What Needs to Be Done
By Tony Cartalucci
Assigning blame
for climate change that will happen with or without human activity on
Earth constitutes a disingenuous discourse.
The climate changes, and nearly everything on Earth and beyond it effects that change.
From geological processes to biological evolution, to
changes in the sun’s output, to yes, even human activity – absolutely
everything has an impact on the climate for better or for worse.
The climate has been in a constant, linear state of change, long before human beings evolved, and even throughout the relatively short period of time humans have inhabited the Earth. This continuous change may have within it temporary cycles, but at no two points in Earth’s natural history has the climate been the same.
Image: Global warming in Antarctica, 65 millions years BC. |
65 million years ago, there were no ice caps. CO2 and temperatures were much higher than they are today, and Antarctica was covered with thriving temperate forests inhabited by dinosaurs. In an opposite and more recent extreme, our ancient ancestors struggled through a global ice age. Today, we live on a planet much warmer than inhabited by our cave-dwelling ancestors, but much cooler than anything the dinosaurs experienced.
Climate change happened, and is
happening now. And even with the complete negating of all human activity
on Earth, it will continue to change. This does not absolve humanity
from addressing its impact on the environment. Quite the contrary.
However it gives us a crucial imperative currently being ignored by
policy makers and activists alike.
All the carbon credits, electric
cars, and solar panels in the world will do nothing to prevent
potentially hazardous climate change, natural or man-made. Tinkering
with the climate through “geoengineering”
could result in a catastrophic extinction-event unlike anything
experienced in natural history. While human activity negatively
impacting the climate should be addressed, measures must be taken to
confront climate change that will come no matter what we do within the
current false discourse now taking place.What’s Suggested and Why it
Won’t Work
At the very center of this false discourse lies the most ridiculous of all suggestions, “carbon credits.” It is the modern equivalent of trying to clean New York City’s 19th century streets of horse manure by taxing it. Horse manure disappeared from New York’s streets when the car was invented. To eliminate the negative health, sociopolitical, and environmental impact of petroleum fueled cars, yet another novel innovation must be invented. Electric cars charged with renewable sources of energy would be a good start. The move to ahydrogen-based economy may be another worthwhile pursuit.
To eliminate CO2 and other emissions from power plants and factories, likewise, innovations must be made.And while these measures are welcomed, even with clean cars and renewable clean energy, climate change driven by other forces, both on Earth and beyond, and many of which are beyond our means to change or safely manipulate, will still continue. Carbon credits is an outright scam. Alternative forms of transportation and energy production are absolute necessities but will not stop natural climate change. But within the current false discourse, even these crucial necessities are not being approached with any serious focus, with schemes like carbon credits, progress-stunting resource rationing, and neo-eugenic population control taking center stage.
What Needs to Be Done
Mitigating the impact of human
activity on the planet, not only in terms of atmospheric conditions and
composition, but in all terms including polluting our water and soil,
and corrupting the genomes of plant and animal species through the
proliferation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), must be
addressed not politically but pragmatically. If governments cannot think
of a particular technical solution to address each and every way modern
society negatively impacts the environment, it should be investing in
scientific, technological, and design-oriented education to produce a
population of problem solvers that can devise appropriate and pragmatic
solutions themselves.
It was the industrial revolution
and a population capable of creating, inventing, and innovating during
the 19th and 20th century that created solutions to the many health and
environmental hazards that existed at the time. Of course, new hazards
were created in the process. Why now do people believe that anything
other than continued innovation can be used to solve these new problems?
Technological progress and investment in all that drives it, should be
the top priority of anyone genuinely concerned about climate change.
Image:
Future agriculture taking place within an enclosed, protected,
optimized environment allows food production to continue no matter what
the climate outside is doing.
