Why should we take the blame for an environmental emergency that a tiny elite has caused?
Watching the report of the UN’s findings on BBC News earlier, I was moved to tweet the following:
Watching #bbcnews treating the UN's report on the threatened extinction of a million species, as though it's something new and shocking. The scale of the crisis has been known for DECADES but the people with the money – including the UN – haven't been interested.
— Mike Sivier (@MidWalesMike) May 6, 2019
I tend to agree with Greta, here:
It’s 2019. Can we all now please stop saying “climate change” and instead call it what it is: climate breakdown, climate crisis, climate emergency, ecological breakdown, ecological crisis and ecological emergency?#ClimateBreakdown #EcologicalBreakdown
— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) May 4, 2019
It’s infuriating.
I was watching documentaries warning of pollution-related climate catastrophe at least as long ago as the 1980s – and nothing was done about it.
All the current hand-wringing is a pathetic attempt to con the general public into thinking that this is a new crisis, when it is nothing of the kind.
There has been plenty of time to do something constructive, but the fat cats of this world decided to make a few more billions for themselves instead – as if money could somehow save them when the environment collapses for all of us.
Now, you can bet they’re going to pretend that it’s somehow the rest of us who are responsible. Look:
Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.
“Humans”?
Most of us haven’t had any say in it at all.
And yet we’re lumped in with the tiny minority who are responsible.
Despicable.
You can work out your own impact on the world by taking WWF’s environmental footprint questionnaire, here.
This Writer is pleased to announce that my environmental footprint is already lower than the 2020 target set by the UK government.
How’s yours?
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We knew about this in the 1970s when “holes in the ozone layer” were first discovered. I stopped using spray on deodorants then and changed to roll-ons because of concerns about CFCs in the atmosphere. Public pressure caused companies to remove CFCs from aerosols but then we found that fridges especially commercial refrigeration was far more polluting. Every time people are able to bring pressure and do a little it turns out that corporations are far worse.
I sense the “energency” will be used to impoverish the masses further, nothing more.
We’re all responsible. Some more than others but unless you’ve been living completely self-sufficient off-grid and going nowhere since the 70s you’ve been involved.
Of course the corporates need to clean up their act – and governments (including the EU) need to stop allowing them to lobby and even dictate climate policy.
E.g The EU has recently announced that buying LNG from the US will help in energy transition. That gas is fracked FFS!
War is another big problem of course. I only found out yesterday (should’ve been obvious really) that emissions from military action are exempt from the Paris Agreement https://worldbeyondwar.org/climate-collapse-and-the-responsibility-of-the-military/?link_id=34&can_id=aab36963a37cd0e38ffdbf6944600fd3&source=email-wbw-news-action-uniting-against-war&email_referrer=email_541879&email_subject=wbw-news-action-uniting-against-war
No we can’t solve the problems by changing our habits at personal level (altho’ people who haven’t already should consider boycotting the worst offenders like Nestle, PepsiCo, McDonalds, Mondolez etc as well as avoiding unn
ecessary plastic where possible but we can at least make our voices heard by at the very least (as well as boycotting) signing pétitions which, now & again, do actually work.
My point is that we have been involved without having been asked. Polluting, climate-changing industries have been forced on us without us being given a choice about them. It is the small elite of politicians and industrialists who have done this with the intention of filling their own bank accounts who are responsible, to a far greater extent.
And of course those who are responsible will continue passing that responsibility on to the rest of us as if it were true – unless we pinpoint exactly who they are and bring them to account for it.
I certainly agree with you about public action.
I could not agree more Mike, the mass media including the BBC all shift the blame for this crisis to the public in general as a way of deflecting attention from the real culprits Big Business and the Greed of the Multinationals.
If anybody poses a real challenge to this situation, they can expect to receive sinister threats through the post from people with links to the oil industry in Oregon USA as recently happened to a friend of mine in Bracknell.
We are not to blame , they are. David Penson