The Greatest Crime in Human History.
Climate scientists clanged the warning bell about Global Warming in the 1970s. For FIFTY YEARS conservatives have ridiculed, denied, distracted, diverted, doubted, debunked, stalled and stalled and stalled…. and are still stalling… the very facts of this rapidly ramping up catastrophe. In doing so, they have ensured that hundreds of millions of humans, quite possibly billions, along with trillions of other Earthlings, will suffer and/or perish… many of those into species extinction. All other mass murders and genocides — combined — pale into comparison to what modern conservatives have conspired to create in their zeal to conserve their own selfishness.
Mother Nature don’t mess around. She has an answer for unruly, disrespectful, greedy, selfish-as-hell, exploiters, disrupters and oppressors of the natural order. Extinction.
Alas, she operates not with a surgeon’s scalpel but with a sledgehammer. Right this moment she is busy taking out species by the bushels because they are no longer adapted to live in the hell-scape on Earth that another, singular, species has left in its callous, self-serving, wasteful, chemicals, plastics and pollution tainted wake.
We are now well into the Seventh Great Extinction Event. The previous six (up from five with the recent discovery of the Guadalupian Extinction around 250 million years ago) episodes of this depressing septet were caused by geologic activity, one way or another, originating either deep within the Earth’s skin or something careening into it from space. Not this current debacle. The current die-off of all of these animals, plants, fungi and other assorted life forms is due to the arrogance and insatiable appetite of one particularly egregious species. This extinction is called the “Holocene Extinction,” pointing directly to its source: Homo sapiens.
Since our species lines fell (or got kicked) out of the original Eden, the vast forests of Africa, and thence cognitively spiraled out with larger and larger brains, capable of inventing language, taming fire and making tools/weapons, the relationship between our ancient kin and the rest of the natural world has been pretty janky. But for most of our existence we have been far too few in numbers and too restricted in destructive power to do too much damage to the planetary balance. That began to change somewhere around 50,000 years ago.
Somehow, with just bows and arrows and spears, we managed to kill off much of the mega-fauna that survived the last great Ice Age. That was nice work. Later, upon wooden sailing ships you wouldn’t trust to get you across Lake Wobegon, humans made a good run at destroying the largest beasts in the vast seas, sending most whale species to the precipice of extinction before some few “crazies” urged a stop to the carnage (timely aided by petroleum oil replacing whale oil in the economy).
But the rise of “fossil fuels,” principally coal and oil, had its own very dark side, which was first hinted at when London turned black with coal dust. Some laws were passed, the first mitigations of early “pollution” were engaged, and blue-ish skies returned, on occasion, to the South of England. This was an early warning of the potential nasty residues and results of burning fossil fuels, and a blueprint for at least trying to do something about it. Alas, lessons were not fully learned.
Meanwhile, humans continued their long, out-of-Africa rampage across the landscapes of the globe, cutting down forests, draining wetlands, flooding canyons, building sprawling towns and cities, exiling wild animals either by stealing their habitat or by the manly “sport” of shooting whatever moved. In America alone, as its offshore whale species hung on by a thread, iconic species such as the bison, bald eagle, grizzly bear, wolf, peregrine falcon, condor, pronghorn were pushed to the edge of extinction. The ivory-billed woodpecker, passenger pigeon and America’s parrot, the Carolina conure, were shoved over it. Not to be missed, not even noticed, by Americans busy being Americans…. meaning continuing the rampage.
The loss of habitat and biodiversity, alone, in America and around the world, has been enough to send countless species into oblivion. Never to return. Some of these species were never identified, much less studied. We don’t even know what we have lost. Animals and plants carry within them proprietary pharmacies. Have we already stamped out the plant that cures cancer, the fungus that prevents dementia, the insect with chemicals that regenerate limbs? Possibly. No one will ever know.
But now rears the darkest cloud of all: the balloon payment has come due on over one hundred years of pumping more and more and more and more and more and (still today) more greenhouse gasses (mainly CO2 and Methane) into our planet’s flimsy, fragile atmosphere. Humanity has not, yet, reduced one iota the amount of such gasses being released; all we have done so far is reduce the “rate of increase.” So, at this point every year we disgorge MORE greenhouse gasses.
Just as the oceans once seemed, Earth’s atmosphere may appear vast and unperturbable; it’s not. You’ve probably seen it from an airliner: that paper thin blue, or at sunrise/sunset orange, gauze that enables life on this rocky, watery orb. It may appear clear as glass, but is actually now choked with compounds and chemicals that don’t belong there, at least in this ratio. What they are doing is blocking heat bouncing off the planet’s surface from escaping into space, slowly turning Earth into Venus… a place hotter than hell.