However, even with our impact on the environment completely negated
through technological innovation, climate change will continue
regardless – just as it had long before humanity came into being.For
humanity and the species it coinhabits the Earth with to survive
inevitable climate change, we must build infrastructure and economies
that are independent and immune from the climate no matter what it does.Our cities, farms, homes, businesses, and even sanctuaries for ecosystems we seek to preserve must be designed and engineered to take whatever is going on outside, and make it work with what we need to survive and thrive on the inside.Urban and rural agriculture that takes place within self-contained systems that can conserve and reuse resources, including water and soil nutrients, as well as control atmospheric conditions for optimal growing environments – immense high-tech greenhouses in other words – could protect our crops from global heating or cooling. Architecture that is modular, flexible, mobile, and adaptable could adjust to sea levels, filling in space where land is exposed, or moved to higher grounds when land disappears. Cities and agricultural systems that float upon the sea would make rising and falling sea levels more or less irrelevant
Image:
The ultimate expression of environmental mastery is constructing
ecosystems and civilizations where they naturally could not exist.
Humanity has already permanently inhabited orbit in the form of the
International Space Station for over a decade, we must simply take the
next step.
And perhaps the ultimate expression of environmental mastery would be creating habitable ecosystems where none could ever exist naturally – beneath the waves, underground, or even in orbit above Earth. Environmental mastery of this level should be the ultimate goal of governments, organizations, and activists around the world who seek to preserve both our ecosystems and our civilization.
Such a future is the realm of
science fiction, but a future that does not look upward and outward, is
not a future worth striving toward.
In the interim, there are
already people experimenting and moving forward alternative models of
decentralized high-tech agricultural, energy, and architectural
solutions that will make weathering climate change more manageable.
Perhaps the decentralized but collaborative nature technological
progress is taking through local hackerspaces, urban agriculture, and
cooperatives could create solutions far quicker and without the
political baggage and meddling special interests impeding progress on
national and international scales.For those frustrated by the lack of
pragmatic solutions for issues such a climate change, genetic pollution,
or the poisoning of our air, water, and soil, starting projects at your
local hackerspace to create or improve technology to protect your food
supply, energy, water, and air could be the beginning of a real
environmental movement that actually solves problems rather than
perpetually complain and argue about them.
Geoengineering and the “Moonraker Scenario”
The other option is one of anti-human regression – where
faux-environmentalists who harbor misanthropic hatred for humanity
demand all progress stop, energy production be reduced, and instead of
finding better alternatives to do more with less, demand that all do as
little as possible with as little as possible. Such a mentality is at
best putting human progress into “sleep mode.” At worst, it threatens
our very survival, which has since the dawn of history itself, depended
on exploration, innovation, and the ability to conquer adversity rather
than surrender to it.Those like White House science adviser, John P.
Holdren who suggests the planet be scoured of its populous human
inhabitants, now toys with the idea of geoengineering, or extreme global
climate manipulation. The likelihood that people like Holdren seek to
do so for the continued progress of humanity, rather than to fulfill
long desired “depopulation” is slim to none. The chances that people
like Holdren seek to “accidentally” plunge the planet into conditions
that devastate agriculture and starve hundreds of millions, or even
billions to death, are somewhat greater.This would be the “Moonraker
scenario” – referencing the 1979 James Bond movie Moonraker.In the film, a deranged industrialist conspires to wipe out humanity and in the ruins repopulate it with what he perceives to be a “master race.” While a science fiction thriller, the movie reflects the darkest desires of tyrants throughout the ages – to erase what exists and build an empire of their own designs in its place. As human nature itself does not change, neither have the aspects of human nature that drive such dark desires. From the intentional and reckless genetic pollution perpetrated by huge agricultural and biotech monopolies through the proliferation of GMOs, to attempts to surveil, control, and even manipulate public perception, to the sabotaged false discourse regarding climate change itself and the consideration of geoengineering – it appears attempts to overwrite the planet’s climate, population, and culture is already underway, either by design or self-destructive ignorance.By exiting the false discourse on climate change – and other false discourses – and demanding and participating in pragmatic, technological progress, we can protect ourselves as much from the effects of inevitable natural climate change as we can from the delusions and designs of megalomaniacs.
An educated, informed, and technologically literate population has the ability to create a technologically driven future that serves the population’s best interests. Anything less leaves us at the mercy of an unpredictable elite that history has already many times warned us about.
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