individual comfort bubble each of us lives in, then humanity’s INTENTIONAL wars of self-on-self murder would have ended long ago.
The quickest way to end the most misery in the shortest period of time would be to depose the power hungry crazies that organize and incite wars, those crazies whose INTENTIONAL product is mass destruction.
Much more difficult to control is the UNINTENTIONAL destruction caused by those who sell products intended to make our individual comfort bubbles even more comfortable.
Our culture operates at the level of yogurt culture: exponential growth until all the space is filled with waste from our consumption.
Yogurt culture has an advantage over human culture in that yogurt culture has evolved a way to cope with its excesses: low energy dormancy until conditions improve.
Human population has tripled over my life time, in part by the invention of the Haber Bosch method of fixing nitrogen with which around 50% of the nitrogen incorporated into all human bodies has come into the food we eat, having provided relief from hunger without an acceptable means of limiting population increase.
Humans don’t have the ability to go dormant, so a low energy waiting for conditions to improve is not available to us.
We are bound to capitalist science, holding all science that doesn’t produce profit (for an exploiting minority) to be illegitimate.
If things don’t change they’ll never be the same again.
The problem is that some presidents said ‘We must fight climate change,’ while the current idiot says it’s a hoax, but the ones who SAID ‘We must fight climate change,’ worked hard to increase US fossil fuel production. They not only did nothing to ameliorate climate change, they did all they could to promote more of it.
Trump is certainly a liar, but he’s a piker compared to his recent predecessors and the MSM.
The Republicans will not pacify with lies but go boldly where Democrats go with trepidation, but still go nonetheless.
Nailed it, Michael – but still the charade plays on. Both those who love Trump and those who hate him seem to think that he is essentially different from, say, Mr Obama. There are certainly differences, e g, in their respective attitudes toward multilateral organisations, which Mr Obama believed the US could still dominate, as if it were 1945 or 1991, something which Mr Trump doubts and therefore attempts to dismantle, but the quest for global hegemony remains the same….
Henri
About 40 years ago Jimmy Carter explained our predicament and told us what we needed to do. It did’t sound like fun so we rejected his advice. That window is now closed and we’re headed for a collapse rather than a controlled slow down. If future generations are able to preserve any cogent history they will judge us very harshly.
This is a re-posting of a comment made 2 days ago, that,
with a delightful twist, I must log-in to see that it remains in moderation.
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I sure would like a definition of “save the world.” I’m hardly one for strained nuance but the problem under discussion can NEVER be understood, much less alleviated, with such a vague and intrinsically intimidating, stated goal.
Whatever air pollution emissions standards His Hairness (aka “Trump”) may have rolled back were, without doubt, totally (if intentionally) useless approaches to the problem. To thus suggest only HH is to blame for the problem is a bit “liberal.”
The conclusion that nothing can be done, therefore nothing need be done, is rather strange given the repeated wailing on these pages about how poorly previous generations have sold out the
more recent ones. Presumably the post-millennials and their offspring, and theirs, can simply go suck eggs?