The science on this was recognized as long as… one hundred years ago, at the very dawn of climate science. As data was collected, a clear upward trajectory of CO2 in the atmosphere was duly noted. But the atmosphere is complicated; there were different ways to interpret this. In the early 1970s, some climate scientists briefly thought, yikes! a new ICE AGE is on the horizon! But a closer examination of the evidence refuted that notion, and suggested quite the opposite: the Earth is warming… and fast. Something must be done to slow this rise, or we — meaning our planet’s biosphere as humans have always known it — are in trouble.
Though the continuing release of greenhouse gasses from the burning of fossil fuels is at the epicenter, also at play is damage to or destruction of the “carbon sinks” that have long held vast quantities of these greenhouse gasses sequestered. It’s as if we are setting fire to our house, and at the same time slashing the water lines that might douse it. These are forests, bogs, swamps, ocean reefs and the seas themselves. When forests are cut down and burned, that carbon smoke goes directly into the atmosphere, and those trees are no longer available as carbon sinks. Meanwhile, of course, trees and other plants are consuming carbon dioxide and pumping out oxygen… just what we need to try to rebalance the atmospheric system. Yet forests are under assault like never before. On industrial scales, some of the most important forests in the world, including the rainforests of South America, Africa, Indonesia and Southeast Asia, are being slashed and burned, for the valuable wood of these old trees, but increasingly also for land to raise cattle.
It turns out that animal agriculture, worldwide, is the second leading cause of Global Warming, just behind fossil fuel generation and burning, but ahead of all transportation emissions combined. That’s just from its own emissions; add in the carbon sequestering removed by forests or otherwise wild habitat destruction for these domestic animals, and the equation gets even worse. Indeed, animal agriculture is a hog for land, water, energy and food for the animals. In the United States, more acreage is devoted to raising food for animals than for humans! That’s also true in many other countries that consume and/or export a lot of meat.
So we are in quite a pickle, and have barely lifted a pinkie to do a damn thing about it yet. But there’s more bad news. Actually, really bad news. As the planet gets hotter, certain built-in tripwires will be triggered that will cause a cascade of currently stable carbon sinks to suddenly release their carbon load. These include coral reefs, tundra and deep ocean pockets. If and when we breach this dangerous trigger, that might be game-over!
It was at that juncture, in the mid 1970s, that the cultures of humanity might have put aside their petty differences and selfish greed to cooperatively, you know, save our home. Despite the visions of Elon Musk, there are no other homes awaiting. It’s this one, or adios! You don’t have to be particularly wise to know that despoiling your own nest isn’t going to end well for you. But no. That best case scenario for human cooperation to address an existential problem was never in the cards.
Why not? One word: conservatives.
Conservatives conserve. What do they conserve? The old ways. The old traditions. The old heritage. The old “way of life.” Anything that conserves their own advantage, privilege and power. They avoid change like the plague, unless it is to go backwards to a time or situation perceived as more conducive for their advantage, privilege and power.
At the very dangerous time in human history, we are now at a place where conservatives are fed up with liberal “progress” and are wanting to yank society back to the 1950s, or 1920s, or 1880s, or — they aren’t ever very clear — maybe the 1700s. They have no interest whatsoever in cooperating with anyone to change their way of life to save the stupid planet. They sent up a nationwide howl when their beloved incandescent lightbulbs were phased out a decade or so ago… they get wild-eyed when it is suggested that citizens shouldn’t own military assault rifles…. all-out conservative revolt will ensue at the very notion of having their gas-guzzling cars taken away, or their beef brisket curtailed. Their politicians know a great wedge-issue when they see one, so are already well-practiced in assailing “alarmist” or “extremist” environmental concerns. Yet FIVE DECADES of denying and debunking Global Warming have more recently turned rancid. Decades ago they were successful at cowing the mainstream media to drop the term “Global Warming” for the more benign “climate change,” as if this transition was perfectly natural and not the spawn of their own favored dirty industries. The climate is changing alright: it’s getting warmer! The official conservative response to this is: nothing.
It’s not just American conservatives who have been dithering. Conservatives in every nation are also reticent to get involved in anything that might undermine their station or impinge one iota on their comfortable “way of life.” United in denial, they can acquiesce with their own consensus to do nothing, and continue to reap the benefits of their disinterest without guilt or shame. After all, everyone they know believes, feels and behaves the same way.
“Disinterest” in this situation — with calamity dead ahead for every living thing on Earth (well, cockroaches will probably do just fine) — is tantamount to treason against humanity and the planet that sustains us. You can praise the Lord all you want; it’s Mother Earth who birthed, feeds and fills your lungs with each breath.
We are already seeing the first “climate refugees.” There is now a tiny civil war going on in Nigeria because, due to Global Warming, a tribe of cattle herders from further north in the sub-Saharan have been forced to move south into more lush farmland to survive. The people who were already there aren’t keen on their arrival. More than 100 people have been viciously murdered. This is a little preview of massive movements and conflict dead ahead. Experts predict over a billion climate refugees by 2050. That’s around one of every nine people on Earth! That should be fun.
