David Suzuki’s latest book is Just Cool It!: The Climate Crisis and What We Can Do, co-written with Ian Hanington. At Alternet, Suzuki writes—15,000 Scientists Issue Urgent Warning: Humanity Is Failing to Safeguard the Planet. We are not doing enough to avert catastrophe:
A year ago, we revisited the 1992 “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity." Signed by a majority of Nobel laureates in sciences at the time and more than 1,700 leading scientists worldwide, the document warned, “Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course.”
It called for a new ethic that encompasses our responsibility to ourselves and nature and that recognizes our dependence on Earth and its natural systems. It also called for stabilizing human population through “improved social and economic conditions, and the adoption of effective, voluntary family planning.” Now, 25 years later, we’ve added two billion people, a 35 percent increase.
Despite progress in stabilizing the stratospheric ozone layer, all the other problems scientists looked at in 1992 have worsened.
On the declaration’s 25th anniversary in November, more than 15,000 scientists from around the world signed a new warning—“the most scientists to ever co-sign and formally support a published journal article.” The BioScience article states, “By failing to adequately limit population growth, reassess the role of an economy rooted in growth, reduce greenhouse gases, incentivize renewable energy, protect habitat, restore ecosystems, curb pollution, halt defaunation, and constrain invasive alien species, humanity is not taking the urgent steps needed to safeguard our imperiled biosphere.”
It raises concerns about climate change, driven by greenhouse gas emissions from “burning fossil fuels, deforestation, and agricultural production—particularly from farming ruminants for meat consumption.” And it points out, “we have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century.”
Some have criticized the warning for being overly alarmist, but the situation is alarming, and we aren’t doing enough to avert catastrophe. Where will we be 25 years from now? It won’t be chance that determines our future. It will be the choices we make today.
There’s a hint of hope. The scientists note that co-operative government actions resulted in a “rapid global decline in ozone-depleting substances,” and that global poverty and hunger rates have dropped. Investing in education for girls and women has contributed to falling birth rates in many regions, deforestation has been reduced in some countries, and the renewable-energy sector has been growing rapidly.
We can make positive changes if we co-operate, but it will take action from all of humanity. We can’t leave it to governments, especially as so many in thrall to the fossil fuel industry are failing to work for citizens. As the scientists argue, “Sustainability transitions come about in diverse ways, and all require civil-society pressure and evidence-based advocacy, political leadership, and a solid understanding of policy instruments, markets, and other drivers.” [...]
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On this date at Daily Kos in 2009—GOP Rides a Tall Stack of $20s:
Ronald Reagan arrived at the White House in 1981 with three major agenda items on his platter. Two of these were just like Mister Bush's 20 years later: greatly increase defense spending and slash taxes on the wealthy. He did both. But his greatest effort was devoted to cutting the top tax rate from 70% to 50% to 38% to 28%, giving already wealthy Americans gigantic new piles to play with. Thus did he start us down the road toward a Third World ratio between rich and poor.
Reagan achieved this defense boost and plutocratic tax reduction by borrowing more than all the presidents who had preceded him. That generated a bit of contradiction with the third item supposedly on his agenda: ending the annual budget deficit. At the time of his first inauguration, this hovered around $80 billion a year. The accumulation of past deficits - the national debt - was nearly a trillion dollars. That gave Reagan's speechwriters the focus for a powerful image for him to use in his first address to Congress in February 1981. He said:
I've been trying ... to think of a way to illustrate how big a trillion is. The best that I could come up with is that if you had a stack of $1000 bills in your hand only four inches high you would be a millionaire. A trillion dollars would be a stack of $1000-dollar bills 67 miles high.
Like so many other things Reagan said, this wasn't true. A trillion-dollar stack of $1000 bills would measure just over 63 miles high. Since the last one was printed in 1945 and use of all large denomination bills was discontinued by the Treasury in 1969, most Americans have never seen a $1000 bill. What we're most familiar with are the $20 bills ATMs spit out. Reagan's image-makers missed the mark. A trillion-dollar stack of twenties would be an impressive 3150 miles high.
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