[note: due to a computer glitch, the portal link to
the previous distribution of this message was broken.
See also additional useful information on the CEED website,
www.ceedweb.org]
Generations, in the not-too-distant future, may well
look back on us living in the first decade of the 21st
century -- especially in the US -- and find themselves
overwhelmed with anger. They may ask:
Didn’t you know that the mass of scientific evidence
showed humans were changing the Earth’s climate? Didn’t
you know that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had increased
30% over the past 200 years because of humans' use of
fossil fuels? AND that carbon dioxide levels were at
their highest levels in over 400,000 years! Hadn’t you
been told repeatedly by the largest and most rigorously
peer-reviewed scientific collaboration in history that
the earth’s average temperature could increase 10 degrees
F? Had you been so effectively inoculated against the
truth by the mis-information campaign of the industry-funded
Climate Coalition? (see Gelbspan, The Heat is On)
Couldn't you see glaciers, which had persisted for
millennia, receding and, in fact, literally disappearing
around the globe? that even your Glacier National Park
would soon become glacier-less? Didn't you even consider
how changes in global climate would strain food resources,
create environmental refugees, and through a cascade
of repercussions, stress ecosystems and societies in
countless unexpected ways?
And future generations could ask: Didn’t you care?
Care about your own descendants, the children of your
children?
Didn’t you see that the real menace -- the real weapons
of mass destruction -- were the invisible gases coming
out your cars' tailpipes and your factories' smokestacks
which together added billions of tons of carbon to the
atmosphere annually, drastically changing and destabilizing
the planet’s delicate and intricate climate system on
which all species had evolved to depend?
Didn’t you realize that future generations would compare
you to those living around Auschwitz? Those people professed
that that did not understand the meaning of the freight
trains arriving and the smoke rising, but you do not
have the excuse of saying you have not been told. If
a court were convened of future generations of humans
and other life forms, such a court could find the accused
guilty, not just of crimes against humanity, but crimes
against life -- for ignoring the small, but closing,
window of opportunity, until it was too late.
This message is a sort of visitation from the future,
not unlike that of the ghost of Christmas Future to
Dickens' Scrooge. That was a frightening and terribly
bleak visitation. Scrooge sees his own tombstone, but,
even more heart-wrenching, he grieves over the untimely
death of Tiny Tim. In horror, Scrooge begs the ghost
answer him: "Is this a vision of what will be or what
MIGHT be?" The next morning Scrooge awakens to find
himself alive in the present. It is not too late. There
still is time to avert tragedy. Let us joyously do now
the many things we can, individually and as a country,
while we still have the opportunity of doing so, while
there is still time. While we still have time.
[note: Please see useful information, including things
you can do, on CEED's website, www.ceedweb.org - click
on the op ed link and then choose one of the other pages
listed.]
Daniel Ihara is Executive Director of the Center for
Environmental Economic Development (CEED), based in
Arcata, CA. He has a doctorate in economics specializing
in Climate Change policy.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:
Contact: Dan Ihara
(707) 822-8347
For more information, contact:
Dan Ihara
Executive Director
Center for Environmental Economic Development (CEED)
(707) 822-8347
ceed@humboldt1.com
Web site: http://ceedweb.org