We haven’t yet seen refugees on the move in America. But we will. Not just streaming across the border from parched Central America as things down south worsen from bad to unbearable, but within America, as huge cities like Phoenix and Tucson and Las Vegas, perhaps even Los Angeles, run out of water. Most coastal cities will also become untenable with sea level rise. No wonder the U.S. Defense Department ranks Global Warming as the №1 domestic threat.
What we have already seen is people here and around the world suffering and dying from the local and regional effects of Global Warming. In 2022, Europe experienced a heat wave that left over 20,000 dead. These scorching heat events have become routine. In America we have had tens of thousands of lives turned upside down or extinguished by weather events that were likely caused or exacerbated by Global Warming. These include epic wildfires, historic droughts, catastrophic flooding, unprecedented tornado “swarms,” supersized and slow-moving hurricanes, and freak winter events such as the storm in 2021 which crashed the Texas electrical grid and left over 240 frozen bodies.
Many of those dead Texans likely voted for politicians who never, not once, took seriously the rapidly increasing dangers of Global Warming. Nor do conservative politicians now. That’s no surprise. People dying as a result of conservative hubris is a thread that runs through all of history. As Texas freezes, and Florida sinks, and Oklahoma and Alabama go to sleep at night worrying about tornados, and the Carolinas wonder if the next monster hurricane is coming to get them, and the western cities squabble over the dwindling drops of the Colorado River, conservative politicians are perfectly satisfied to twiddle their thumbs and count their profits.
They have no interest whatsoever in Global Warming. Which means: they have no interest whatsoever in the livability of the planet… for animals, for trees, for mushrooms, for people, including their own children and grand-children. Like no other phenomenon or issue ever, Global Warming is underscoring how life cheap life really is for conservatives. They are stealing the future of everyone and everything else on this planet for their own immediate gratification.
This is the highest crime, the most diabolical atrocity, the most despicable immorality ever perpetrated by the human family. And that’s saying a lot. Humans have set an exceptionally high bar of malfeasance and cruelty. Yet these politicians and the people who continually elect them have easily vaulted all previous criminality combined. Nothing else compares in its sweeping evil. Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot? Mao? These are nano-villains compared to the ideology that would wreck the entire planet for a few more shillings.
As coral reefs die, as glaciers melt, as tundra bog begin to belch, a wildfires rage, as forests are razed and burned, as rivers and lakes and aquifers dry up, as ocean ecosystems are wrecked and filled with plastic and garbage, as billions of enslaved farm animals suck up land, water, food and energy, as billions of people go about their daily lives as if nothing whatsoever is happening that — very soon, if not already — is going to whap them upside the head and leave their children in a dystopia, the clock ticks faster. Once we had fifty years to modify our behaviors across cultures. Once we had a noble project that might have pulled the world together in shared cooperation to save it. Once we had a society guided by science and the pursuit of difficult, lofty goals that landed men on the moon, and brought them back to talk about it. Now humanity more resembles a clown show, clumsy rowers on a tiny boat bopping each other as the waterfall fast approaches.
Liberals may not like it, but they will modify their beliefs and behavior for the overall good. They will change their diet, consumer more thoughtfully, dial back their materialism, recycle, ride bikes, drive electric cars, take public transportation, restrict their water use, try to live “green.”
Conservatives? Not so much. You see, they have this thing called “Their Liberty!” that is their Get Out of Responsibility card for any particular situation. To them it is patriotic to exercise their liberty not to go along with anything that liberals might favor. After all, liberals are the enemy, the menace, the socialists, who threaten their tradition, heritage, way of life, family values.
Of course, those who have already tangled with Global Warming have a different perspective. When your house or town or farm or livestock or livelihood or life of a loved one has been devastated by a weather event, the last thing you want or need is the fear-mongering of the typical conservative politician. You have little or nothing to fear from immigrants, Blacks, women, Muslims, socialists, gays, transgender people, liberals or any other group of people. It’s Global Warming that is bent on invading your life… and it is a mass killer that your AR-15 won’t stop.
Conservatives have gotten away with a long litany of crimes, relying on the sleepy forgetfulness of the general public. Remember slavery? Genocide? Women’s subjugation? The Inquisition? The murder of Socrates, Jesus, Bruno, Joan, John Ball, to name but a scant few? Conservatism, as an ideology, somehow skated free from rightful blame for almost every atrocity in history. But this crime — the destruction of the beautiful, livable, breathable, lush, green, bountiful, honking with life, planet we inherited — will live in infamy. If there is one thing we might hope Global Warming will melt like the glaciers and suck dry like an Arizona lake, it is conservatism: the Ideology of Selfishness. As is, this whole experiment of the Universe attempting to rise to a consciousness capable of intelligence, wonder and love is on the precipice of abject failure.
