Extinction bankers
Applauding
Earth System
Passing bell.
Terrorsome!
$6 Trillion
Scandalous
Fossil fuel subsidies.
Coal King
Gautam Adani
Third
Largest bank account,
$137.4 billion,
Madly stoking furnaces!
Cyanobacteria three point five billion years,
Oversufficiency oxygenated ozone shield,
Great forests four hundred million years,
Ocean plush green mats bacteria,
Gratitude Mother earthly oxygen orb!
Littlest photosynthetic organism,
Teeny bacteria largest oxygen surface,
Prochlorococcus planetary oxygen twenty
per cent exhaler,
More than Amazon, Congo, Indo/Malayan
rainforests combined,
Indebtedness beloved Mother Earth!
Minus fifty degrees Siberian berezhlivyy,
Ancient Gmelin larches, Siberian dwarf pines,
Nana willows, balsam poplars,
Tenacious festina lente,
Timeless, noble yet vulnerable.
Gold, silver, black gold fever!
Magadan Oblast, Yano-Kolyma,
Goltsovoye, Natalka,
Omusskchansky Coal Cluster mines,
Eureka! Riches galore.
Credulity, naiveté, vanity, confidence,
Irresponsibility, greed, planet-killing.
Men, money, power, immortalise,
The long game, high stakes, illusions.
Name your price? More!
Unctuous fossil fuel conmen seep assuredly,
Mustn’t leave anyone without,
Such slithery goop duplicity bathed.
Asphyxiating pollution, black gold drying up,
Price ever-rising, people alert.
Oppressive deathful hideous heat,
Combusting subsidised fossil fuels, wood pellets,
palm oil be damned.
Fire Age dire, so strange, past irrelevant,
No-narrative, no-analogue tomorrow.
So immense unimaginable coming upheavals,
Inherited knowledge arc, past to future, broken.
No precedent forthcoming,
Impossible to triangulate accumulated wisdom.
A future never known.
ALICE SPRINGS – Are you fed-up with the worst, least qualified and most unscrupulous citizens, the world’s leaders, lying about reducing emissions and failing to address the climate emergency?
Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison just greenlit two humongous fracking mines in the Northern Territory (NT) and Western Australia (WA). Morrison blatantly disregarded the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) warning that there can be NO more new coal, oil and gas extractions if we are to limit temperature increases to below the critical threshold of 1.5 degrees.
Morrison’s most recent planetary destructive fracking decision followed on the heels of U.S. President Joe Biden’s move to auction off oil and gas leases across 32.4 million hectares (80M ac) of the Gulf of Mexico. Old boys business as usual.
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GLASGOW – Old-growth forests are the planet’s largest and most carbon-rich biodiverse assemblages. Protecting these earthly temples is central to the survival of all life.
As the twenty-sixth United Nations climate talks get underway, the only issue that matters to Mother Earth and the two million known species is, how to slow down the infernal man-made climate heat, climate droughts, climate fires, climate floods and strengthening climate hurricanes and climate cyclones?
The answer is really quite simple. Reduce combustion emissions immediately. Dovetail all industries to produce a zero-combustion global economy by 2035. And end all fossil fuel subsidies, $5.9 trillion annually, without any further delay.
SAN FRANCISCO – Mother Earth defender and author, Jocelyn Zuckerman, has penned an excellent detailed account in Planet Palm of the insidious and ubiquitous palm oil trade. Victress.
Zuckerman journeyed to four continents and witnessed firsthand this planetary destructive, crafty industry. It’s a riveting read.
If ever there was one farmed crop that begged the United Nations (UN) to enact a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, palm oil is it.
A West African tropical palm, Elaeis guineensis, produces bunches of fruits the size of plums, which yields copious pulp and kernel oils that are loaded with saturated fats.
Today, those oils are the backbone of processed everything, from personal care products to deep fried foods and pastries to instant noodles. Humans also burn a shit ton of it, one-third of all biofuels annually are palm oil. They emit four times more planet-cooking gases per unit than diesel fuel.
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WASHINGTON (DC) – About 72 species of sea grasses are nature’s protective chainmail that filter land runoff, boost water quality, recharge aquifers and provide habitat for thousands of species. Yet they, too, are being assaulted and plundered by man.
Sea grasses in mesmerising meadows occupy the coasts of every continent except Antarctica. Although their total ocean area is about 0.1%, sea grasses hold an astonishing 11% of the ocean’s carbon (sometimes referred to as ‘blue carbon’).
Some of my colleagues affectionately call the sea grasses ‘the lungs of the sea’. And for a good reason, one square metre of a sea grass meadow releases 10 litres of oxygen each day of the year. Bonanza!
Each year, Mediterranean sea grass meadows are helping to protect the deep North Atlantic ocean and all life therein by sieving 900 million pieces of pernicious petroleum-based plastics.
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SAN FRANCISCO – This week the United Nations (UN) climate body, the IPCC, issued its sternest warning a ‘climate code red.’ Yet every IPCC decarbonising scenario has GDPs (Gross Domestic Product) rising not falling. The jarring reality is that it’s not possible for civilisation to grow enough food with increasing, intensifying and longer lasting ferocious heatwaves.
Combustion heat from fossil fuels and wood pellets has supercharged the oceans by adding the equivalent heat of detonating 10 Hiroshima atomic bombs every second of the year. The oceans drive the climate, which is becoming terrifyingly unstable.
