Thursday, March 20, 2014

Time To Engineer A Revolution

There's an interesting and well balanced article on climate change and geo-engineering here (We can't just geoengineer our way out of climate change - by David Suzuki) which points out what's happened so far regarding past scientific or technological mistakes. Pesticide use, CFCs, rampant burning of fossil fuels, damaging our food, the food chain, the ozone layer, our living environment, polluting air, water, soil and our bodies.

Now, as Suzuki writes, 'for the past few decades, a catastrophic consequence of our profligate use of fossil fuels has loomed' and 'we’re now faced with ever-increasing extreme weather-related events and phenomena.'
He goes on to point out that had we addressed the problem from the outset we could have solutions in place. 'Now that climate change is undeniable' he notes that many experts are coming up with solutions.
'But we’re still running up against those pesky unintended consequences. Scientists at the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, studied five geoengineering schemes and concluded they’re "either relatively ineffective with limited warming reductions, or they have potentially severe side effects and cannot be stopped without causing rapid climate change."

Suzuki also offers a number of 'coulds', 'shoulds', 'oughts' and 'musts' which from a socialist perspective are mere pie in the sky. All the examples of the mistakes of history boil down to the same root cause. There has never been given sufficient time or research before marketing new products and when problems have been noticed they've been minimised or covered up for the sake of profit. Whatever happens from now on can be guaranteed to be more of the same from governments, corporations and profit seekers world wide. The population of the world is merely a tool for the capitalist class, to be used or dispensed with as markets dictate. 'Should, ought and must' will gain nothing for the working class until we have fought and won the revolution together.



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