“Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children’s children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.” — Theodore Roosevelt
God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
And I brought you into a plentiful land to enjoy its fruits and its good things. But when you came in, you defiled my land and made my heritage an abomination.
And I brought you into a plentiful land to enjoy its fruits and its good things. But when you came in, you defiled my land and made my heritage an abomination.
I never understood how someone could believe that people are the primary cause of climate change. The climate has always been changing and will always continue to change. Those who label me as a climate denier say that it has been doing this for 4.6 billion years. This semester I am taking a philosophy class in which we learned about existentialism, a philosophical movement centering on analysis of individual existence and the plight of the individual who must assume ultimate responsibility for acts of free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong (Merriam-Webster). This way of thinking elevates man into a role traditionally given to gods. I really like this way of thinking as a means of taking self-responsibility for making the world a better place, Jordan Peterson style. After studying this, I suddenly understood how people could believe that they had suddenly taken control of this ancient planetary cycle.
I do think that people have a profound impact on the land. Every other animal adapts to its environment; we adapt our environment to us. This happened on a small scale when a farmer struck out west, claimed a plot of land, chopped down a few trees, and built a house. This happened on a larger scale when we started fencing in the land, dividing it up with railroad lines, and plowing huge swaths of it with tractors. Around this time we also started saturating the land with chemicals. It was this process that took farming from primarily carbon negative to primarily carbon positive. All of these helped lead to the dust bowel and the great depression. As if we learned nothing we kept on recklessly trying out new technologies at scale. We logged the entire Midwest without thinking or replanting, always moving westward. When they hit the ocean they started replanting, but the Midwest would never regrow its forests. Then factories, refineries, steel mills, and other manufacturing plants would dump all of their waste into the rivers. This led to frequent river fires in many places until in the 60s people finally took notice and pressured the government to pass laws to protect the land and people. Meanwhile the Great lakes, which hold something like 20% of the freshwater in the world, were being ruined. Locks, damns, and passageways were dug from the ocean up into those precious waters. Invaders followed, swimming, or taking a ride on ships. Eels decimated native populations of fish, invasive Alewife fish propagated like mad and then died en mass, foreign mussels sucked the waters dry of nutrients necessary for natural flora and fauna, etc. And in the eighties, we all know what the CFCs were doing to the ozone layer before they were banned.
And yet people are still here. The planet is very beautiful. There are more trees than ever before. People are becoming more conscious of their power to cause harm, and their power to force politicians and companies to be better. Officials are realizing how important it is to conserve and not remake nature. We banned CFCs and the ozone layer is on track to recover by 2065. Solar power is taking off like a rocket. Genetically modified and organic food is taking over markets. Tesla is pushing out gas powered cars. Nuclear power has become safe, reliable, and available.
So we have overcome many challenges, and many think the next challenge is carbon. They say that the planet is warming primarily due to carbon emitted by people. According to Skeptical Science, each year people emit 3.7% of the carbon that goes into the atmosphere. All of this gas used to be in the air back when plants and animals grew to enormous sizes and ages. We only have a good record of the climate going back about 100 years. We do know that the dark ages were ended by the enlightenment, the plague (which made each person's work more valuable), and global warming that made crops grow better. So the planet was very warm and had a ton of carbon and plants and animals thrived, there was a huge event (probably a flood) which turned many of those plants and animals into oil and coal and trapped them beneath the earth. Then global warming contributed to economic prosperity that ended the dark ages. Now we are digging these carbon sources up and releasing them into the atmosphere. People are worried that this is melting the ice caps. What I have seen from gardening is that plants need sun, water, and heat in abundance to do well. As far as I can see more carbon in the air and more water available is great news! Further more people are desalinating huge amounts of water from the ocean for growing crops and otherwise living. This is leaving the oceans with more salt. We need more water to keep the salinity right. Beyond this each new amount of carbon that is in the atmosphere creates less warming than the carbon that was added before this. So the more carbon we emit the effects will taper off. Furthermore there is not enough evidence that this is actually happening. Nasa discovered volcanic activity under Antarctica that is causing lots of the melting there.
So are there problems? Yes! Is carbon emissions going to kill us all in twelve years? No. What do we need to do? We need to embrace nuclear energy immediately! This is safe, carbon free, cheap energy. The biggest reason why we haven't already embraced it is that the fossil fuels industry has campaigned against it spreading lies about how dangerous it is. We also need to immediately stop all subsidies of energy, especially fossil fuels, so that people can choose what they think is best based on the real market! We need to slow the increase of wind energy and reconsider hydro. Hydro is bad for rivers and wind is not cost effective or good for birds. We need to rethink electric cars which over their lifetime (particularly sourcing of materials and disposal) are worse than gas cars for the environment and the children mining the materials. Solar will take a bigger chunk of the market when it is fairly priced. The other huge blind spot is food sourcing. Right now farming is a carbon positive process. We need to go back to natural farming techniques that allow much greater yield per acre, mixed crops which make for healthier food, less chemicals (another huge energy drain), and mulching which reduces the need for poison and traps water, carbon, and nutrients in the soil. This type of farming is way better for the land, water, and is therapeutic for the farmer. We also need to end all farming subsities and most farming regulations which choke the small farmer and help the corperate farmer.