Climate fires are raging all over the globe. Siberia is one giant firestorm with untold losses of our brethren and sistren, the animals. Over 40 million acres are charred across Russia’s Northern Asia. For the first time in recorded history the North Pole is blanketed with thick choking climate smoke.
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SAN FRANCISCO – This week, climate fires, climate floods, climate heatwaves and climate mega-droughts are laying waste to people and Mother Earth.
A mega-drought across America’s West is deepening. In California, a million acres are fallow. Billions of dollars forgone. No mid winter Sierra Nevada snowpack, no spring groundwater recharge, so millions of taps across the Golden State have begun to trickle.
In June amid record U.S. heat, the world’s coal producers announced 432 new coal mines, mostly in China, Australia and Russia. Avarice bankers, oligarchs and the world’s leaders are unconcerned about adding more combustion heat into the biosphere that has become a gigantic land and sea graveyard.
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SAN FRANCISCO — An upcoming Netflix series, Big Timber, glorifies the annihilation of Vancouver Island’s rare and indispensable old-growth rainforests. Revolting.
British Columbia (BC), Canada, has about one percent of its old-growth forests intact. Vancouver Island, BC, the world’s forty-third largest island, has been cutover within an inch of its life.
Credit: TJ Watt
The few unharmed stands of old-growth on Vancouver Island create coveted clouds, which reflect incoming radiation and help keep the planet within a habitable range of temperatures. Those hallowed rainforests are crucial habitat for endangered marbled murrelets, little brown bats, northern bats, black swifts and scarce sockeye salmon.
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Why is only one day, each year, set aside to pay homage to our Mother Earth? Is it, so that for 364 other days we can turn a blind eye, or worse, rape her with impunity?
Our kith and kin, the animals, are terrified because ghastly man-made heatwaves, climate fires, climate droughts, climate floods and the GDP-driven Age of Extinction are accelerating at breakneck speed. Ladies and gentlemen, we need all the animals, old-growth rainforests, coral reefs, wetlands, salt marshes, mangroves, peatlands, kelp forests and marine grass meadows in-tact to survive and cohabitate on this hallowed blue planet.
The elephant in the room is human consumption and the insatiable fossil fuel and wood pellet combustion energy required to make more. Do you really need more?
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We are currently facing massive areas on land and under the sea that are dead. It’s irrefutable and bloody frightening.
Man, the superpredator, is the culprit.
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Ten Hiroshima atomic bombs, every second of the year, of fossil fuel heat in the oceans has once again lambasted Australia. Historic climate floods deluged parts of Queensland and New South Wales.
These god-awful once in 100 years’ floods made the 2011 and 2020 climate floods seem tame. They, too, were deadly.
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Fossil fuel stoked global heating has laid waste to the Aussie’s second favorite tree, the wonderful snow gums of the Alps.
Sprawling forest graveyards are strewn across Oz. From the lonely giants of the temperate southwest to the skeletons mangroves of the tropical northeast and along the bare high plains of New South Wales to the boiled ones of northeast Tasmania – it’s bloody grim.
Image credit: Greening Australia
I’ve walked in these eerie, lonesome tree cemeteries and lamented their loss to the nation. How many more millions of acres must we lose of these complex, climate-making, biodiverse hotspots replete with water-rich bastions before governments stop the annual $5.3 trillion in subsidies to the wealthiest and biggest polluters, the fossil fuel industry?
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The climate generation (Gen Zs, or under 26s) comprises almost a third of the world’s population. These intrepid kind humans are fighting the climate crisis by ‘taking the rose by the thorn’ and eating plant-based diets to save Mother Earth. Happy dance!
The purchasing power of the Gen Zs is formidable. It exceeds $3 trillion. Recently, the UK’s BOL Foods became an entirely plant-based company with planet-friendly food for the burgeoning Gen Zs vegans. Additionally, that company is now saving 200 metric tons of CO2 and 1.8 million gallons of water annually.
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The oceans store more than 90 percent of all combustion heat. In 2020, record fossil fuel and wood pellet heat in the ocean was the energetic equivalent of detonating 315,536,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. The energy within the oceans drives the climate, which is becoming less predictable and more violent.
Planetary ice is important for reflecting incoming solar radiation back to outer space. As the world’s temperature rises, planetary ice is in peril. In fact, Earth’s ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s. The world has lost 28 trillion metric tons of ice since 1994. That is enough meltwater to fill 10.2 billion Olympic swimming pools, or, cover the entire state of California in ~200 feet of water.
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The year 2020 set another horrible heat record in the oceans, which make up 99 percent of the planet’s biosphere, or, where life can exist. Many billions of our brethren and sistren, the animals, are already dead. It’s simply too hot.
The ocean heat is in lockstep with burning fossil fuels and wood pellets. In 2020, the world’s oceans absorbed the equivalent heat to dropping 10 Hiroshima atom bombs every second of the year (20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 {sextillion} joules).
Image credit: Kevin Trenberth
Allow me to remind you that the oceans drive Earth’s climate. Hence we are amid a worsening man-made climate crisis. It is never just about humans though. We share this glorious blue planet with a couple of million other life forms. All life is interrelated and we need everything that is left, alive.
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I was taught to respect my elders. The world’s largest coral reef system, or, the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), is about 8,000 old. It is sacred, yet it has been horribly abused. Consequently, the GBR is terminally ill.
Image credit: Brett Monroe Garner