It is obvious to anyone who has been paying the slightest attention to the ever-lengthening list of this world’s threatened and extinct species that the best thing for the fate of our fellow creatures on planet Earth could be the extinction of human race and so the current debate on the environment and climate change is not a tale of “saving the planet.” It’s a prosaic call to defend our own best interests as a species.
As temperatures at the poles steadily rise and the vast ice cover whose bright surface currently reflects much of the heat of the sun back out into space rapidly melts away, rising sea levels are causing entire nations to slip beneath the waves, shorelines containing major metropolitan areas to disappear resulting in massive migrations of human beings into other, already over-stressed regions of the planet.
Meanwhile, incredibly rich and fertile regions such as California and the breadbasket of the North America, the mid-western states, are turning into 21st century dustbowls, threatening more than just the world’s supply of almonds and grapefruit. Our modern industrial societies have been built on an abundance of cheap food and access to fresh water, and it is these two things that are coming under ever increasing threat from changes in the world’s climates.
Much is made of whether the trend to ‘global warming’ is a naturally occurring cycle or a man-made phenomenon but the science is overwhelming that man’s impact on the environment is either a direct cause or a major contributing factor in the accelerating rise of the world’s temperatures. No matter how the issue is framed, the numbers are both clear and alarming, representing the clearest, the most real and present danger to the western way of life, far and away more of a threat than the most ingenious and diabolical terrorist plot. Climate change is a threat of a truly global proportion, and it spares no man, woman, child, region or religion.
So what, then, of the cost? What is the value we place on the human race? Where in the balance of the scales do we place the lives of our children, our grandchildren, on down to seven generations and forever beyond?
It is a well understood principle of the sociology of corporations that they respond best to a single factor—profit on the bottom line. It stands that to simplest of reason that the most effective way to marshal the vast, incredible and ingenious resources of modern corporations in the war against atmospheric pollution is to make doing so a profitable enterprise. It is that plain and simple.
Will it cost each of us more? Undoubtedly. Claims that a carbon tax would be ‘revenue neutral’ are specious at best, to which we say, so what?
But argument that we cannot afford the cost of reducing the carbon going into our atmosphere is vastly offset by the distinct lack of nutritional value to be found in the gold we would save through inaction. It is inaction that we cannot afford.
Charles Darwin’s observations led him to the conclusion that, above all things, species of every stripe struggle to maintain their lineage and that, even in the most primitive of organisms, this is of abiding importance.
Mr. Darwin would expect no less of us us, the most sophisticated and self-aware species on the planet, to above all things seek to survive, no matter what the material cost.
