Hell,
High Water, And Corporate Profit
By Mickey Z.
31 January, 2007
Countercurrents.org
From
the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) comes the latest in a long
line of dire warnings. Thanks to climate change, mountain glaciers are
shrinking three times faster than they were in the 1980s. Across America,
two distinct sounds are heard: a collective yawn and the clacking of
keyboards as another million words are written to cast global warming
as a tree-hugger conspiracy.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is also about to
release a major report that declares human-induced climate change is
happening and must be addressed. IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri says
the report "embodies substantial new research, it addresses gaps
that existed in our knowledge earlier, it has reduced existing uncertainties.
I hope policies and actions will be formed to address the problem."
As reported by BBC News, the IPCC report will identify human activities
as being "principally responsible for the climatic changes observed
around the
world."
The pro-climate change delegation will remind us it's possible that
human influence on global warming is exaggerated. This may or may not
be true. Either way, it begs the question: What's the downside of acting
as if humans were the sole cause of climate change? The "policies
and actions" Pachauri (and many others) urge could serve to reduce
consumption, pollution, and many preventable deaths. Who could possibly
be against that? Before you attempt to answer this, consider that if
Americans get on board and take major steps to scale down their highly
unsustainable lifestyles, corporate profits would tumble. As they say
in Denmark: There's the rub.
While there is no pro-warming lobby, there are corporate lobbyists swarming
like flies around the fetid legislative droppings in D.C. As the global
temperatures increase, so will the press releases and the cunning campaigns
of misinformation.
The late Australian scholar, Alex Carey once listed what he felt were
the three most significant developments of the twentieth century: the
growth and spread of democracy; the growth and spread of corporate power;
and the development of corporate propaganda to protect corporate power
against democracy. Translation: It's extremely difficult to provoke
change within a culture born and raised on trusting corporate values.
But the stakes may never be higher. "With the scenarios predicted,"
said WGMS director Wilfried Haeberli, "we will enter conditions
which we have not seen in the past 10,000 years, and perhaps conditions
which mankind has never experienced."
What change are you willing to make...now?
Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.
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