​Climate change and chaos

By Ed Raymond

Are we learning from chimps or are they learning from us?

Here we are, involved in a number of wars in a dozen Middle East countries, and researchers in Uganda’s Kibale National Park have discovered that a large chimpanzee group, our close relatives, is involved in a serious civil war. Chimp groups have been battling about home territory for hundreds of thousands of years, but it’s the first time a chimp group has been observed having a civil war between members of the same group.Chimps have long been known to have lethal campaigns between groups that don’t know each other, and they often battle other groups about food and territory, but this is the first time a once-unified group is splitting up and having an internal killing civil war.

Researchers have often commented that chimp neighbors always seem to get along. Not anymore. The big question is, did we learn about regional and world wars from our chimp relatives? Or did Uganda chimps learn about conducting wars from us? Well, the research continues.

I see in a few minutes we are going to blockade all of Iran’s ports. If that doesn’t work we will bomb bridges, hospitals, schools, nursing homes, and kids so we impress people with Higdem’s “lethality and rules of engagement.” That means kill everybody.

I always read Rebecca Solnit because she is a thoughtful political analyst. Here is her latest about the nutcase in the Oval Office with the itchy trigger finger:

“The United States is being murdered, and it’s an inside job. Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled of disabled. All this is common knowledge, but because it dribbles out in news stories about this specific incident or department, the reports never adequately describe an administration sabotaging the functioning of the federal government and also trashing the global economy, international alliances and relationships, and the national and global environment in ways that will have downstream consequences for decades and perhaps, especially when it comes to climate, centuries.”

I would like to ask her why she ended with the word “centuries.” The evidence seems clear: we don’t even have decades. Here is some evidence.

Everyone should read Caroline Fraser’s ‘The Throwaway Planet’

It’s featured in the latest “New York Review of Books. In her opening paragraph she references T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” my favorite poet’s long poem about the 1920s.

“T.S. Eliot famously tallied images of a lavish but exhausted culture — empty bottles, sandwich wrappers, cigarette butts,” Fraser says. “A hundred years later, what seems remarkable about his scraps of refuse is how inoffensive and even organic they are. Stony rubbish, dead trees, the odd corpse in the garden — nothing that couldn’t be absorbed back into the earth. Of course, that was 1922 when the chief form of plastic in use was Bakelite.”

By the 1940’s science was looking for something to replace organic silk, wood, cotton, and rubber. By 1944, American troops in Europe were marching with plastic.

“US soldiers were marching across France to the tune of bugles made of plastic, arranging their hair with plastic combs, sleeping in tents made of plastic canvas, and flying airplanes that had been dispatched across the Atlantic packaged in plastic Saran Wrap to shield them from salt spray,” the article continues.

An American historian remarked: “Plastic will have more effect on the lives of great grandchildren than Hitler or Mussolini.”

In his book “Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash,” Alexander Clapp lists what 8.2 billion people discard each day: 1.5 billion plastic cups, 250 million pounds of clothes, 220 million aluminum cans, and 3 million tires. Each living human being represents about one ton of discarded plastic. By 2050, the weight of plastic refuse in the oceans alone will exceed the weight of “all fish put together.”

Meanwhile: back in Washington, where the climate is perfect…

Before I get into the “hoax” and “con job” of climate change by the stupid and greedy (the deadliest combination on Planet Earth!) I want to review what medical authorities have determined about heat. Heat is the number one weather-related killer in the U.S., the weather service warns. Infants and young children, older adults, people with chronic medical conditions and pregnant women are especially vulnerable to heat-related injuries and death.

Corky and I lived in Washington seventy years ago, where it got muggy in the summer but never had a killing heat. I was in Havana in 1956 when we couldn’t take-off after 10 a.m. because the hot air did not provide enough lift.

We have walked the streets of Phoenix ten years ago when some days were so hot, if an elderly person fell on the asphalt, they could suffer third-degree burns without a quick assist. Today the Gulf of Mexico is a hot tub that creates 1,500-mile storms from Louisiana to Maine with tornadoes, floods, derechos, thunderstorms and hail. A derecho can stay on the ground for 400 miles.

