Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press

We have a bigger problem than just Covid-19: Ultra-Rich Preventing Action On Global Climate Change

AT RIGHT: Jakobshavn glacier sits on land in Greenland and has been sliding into the ocean for millenia. But it's receeding now and has receeded more in the last ten years than in the previous hundred, courtesy of humans adding carbon to the atmosphere. This image dates from the late 1990s and comes to us courtesy of psjfactoids.blogspot.com

Many people these days - well, since the 2016 election cycle - have been expending a lot of outrage in the wrong direction. A significant percentage of us in the lower 99% of income in the USA are pretty upset about our economic instability and the rise of so many problems in the last 40+ years. Yet of all the issues we face, one real issue all citizens must grasp is that we're being divided and conquered by the ultra-rich. So many people are angry at and about Trump, but he isn't the cause, he's a symptom, a tool, an unglamorous tool, to be sure, but ultimately no different than Bill Clinton, Obama or either of the Bushes; ALL tools of the ultra-rich.

The ultra-rich use every division strategy they can think of to keep us from uniting against their power. The more you focus on one of the divisions they've pushed at you, the less likely you are to focus on their actions, such as the recent sell-out - the several trillion dollar give-away to the ultra-rich as supposed Covid-19 relief, for but a very recent example.

Even if you can't ever see yourself coming together and uniting with the yahoos who incite you, perhaps you can ignore them and focus on what's actually important - getting the ultra-rich out of power. (I'm not saying that these yahoos spreading disease that kills people isn't important, but you can't actually do anything about that anyway, and it's a secondary problem.)

Right now, the defeat of Sanders puts us in dire straits. Status-quo leadership means leadership by the ultra-rich.

We could stay under the boot-heel of the ultra-rich forever if it weren't for global climate change and this Holocene extinction event we've initiated; humanity itself is at grave risk right now and even more so the end if industrialized civilization is looming and could come VASTLY faster than most people could even imagine. But as an Earth scientist who has learned about some of our worst problems, there are several "positive feedback loops" of massive scale that will change the planet's biosphere forever - and by "positive", I don't mean good, I mean self-reinforcing. Among these is sea level rise; briefly, the end to industrialized civilization comes as sea level rises many feet at a time in jumps, not a steady dribble, and it won't matter that YOUR sea ports are open if your trading partner's ports are not open. The collapse of industrialized civilization comes shortly after sea trade becomes impossible. ... It's not a pretty thing, but it's coming fast.

(As an aside, note that sea level is known to have been about 186' higher than it is today, and there are numerous places around the world with terrestrially supported ice that would raise sea level by many feet if it joined the sea, and much of this is low-lying ice, so if we get, say, two feet, that will really give us ten, as rising seas will melt ever more ice that's just barely above sea level now...)

The ultra-rich are preventing us from addressing this challenge and as such they are a direct threat to all of the current biosphere of this planet; they MUST be defeated. This is humanity's most dire challenge ever, and there could not be any more dire challenge. So, focus your energy on the right target.