Last night, Mitt Romney--ever one to hem and haw his way into a promotion to President--doubled down on perhaps the most specious and hackneyed of 21st century Republican truisms: that our future is very much an ultimatum between the economy and the environment. It's a gamble, the argument goes, to protect the environment if it impedes economic growth.
Ironically, though, the very definition of economy is "how a society uses a scarcity of resources." To ignore that the computer you use contains rare minerals and precious metals that had to be extracted; or to ignore that the food you eat was likely shipped great distances by petroleum-based transportation; or to ignore the lush, carbon-sinking virgin forests being mowed down for livestock; or to ignore the neurological injuries from mercury in coal-fired power plants; or to ignore the changes to the ecological balance and their effects on the food supply; or to ignore the effect of the changes in salinity and alkalinity on the ocean currents; or to ignore the careful deliberation with which climate scientists have produced studies on carbon patterns and their affects on ice extents and global temperatures; is to flatly ignore, too, this very definition of economy. To ignore that the environment and economy are tied to each other, and that the environment is indeed the limiting reactant in the calculus that weighs the probability of human survival, is a quixotic fantasy. It's a fantasy where an endless bounty provides endless choices. There can be no sacrifices, because such sacrifices are not necessary and they inflict unnecessary damage. In this quixotic, naive logic of atavistic, albeit recent, conservative ideology, we can supposedly have it all. Such puerile thinking is like that of a child.
The scarcity we face is not in the availability of fossil fuels. We know full well now that there's enough oil, coal, and natural gas in the Athabasca tar sands, along the Orinoco River, in the Appalachian mountaintops, and elsewhere world wide for the most grueling of fracking and mining to incinerate the planet at a clip. The scarcity, then, is what is inversely proportional to fossil fuel emissions, and that is the carbon sinking forests, the albedo of the ice reflecting heat into space, and the ecological balance that has guaranteed more stable weather patterns and dependable food supplies. Entire cities, and indeed entire states and countries, have been founded on the climates and geographies their settlers perused and tried to understand several centuries ago. Predictable wildlife migrations, such as the brimming marine life that is born in the oxygen rich Gulf of Maine, fed by the Labrador Current's clash with the Gulf Stream, gave rise to thriving communities and cultures we hold dear today. Captain John Smith navigated the Chesapeake Bay with dewy-eyed journal entries about water so clear, he could see vast schools of fish.
Of fish we were best acquainted with sturgeon, grampus, porpoise, seals, stingrays ... brits, mullets, white salmon [rockfish], trouts, soles, perch of three sorts.
These patterns now become less certain. Rainfalls are more extreme: too much or too little. Plants like neither. The dice are loaded now, and our conventions about the way the world works are changing even as our collective mindsets do not. We take for granted that the grocery store will be stocked. How will we ever expect to shatter the complacency about the intricate workings of that food bounty?
And so, in stark contrast to the cross-sectional Republican stance on this, the truly damning ultimatum over whether or not the environment should impede economic growth is a matter of how much the environment will be depleted, not protected. The economy cannot and will not survive "as is" when the environment yields and reacts to increasing stress. In the month of July, world food prices surged 10% while 2/3 of the lower United States wizened, wildlife died off, and wildfires birthed even more carbon emissions. In Needles, California, 115 degree rainfall: a world record. In Kuwait, a record is set for the hottest day in Asia. It's 2012, and it looks like hell on Earth.
And though, as of July, the United States is on the trajectory to shatter the record for its warmest year, North Carolina's state legislature effectively denied the presence of the Coriolis effect, its effect on sea levels, and thus pleaded with the Earth to reject its natural laws in favor of human laws. The Earth, though, she isn't listening. In fact, she cares not for polls that tilt one way or another on climate change. In the far north, the Arctic ice extent plunged to record lows, sinking to levels far preceding the 2007 record. An event which occurred in August--a full month before the close of the melt season (mid-September)--this has only piled on to a litany of evidence going decades into the past.
Read More
