Increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is warming the planet. NASA / JPL-Caltech, 2022.
Prologue
California must move very fast to stop burning fossil fuels in order to
limit the harm and damage from climate change. America and the world have to do
the same thing – put fossil fuels out of business as fast as possible.
We love
our homes
Thinking about climate chaos is disturbing. It causes a storm of
emotions to me, sometimes nightmares. My ideas of virtue go away. Plato and
Aristotle as well as Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo and Newton spoke of a
perfect Cosmos, immortal, created by no one. That included the Earth. Perfection
and order, Cosmos, was its nature. But now, in 2023, doubts cloud that
perfection.
I am speaking from California, my home for 14 years. I have taught
at Humboldt State University, California State Polytechnic University-Pomona,
and Pitzer College – all in California. I bike, take the bus and train. I walk
every day in Claremont, my small hometown. I wrote my latest 2 books, Poison
Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA, and The Antikythera
Mechanism: The Story Behind the Genius of the Greek Computer and its Demise, in
California. I have even written another 2 books, which I hope will see the light
of the day soon.
What I am trying to say is that California has become my new
home. I love it no less than I love Virginia where I lived for 33 years or
Greece that brought me to life. These homes are threatened by anthropogenic
climate chaos. Changing the climate of the planet should have been beyond the
power of puny human, one of millions of species living on this giant star, our
Mother Earth.
Knowledge without virtue
Puny humans remained insignificant for
millennia. They fought each other with sticks and stones for millennia. They
fought each other with metal spears and swords for centuries. Eventually, in
Modern times, they started killing each other with lethal guns, canons, armed
airplanes, and, in the 1940s, atomic bombs.
So, puny man, always a craftsman,
after the Renaissance of the fifteenth century, misused Greek science
(mathematics, mathematical physics, mathematical astronomy, biology, and
engineering) to conquer other men and the natural world. The discovery of fossil
fuels (petroleum, natural gas, and coal) sparked the so-called Industrial
Revolution that remade the planet with skyscraper cities, inhabited by millions
of humans employing millions of petroleum-burning cars, trucks, airplanes,
ships, and countless other petroleum-powered machines.
Pollution was one major
product of this human explosion in machines, and in perpetually growing
populations covering most of the land of the Earth. Pollution from industries,
militaries, navies, and human and animal farm wastes are toxic to humans and
animals and plants and water and air. Species on land and the seas and oceans
are under tremendous stress for food and space. Many are disappearing.
The other
product of the human grasp of the fire of knowledge was the changing of carbon
dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. For millennia, this greenhouse gas was around
300 parts per million. In 2022, CO2 was 420 parts per million. CO2 originates in
the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, wildfires, and the eruption of
volcanoes. Along with other greenhouse gases, CO2 is warming the planet,
definitely darkening the future for all life on Earth.
Warnings
For decades,
climatologists have been issuing warnings about this unsustainable, nay
dangerous reality of changing climate. Not only that, but the United Nations has
been sponsoring annual climate summits that trumpet these dangers to human
wellbeing and the health of the natural world. So, why the climate apathy of
world leaders? They know the facts. The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres,
makes certain of that. He has told them repeatedly their countries and the
entire planet are in dire trouble. He describes climate change as climate
emergency, warning them and fossil fuel company executives they are speeding on
highways of destruction. On November 7, 2022, he addressed prime ministers,
presidents and kings in the Climate Summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. He said:
“We are in the fight of our lives. And we are losing. Greenhouse gas emissions
keep growing. Global temperatures keep rising. And our planet is fast
approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible. We are on
a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”
Monotheism,
guns, and billionaires
So, again, why so little is being done? Religions, guns,
and billionaires hold the keys.
Monotheistic religions, especially Christianity
and Islam, wiped out polytheism that taught humans to respect and venerate the
Cosmos and the Earth. The Greeks, for example, had several gods that were forces
in the natural world and models farming and rural life (Demeter, Dionysos,
Aristaios, Pan), beauty (Aphrodite), music and prophesy (Apollo, Hermes),
justice and rain (Zeus), intelligence and technology(Metis, Athena, and
Hephaistos). The Greeks did not believe in those gods. Eusebeia, piety, explains
their relations to their anthropomorphic gods. They were pious towards them.
They thought of the Earth, for example, as a goddess. Plato said the Earth was
the oldest of the gods (Timaeus 40c).
Christianity and Islam, in contrast, teach
humans to master nature. The result of such Biblical indoctrination in America
was the genocide of the indigenous people and widespread ecocide in nature.
Hollywood captured this religious and racist policy with its endless movies on
cowboys and Indians.
