Let's Barbecue Mom

On its February 18 edition of "World News Tonight," ABC ran one of the best ever mainstream media reports on the pace and effects of global warming.

Using effective computer graphics and a simple, jargon-free approach to the facts, reporter Bill Blakemore explained the workings of climatic "feedback loops," i.e., the process by which the warming of the atmosphere and oceans has accelerated and gathered irresistable momentum.

In a feeback loop, the rising temperature on the Earth changes the environment in ways that then create even more heat. Scientists consider feedback loops the single biggest threat to civilization from global warming.

Past a certain point — the tipping point, they say — there may be no stopping the changes.

Scientists working in the Arctic report that feedback loops are already underway. As the frozen sea surface of the Arctic Ocean melts back, there's less white to reflect the sun's heat back into space — and more dark open water to absorb that heat, which then melts the floating sea ice even faster. More than a third of summer sea ice disappeared in the past 30 years.

The biggest culprit in this scenario, of course, is fossil fuels consumption, and the biggest consumer of fossil fuels by far is the United States, weighing in with over 20 million barrels of oil products burned each day, or more than a billion barrels every fifty days. That's a quarter of the world's total fossil fuels consumption.

Although The U.S. population is only five percent of the world's total, we manage to produce 22 percent of the greenhouse gases that are now roasting our mother earth to death as well as producing secondary effects like the 2004-05 hurricane season. How do we do it? On average, one American consumes as much energy as 2 Japanese, 6 Mexicans, 13 Chinese, 31 Indians, 128 Bangladeshis, 307 Tanzanians, or 370 Ethiopians (1995 U.S. Statistical Abstract, p. 868).

Saving the earth, keeping it livable, is going to require massive changes in the world's consumption and living habits, and nowhere is immediate wholesale change a more urgent necessity than in the U.S. Are the government and people of this country up to the challenge?

Not a chance.

The big question, of course, is why? We've known about these problems, and about the looming cheap oil crunch for decades. What's behind our seeming inability to make even the simplest, essentially painless changes, such as demanding smaller vehicles with dramatically better gas mileage, which would stave off the most disastrous aspects of the scenario now at hand.

The answer is that it's not inability, it's unwillingness, and that behind the unwillingness is money. Politics, including the politics of global warming, is inextricably linked to money. "Show me where a man gets his cornbread," said Mark Twain, "and I'll show you where he gets his politics."

These twin crimes -- betraying of the earth and whatever future generations might live on it, and frivolously draining the last of the world's cheap, light, sweet crude are being perpetrated because lots of capitalist buccaneers are making lots of loot perpretrating them. It's no mistake and no accident that Exxon-Mobil showed 25 billions in profit last year.

And while there is no behemoth real estate developing corporation analogous to Exxon-Mobil or Chevron-Texaco, the multitude of subdivision builders and strip mall developers infesting the regions which used to be countryside are reaping ill-gotten gains comparable to those enjoyed by big oil, and barbecuing their mother (and ours) in the process.

Tomorrow we'll examine in some detail the uses for which our foreclosed future, in the form of the world's last cheap oil, much of the U.S.'s best land, and the very solvency of the U.S. as a viable economic entity, has been squandered.