In a Washington meeting on the subject of climate change about two weeks ago, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said he wants to rescind everything that has been in EPA directives since 2009 that covered “endangerment finding.” He said he wanted to drive “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” He wants to stop regulating greenhouse gases, as an example. Of course, God’s “Chosen One” has declared climate change as a “scam,” “hoax,” and the world’s biggest “con job.”

Zeldin wants to eliminate any mandates relating to electric vehicles, whether car, truck or bus. The EPA has already terminated $20 billion in grants awarded by the Biden administration, calling them “schemes marred by conflicts of interest and potential fraud.” Zeldin has removed any mention of human causes of climate change.

While the climate deniers were meeting in Washington, March became the hottest March in the Continental United States in recorded history. Most representatives were wearing a blue button with the words “Don’t Stress” and “There is No Climate Crisis.”

James Taylor, the president of the Heartland Institute, the famous think tank funded by most of the influential fossil fuel companies, chimed in with “I feel wonderful! The Truth is winning out.” A table held pamphlets proclaiming “CO2 is a Lifesaver!” Gee I thought it warmed up the skies!

Naomi Oreskes, a science historian at Harvard University who has studied climate deniers for 20 years, summarized members of the Heartland Institute: “Part of the mentality of these folks is that they present themselves as victims. Of course, that’s completely preposterous, because they’re not victims, and in fact many of these people are affiliated with very powerful groups and been supported by Fortune 500 companies.”

The Heartland Institute pushes false themes of climate change. It says carbon emissions are harmless (or in certain situations, beneficial), renewable energy from solar and wind farms is destroying the planet and powerful leftist politicians push climate science in higher education.

If you think regulations are not necessary, take evening strolls through Los Alamos

During the 1940s, Manhattan Project scientists based at Los Alamos, New Mexico conducted many experiments with all kinds of radioactive materials. After the experiments were conducted, the liquid radioactive waste was piped into an arroyo which was later known as Acid Canyon. The liquids contained weapons-grade plutonium, strontium, cesium, uranium, americium and tritium. Over the years since then, we have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up the site. Millions of tons of soil have been removed because of toxicity. Plutonium-239 and -240 are still detectable in the canyon — and have leached into a lake 16 miles away.

This mess happened because there were no rules and regulations regarding the proper disposal of dangerous materials. Disposing hazardous materials in pits, mounds, holding ponds, canyons, arroyos, rivers and lakes often does not cut it. The Trump administration wants to get rid of regulations that might save us billions of dollars in cleanup — or survival.

If you need another example of lack of regulations that cost us billions, Google “Kingston Fossil Plant” connected with the Tennessee Valley Authority Project and learn about the failure of the coal ash storage site that polluted three southern states. Find out what happens when coal ash slowly grew into a 60-ft tall mound, spreading over 84 acres at a rate of a thousand tons a day, held back by an earthen dike over 50 years. It finally broke and loosed 1.1 billion gallons of poisonous sludge in those states — in some cases to a depth of six feet. It also filled two rivers in the area. No human life was lost, but thousands of deer and millions of animals and fish died in the sludge.

In both cases, the Democratic administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt failed to regulate the disposal of poisonous waste. Now, four generations later, we have the Republican administration of President Donald John Trump that will fail to regulate the disposal of carbon dioxide to prevent abrupt climate changes. Now we have huge corporations powerful enough to force administrations to regulate the use of fossil fuels and to fund solar and wind projects that would enable us to follow the guidelines of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate.

As an example, the tech giant Microsoft, under the chairmanship of Bill Gates, has been the largest funder of carbon removal efforts. But with the pressures of a billionaire-owned government opposed to the science of climate change, it has announced to the world that it is no longer going to purchase carbon removal credits produced by companies that have built carbon removal projects.

A coalition of companies buying carbon removal credits announced this change of positions: “We know the world is going to need carbon removal at a scale to meet global net zero goals, but carbon removal does not have a natural buyer, but without a clear source of demand, it is hard for carbon removal companies to attract investment and great entrepreneurs. Basically, it is very difficult to start a carbon removal company.”

Particularly when the government thinks climate change is a “hoax,” “con job,” and says “there is no climate change crisis.” If we don’t remove carbon from the atmosphere, those 1,500-mile storms from the Gulf of Mexico to New York state will soon be 2,000-mile storms to Maine.