The continuing gun mayhem in America is a consequence of
this cowboy mentality of shooting first and asking questions later. Yet no
politician dares challenge this silent war, the murder of children by adults and
younger killers. The almost daily / weekly fatal shootings have not prompted the
passage of laws to outlaw guns and disarm Americans. With this mindset, climate
change all but disappears from those carrying guns. They are probably deluded in
thinking that guns can fight storms and heat waves.
The gun plague is also
inflicting California, though not to the degree of other states like Texas or
Florida. California has suffered tremendous damage from forest fires, storms,
hurricanes. The governor of the state, Gavin Newsom, is smart enough to tell the
people of California that we must fight climate change with a fast transition to
clean energy like solar panels. California had incentives for putting solar
panels on roofs of homes and buildings. I benefitted from that incentive in 2009
when I put solar panels on the roof of my house in Claremont. However, these
incentives are almost ending on April 14th in order to please the billionaires
behind the monopoly utilities of electricity. The same thing is happening to the
federal government. President Joe Biden ordered the Department of Interior to
license a petroleum billionaire to excavate Alaska’s Arctic for oil.
Environmental organizations protested this obscene decision, but the harm to
indigenous Americans and massive ecocide is being done. Unless a different
President terminates this petroleum crime, it is designed to last for 30 years.
Why should the animals and indigenous people of the Arctic suffer and possibly
perish because a billionaire wants to maintain his feudal domain? Is this
something you expect from a country selling democracy abroad but obeys the
edicts of billionaires at home?
A friend asked me: “What will it take Evaggelos?
What more irreversible destruction will it take before self-interest of a few
will be reined in?” The answer is neither simple nor easy. We should know we
cannot have democracy and billionaires together. It’s either billionaires
(oligarchy / tyranny) or democracy. We cannot claim we have democracy while most
of the wealth of the country is in the hands of the very few we call
billionaires. They should be taxed out of their oligarchic status and, in most
cases, ill-gotten wealth. Use their money to create small businesses, small
organic family farmers, and fund the development of ecological technologies for
fighting the giant in the room.
Without this political reform, climate chaos
will wreck America and the world. On Friday, March 31, 2023, a tornado hit a
small Mississippi town with enormous force: “An ominous wedge appeared in the
night sky over one of the poorest regions of the American South late Friday,”
reported the New York Times. “When it touched down, it nearly obliterated the
small Mississippi Delta town of Rolling Fork in one of numerous scenes of
destruction and heartbreak across swaths of Mississippi and Alabama. At least 26
people were killed, dozens more were injured, and homes and businesses were
smashed to pieces.”
Should we keep bemoaning for each climate blow or act to
diminish this onslaught? Or, perhaps, wait until rising waters cover Florida
before we become serious about fossil fuels? I don’t think so.
Remove
billionaires and open the door to free speech to see the coming climate storm. I
realize how problematic this proposal is at a time when the country is on the
verge of civil war. The Republicans are using lies, and religious superstition
in their defense of their billionaire funders. The Democrats are reluctant,
perhaps afraid to punish political corruption that, for instance, led to the
January 6, 2021 insurrection. Donald Trump is still a free man.
Another cause of
continuing business as usual, that is doing little if anything against fossil
fuels and their owners, is the prevailing ignorance about the climate enemy. My
efforts at Claremont tell a story of some significance. I testified and wrote a
letter to the City Council in which I urged the mayor and his colleagues to put
solar panels over buildings and parking lots belonging to the city. Furthermore,
I urged them to talk to the presidents of the five colleges and one university
in Claremont, bringing them together with the city. These schools have acres of
roof space and parking lots for solar panels. My modest suggestions went
nowhere.
You would think scientists would be out in the streets trying to
convince their local, state, and federal government to defend America against
its real enemy, a warmer climate brought to us by fossil fuel companies and the
industries hooked on petroleum, natural gas, and coal. Unfortunately, with some
exceptions, professors, scientists, teachers, and schools are in deep sleep.
They like what they do and what they have. They refuse to challenge their
business managers.
Epilogue
Change is unsettling. People learn to live under
monarchies, tyrannies, and democracies, even corrupt democracies. The moment one
suggests political change, he / she becomes “not a team player.” Some senior US
EPA officials branded me “not a team player.”
All this is another way of saying
that, like it or not, climate change / chaos is embracing us. Fossil fuel
billionaires, and their supporters, will resist alternatives. Only a more
democratic America without billionaires will fight climate change as if its life
was dependent on the fight. I hope this transition to democracy is fast. We
don’t have much time.
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