Save The Planet? Hit Them In The Wallet

It took me a long time to get the Simpsons. I didn't even get the Homer Simpson / Homo Sapiens pun. I didn't like crass Bart or sensitive Lisa, or Marge with her blue hair, or her croaky, chain-smoking sisters. Then one day, the penny dropped. I was slumped in front of the box too depressed to change channel, not enjoying the cartoon.

"QUIET!" yelled Homer, "I CAN'T HEAR MYSELF THINK!"

Everyone stilled in the Simpson's household, and a thought bubble emerged from Homer's skull... words formed... Homer's voice intoned as if from the depths of his subconscious mind: "Beer.. Peanuts.."

I laughed. The Simpsons remain a perfect American snapshot, full of joy, criticism and insight about human nature.

The news media are making a lot of economist Sir Nicholas Stern's report that global warming (this is has now become a replacement phrase for the impending ecopocalypse) will cost us money. Money!! God forbid. I've been rattling on for years, especially to the technophiles, that the wond'rous, Earth-saving advances they all assume will prevent global disaster will happen automagically as an inevitable result of our own resourcefulness. Only if the economic base remains, I replied so many times I got bored with the sound of my own voice, and that can only remain if the planet's resources continue to be consumed. So, to get to the point where we can utilise this technology, society, the economic machine, has to remain. Yet it is society in it's current set up which is causing the problem. This is an obvious contradiction that even Homer would understand it.

Believing an economist's prediction about the fate of the planet is like believing Charles Montgomery Burns has his employees' interests at heart. Stern's view on the state of the planet is far too limited in it's scope. He says the global economy could shrink by " as much as 20%". This is ludricous. He's not looking at the indicators. The global economy won't just shrink, it will totally disappear as we knnow it; 40% of species wiped out? Possibly more like 99%. Still, at least Sterns knows what REALLY scares people - cash - and it is a good thing that someone is talking the language of commerce from an ecological standpoint.

And now, I'm going to repeat myself. I wrote about this issue in June 2005 - it's worth a re-run. After all, it takes only 25 minutes of my time, and a small amount of electricity to get it to you. But - hang on - what about the huge, expensive, powered networks that sustain the web? What about the non-recyclable batteries in this laptop? Oops, I've given myself a reason to stop blogging.

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow" - Chateaubriand. I printed these words on A4 paper and glued them onto large cardboard boxes, on the other side adding the modern legend that 50% of urban waste is paper and invaded Kings Cross train station one evening with twelve enlightened eco-guerrilla friends dressed up as parcels, and this BBC report about the Kalahari reminded me of those art performance days in Euston Road and the wonderful quote.

However messy you are in your own bedroom, it does seem a tad careless to be destroying the entire house. And, however philosophical I am about my own demise, I can't get out of my head that we really are accelerating to an almighty mass finish, laying bare the green earth upon which depend, poisoning the fertile seas, taking all of the higher life forms with us, with the USA, richest country in the world and the biggest polluter, remaining in massive, deliberate, sustained denial.

The sheepish USA public rants on about the Downing Street Memo (while us more cynical Europeans say, well, we knew at the time - didn't you?) and yet nobody picked up on the re-writing of a paper by the President's office, which watered down the US government scientists' own advice that global warming is a reality.

Central to the exposure of this cover-up was the discovery of an email sent to Phil Cooney, chief of staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, by Myron Ebell, a director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). The CEI is an ultra-conservative lobby group that has received more than $1 million in donations since 1998 from the oil giant Exxon.

This from the Guardian, Sept 21st 2003:

The email, dated 3 June 2002, reveals how White House officials wanted the CEI's help to play down the impact of a report last summer by the government's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in which the US admitted for the first time that humans are contributing to global warming. 'Thanks for calling and asking for our help,' Ebell tells Cooney.

Some of the changes include deleting a summary that stated: 'Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment.' Sections on the ecological effects of global warming and its impact on human health were removed. So were several sentences calling for further research on climate change.

A temperature record covering 1,000 years was also deleted, prompting the EPA memo to note: 'Emphasis is given to a recent, limited analysis [which] supports the administration's favoured message.'

White House officials added numerous qualifying words such as 'potentially' and 'may', leading the EPA to complain: 'Uncertainty is inserted where there is essentially none.'

Honey, I'm home!


global ecology disaster