the ONLY GREEN list

 

        

   "Everywhere I look there are opportunities to be addressing climate change and everywhere I look we are not doing it."        Bill Nye    

                                                               Ecologist Opinion, July 12, 2021

   THE CLIMATE CRISIS NEEDS TO BE THE HEADLINE EVERYDAY                                                              

   The Climate Crisis needs to be THE headline in every newscast and in every newspaper every day.

   If there was a hot war happening, what would everyone be leading with?  Every day.  With each new hour and publication.  We’d be getting the latest on that hot war.

   You know where I’m going. 

   The news media is not on board.  They’re finally saying ‘climate change’ easily and often.  They no longer balk at blaming the Heat Dome, or the fires, or the droughts on climate change.  That’s terrific.  That’s good.

   But they’ve come very late to the party (read disaster) and they’re still not on board.

   As an old newsman, I’m in consternation.  Have we come so far in the devolution of newsrooms that the managers and assignment editors no longer chase the biggest story out there?  Are they constrained by the monied interests who control them?  Probably yes, on both counts.

   We need an Edward R. Murrow.  Once upon a time, the CBS network allowed its news division to cover anything they chose, no matter how unpopular, no matter how controversial, no matter if it crashed up against the vested interests.  Edward R. Murrow was the embodiment of that reporting.  But that was a short-lived phenomenon.  Today the best hopes for this kind of reporting can be found in the mainstream at National Public Radio, The Guardian newspaper, and, to some degree, Al Jazeera.  Plenty others, out of the mainstream, are dedicated to this reporting.  Gizmodo, Mongabay, even The Hill has stepped up.  David Attenborough, in his 90’s, is working feverishly to leave a record of What Is because he foresees that soon that will all be gone.

   But the climate crisis needs to be THE headline in every newscast every day, every hour.

   It will take centuries to recover from what we have already wrought.  Yet we’re no more than frogs in the slowly coming-to-boil pot of incessant burning of fossil fuels.  As a species, we’re too dumb to simply stop it.

   Talk about a hot war.  Sea levels are rising, droughts are shrinking water supplies that are already overused by enormous overpopulation, extreme heat is killing marine and other wildlife in huge numbers, the same heat is fast melting the Arctic permafrost (which will release so much methane our problems will immediately double).  And there’s the fires.  And more frequently we’re seeing actual Environmental Refugees, the new reality that author J.K. Ullrich calls ‘engees’.

   The climate crisis needs to be THE headline in every newspaper in every issue.

   The most current CO2 parts per million should be on prominent display at all times. In 2001 it was 370.59 ppm, already well past the 350 that 350.org was founded over.  Right now it is past 417 ppm.  The forest fires, the thawing permafrost, and the ongoing burning of oil and gas ensure that it keeps rising.

   It should be as prominent and accessible as the daily temperature.

   We need the media to get on board.  We need them all in.

   The climate crisis should be THE headline everyday for all the news.

   Talk about a hot war.

   

                          TOGETHER IN A CLOSET                                                                 by the Ecologist

Imagine that a whole big bunch of us is in a closet together.  We can make it a really big closet, but it’s a closet.   No windows and only one door.  And if we open the door, everyone dies.  So we have to stick it out and survive until tomorrow in this closet together.  We’ll always have enough air, but if we allow that guy over there to light his cigar the air will smell like cigar smoke.  For a long time.  With just that one cigar.  We're gonna have to make it past tomorrow.

But no one is willing to tell him to cut it out.  He smokes one after another and now the air is getting really bad because of it.  Someone needs to tell him to stop.  There are actually some folks being sickened by the smoke.  It looks like it’s going to have to come to the point that a group of us get together and make him stop.

That’s what Extinction Rebellion  is all about, that’s why they exist today.         Greenpeace  exists for the same reason.  Whiners and deniers say 17-year-old Greta Thunberg hasn’t offered one concrete idea about what we should do, or how we should do it.  Neither has X Rebellion or Greenpeace.  They’re all just trying to get us to STOP what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.

Like that group of us who, sooner or later, is going to go make that guy stop lighting his cigars inside our closet.

So, for yourself, what’s it going to be?  Sooner?  Or later?

"Now is the time for each and everyone of us to decide which side of history we are on." Extinction Rebellion, 4/28/19

So for you, what’s it going to be?  And when?   



"We can no longer continue feeding our addiction to fossil fuels as if there is no tomorrow. For there will be no tomorrow."  Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu