OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #176, APRIL 29, 2024.

 

OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #176, APRIL 29, 2024.  Compiled by Dick Bennett

Greta Thunberg for Science 
Zack Frye on Settler-Colonialism v. Nature

    By repeating its superb documentary on Greta Thunberg, PBS has again invigorated global resistance to climate change, and again exposed the hucksters of quack remedies.  

     Greta is an adult lay scientist, critical thinker, and ethical leader roaming the planet to gather the facts, investigate claims and evidence, and to demand our leaders to take action to save life on earth, as the film shows over and over.  Above all, she tracks the emergency.    Will trees as carbon sinks save us?  Well, yes, but not soon, for we must plant millions, and new trees have negligible usefulness. She goes to the foresters and discovers the limited contribution of new trees to a carbon free atmosphere, concluding that we must stop cutting trees now.  Will the new technology of sequestering carbon save us?  She goes to the experimental technology, and discovers the immense expense of capturing CO2 by the necessary millions of sequestering plants yet to be perfected and built.   Chemical additives to livestock food will significantly reduce the methane produced by cattle?   Yes, 30% of the 37 billion tons of methane can be reduced…..in 30 to 50 years.   And 1 kilo of meat for food produces 60 kilos of CO2; and the soya farms to feed cattle are cutting down jungles.  Nostrom after nostrum is confronted and shown to be less than advertised by the people selling it—patent medicines, panaceas.   And most of all, we don’t time.

     Instead, we can and must stop CO2 now where it is being most produced--by carbon-emitting engines.  But the people making unimaginable wealth from fossil fuels won’t stop making fossil fuels.  So The People must stop using them.  They care about the planet and our species, and all species.  Yes?  But other people are causing it, bad news is not enjoyable.  The global fashion industry produces more C02 than driving and flying.   And, much history suggests, truth is not always sufficient or efficacious.  Power, money, propaganda, doublethink disinform.  So The People, enjoying planes and plastics, don’t stop either.  

     Greta knows all of this and much more; it’s in the documentary.    She understands the emergency: the world is not on track to meet the Paris agreement of 1.5 CO2, or at least 2.    Listen to the science, she cries out, but she knows the truth is not enough, that truth is not irresistible, as a psychiatrist explained.  But Greta, autistic Greta, hasn’t given up.   

 

ADDITIONAL DIMENSIONS
Zach Frye.  “How Settler-Colonialism Kills More Than Just People.” Black Agenda Report. PopularResistance.org (3-30-24).   The ideology and praxis of settler-colonialism are widely understood to be one of the most violent, brutal, and inhumane systems ever constructed by humanity. In every corner of the globe, dominant Western nations hailing from Europe and North America have systematically enforced their rule throughout the Global South by way of coercion, economic dominance, and, most importantly for the sake of this work, environmental destruction. One of the less focused aspects of settler-colonialism and its means of enforcement is the destruction of not only the Indigenous population but the ecosystems as well. -more-