Recycling is extremely important but is not currently done sustainably. We also need to figure out how to stop polluting the oceans. Most of the trash that goes into the oceans comes out of a small number of rivers in Africa and Asia. One solution is to bring those regions into the first world by guiding them into good jobs, education, and technologies as rapidly as possible to increase their wealth and standard of living. When they don't have to worry about being able to survive, then they will be able to worry about things like pollution. Also that will slow the population expansion which climate fearmongers worry about.
And yet people are still here. The planet is very beautiful. There are more trees than ever before. People are becoming more conscious of their power to cause harm, and their power to force politicians and companies to be better. Officials are realizing how important it is to conserve and not remake nature. We banned CFCs and the ozone layer is on track to recover by 2065. Solar power is taking off like a rocket. Genetically modified and organic food is taking over markets. Tesla is pushing out gas powered cars. Nuclear power has become safe, reliable, and available.
So we have overcome many challenges, and many think the next challenge is carbon. They say that the planet is warming primarily due to carbon emitted by people. According to Skeptical Science, each year people emit 3.7% of the carbon that goes into the atmosphere. All of this gas used to be in the air back when plants and animals grew to enormous sizes and ages. We only have a good record of the climate going back about 100 years. We do know that the dark ages were ended by the enlightenment, the plague (which made each person's work more valuable), and global warming that made crops grow better. So the planet was very warm and had a ton of carbon and plants and animals thrived, there was a huge event (probably a flood) which turned many of those plants and animals into oil and coal and trapped them beneath the earth. Then global warming contributed to economic prosperity that ended the dark ages. Now we are digging these carbon sources up and releasing them into the atmosphere. People are worried that this is melting the ice caps. What I have seen from gardening is that plants need sun, water, and heat in abundance to do well. As far as I can see more carbon in the air and more water available is great news! Further more people are desalinating huge amounts of water from the ocean for growing crops and otherwise living. This is leaving the oceans with more salt. We need more water to keep the salinity right. Beyond this each new amount of carbon that is in the atmosphere creates less warming than the carbon that was added before this. So the more carbon we emit the effects will taper off. Furthermore there is not enough evidence that this is actually happening. Nasa discovered volcanic activity under Antarctica that is causing lots of the melting there.
So are there problems? Yes! Is carbon emissions going to kill us all in twelve years? No. What do we need to do? We need to embrace nuclear energy immediately! This is safe, carbon free, cheap energy. The biggest reason why we haven't already embraced it is that the fossil fuels industry has campaigned against it spreading lies about how dangerous it is. We also need to immediately stop all subsidies of energy, especially fossil fuels, so that people can choose what they think is best based on the real market! We need to slow the increase of wind energy and reconsider hydro. Hydro is bad for rivers and wind is not cost effective or good for birds. We need to rethink electric cars which over their lifetime (particularly sourcing of materials and disposal) are worse than gas cars for the environment and the children mining the materials. Solar will take a bigger chunk of the market when it is fairly priced. The other huge blind spot is food sourcing. Right now farming is a carbon positive process. We need to go back to natural farming techniques that allow much greater yield per acre, mixed crops which make for healthier food, less chemicals (another huge energy drain), and mulching which reduces the need for poison and traps water, carbon, and nutrients in the soil. This type of farming is way better for the land, water, and is therapeutic for the farmer. We also need to end all farming subsities and most farming regulations which choke the small farmer and help the corperate farmer.
Recycling is extremely important but is not currently done sustainably. We also need to figure out how to stop polluting the oceans. Most of the trash that goes into the oceans comes out of a small number of rivers in Africa and Asia. One solution is to bring those regions into the first world by guiding them into good jobs, education, and technologies as rapidly as possible to increase their wealth and standard of living. When they don't have to worry about being able to survive, then they will be able to worry about things like pollution. Also that will slow the population expansion which climate fearmongers worry about.
"If we've learned any lessons during the past few decades, perhaps the most important is that preservation of our environment is not a partisan challenge; it's common sense. Our physical health, our social happiness, and our economic well-being will be sustained only by all of us working in partnership as thoughtful, effective stewards of our natural resources."
— Ronald Reagan
— Ronald Reagan