Warm sunshine and a soft, cool breeze this Saturday afternoon, on California’s north coast.
Weekend days are so different those days in rest of the week on a shitload of levels — even the tempo is dissimilar, time itself seems to bend a little.
Now a month-old retiree, I’ve suddenly inherited big blocks of time in which to dwell on such insane shit.
Remarkable to wreck a week in one quick nut revealing a major-major obstacle to handling climate change — changing civilization.
Via The Hill:
The 2.7 percent rise over 2013 builds on an increase first seen last year, which saw more power plants and other sources spewing carbon into the atmosphere than 2012.
Emissions from fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas were 6 percent higher in the first half of this year than in the same period in 2012.
(Illustration above found here).
The report released yesterday afternoon by the US Energy Department displayed a frightening aspect to this whole climate-change situation — the world operates in a certain way to keep on existing, which includes the requirement of economic progress. Any chance right now of altering the current path of an environmental collapse/catastrophe is to way-drastically “cut” CO2.
A feat near-about impossible.
Civilization’s machine — via the Dallas News:
The Energy Department data, a routine snapshot of U.S. energy consumption by the department’s Energy Information Administration, shows higher pollution levels from all major classes of fossil fuels, including petroleum, natural gas and coal.
Trend lines were up in nearly all industrial sectors, as factories, retail stores and utility plants all consumed more fuel compared with previous years.
American homeowners also contributed to rising pollution levels, the report showed, as households used more electricity, natural gas and fuel oil in a year that brought record-breaking cold to the East Coast and Midwest, and extreme heat and drought in the western third of the country.
Across the nation, carbon emissions for the first six months of the year were nearly 3 percent higher than during the same period last year, and about 6 percent higher than in 2012.
On Tuesday, President Obama apparently spoke out of turn while addressing the UN Climate Summit in New York, claiming the “urgent and growing threat of climate change” while at the near-about same time pushing for the production of more oil..
Plus, the factor of humanity: And a Gallup poll conducted in March 2014, found that a little under a fourth of Americans — 24 percent — list climate change as a national problem that they worry about “a great deal.”
Even as automakers are having their best year since 2006.
In September 2008, David Letterman launched into a rant about climate change, best described with the two words he used mostly during the spiel, “We are dead meat,” and basically says what needs to be done is to immediately stop all use of cars/trucks/airplanes/etc, right at that time, right now — but even if we did, we’ll all still dead meat.
The video clip is gone — can’t locate it anywhere on the InterWebs. See the original note about it at HuffPost.
And Letterman’s correct, six years ago!
NASA, too, tried to explain last March about a coming chaotic inevitably — from the Guardian:
These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social features: “the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity”; and “the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or “Commoners”) [poor]”
These social phenomena have played “a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse,” in all such cases over “the last five thousand years.”
Climate change and economic inequality — nothing of any merit will take place until the ‘Elites’ realize they’re fucked, too.
By then, though…