WHEN DID WE LEARN TO HATE EARTH?

maybe it's the natural escalation from hating our parents?

There’s a famous picture I’m sure you’re all familiar with. Environmentalists, and perhaps even socialists, love it. Capitalists don’t want to look at it. It’s the famous photo taken by Voyager One, looking back at earth from deep the edge of our solar system 3.7 billion miles away. The pale blue dot in a warm hue of amber. That’s earth.

Earth is so profound in that small sliver of light it’s very hard to put into words. The first word that can easily applied to this photo, especially if you didn’t know what it was, is that whatever that light is, it’s insignificant. For me, it was a slap in the face akin to seeing myself in the mirror after a night of no sleep.

That is us. All of us. All of us that are. All of us that were. And all of us that will come after. There is nothing else worthy of our attention in any measurable distance.

So tell me, why do we hate our planet so much?

As of this summer, the EPA, otherwise known as the Environmental PROTECTION Agency, has authorized the greatest deregulation acts of this century. The claim is this will unleash America’s full power while rolling back extra expenses foisted on the American people in hidden regulatory costs. This would rethink standards on clean power plants, as well as emissions such as mercury and other toxins. This would reconsider how oil and gas are released in wastewaters.

This would bring back energy we no longer build things for, mainly coal. Coal is still used for nearly 1/4 of the United States power plants. It is used in the smelting process for steel, but our technology growth has provided for many alternative methods. Are they more expensive right now than coal? Probably. But all of it is dirty, and all of it is proven to poison our air. Even when they are meeting the standards that were set by this same agency, it hasn’t done enough to curb the largest gains in lung cancer now among young people and non-smokers. Lung cancer accounts for 20% of the cancer mortalities and would rank among the top ten killers if it was given its own category. On top of that, while coal might be cheaper to produce, especially in closer to the surface mines like the ones in Wyoming, the transportations costs for coal accounted for 41% of its price in 2022. In many cases, renewable energy is cheaper than coal, with wind and solar being among the cheapest.

In the name of capitalism, everything becomes about $$ and prices. But even if you don’t buy into what the right calls the ‘climate change religion’, as if science has been wrong so many times that it has needed to indoctrinate a group of folks into a phony religion, no one can deny the added veracity of the last decades storms, fires and floods. We have witnessed destruction on levels not seen in the modern era.

I live in Los Angeles, where fires burned entire suburbs to the ground in a matter of a few weeks. I’ve lived here longer than I lived in my birth city of Pittsburgh. Never has there been this kind of heat combined with wind speed to create the firestorms we’re now seeing. This last one occurred in January when typically the Santa Anas kick up in September and October. This is reality.

Then, there’s the strange case of what happened at Lake Tahoe this past June. Out of nowhere, a pleasant day turned into a violent storm, chill factors dropped and it snowed, killing 8 people suddenly who had been having a pleasant day on the lake.

Just today, Shell Oil decided to scrap construction of its biofuel plant, one of their major modernization projects. Instead, they’re going to focus on their other fossil fuels. Why? Because that’s the message from the United States. The results of this cannot be understated. It would have been one of the largest converters of waste into jet fuel. And you wonder why prices will rise in the long-run? We’re no longer trying for the most efficient way to do things; just whatever is easiest right now.

This is the kind of thinking that brings you an extra lane on a highway that takes over a year to build, and solves the traffic issue for maybe one to two years at best before it’s obsolete. It’s a bandaid on a bleeding artery.

We are approaching Hurricane season. The most recent Hurricanes to hit the United States were Hurricane Helene, which struck Florida and the Carolinas last September as a Category 4 and one of the largest storm systems on record. It did widespread damage and moved inland. In a scientific assessment, researchers found that Helene had 10% more rain, had winds that were 13 miles per hour more intense, and drew energy from water that was 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer due to climate change.

Then Hurricane Nine, a Category 4, in late September hit Florida and Georgia, but even affected states inland again. Hurricane Milton, a Category 5, struck the Gulf of Mexico in early October, followed by Rafael, a Category 3 in Louisiana.

The United States luckily avoided Erin, which passed by our coasts eventually as another Category 5, with winds up to 85 knots before turning back into the Atlantic this August. None of these storms have been less than a Category three since Helene, and ask North Carolina about how they’re still reeling from Helene’s strike. It caused 252 deaths and over 78 billion in damage attributed to mostly sustained heavy rainfall after being reduced to essentially a Category one.

And we’ll never forget how ill-prepared Texas was this summer on July 4th when a storm system swept over the Guadalupe river and absorbed a summer camp, washing it almost entirely away with 27 campers and counselors.

Originally, the Trump administration said they were going to eliminated the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) altogether, but after the Texas debacle, there’s been less talk of that. Still, the cuts they have imposed on reacting to storms is not nearly as devastating as the ones to prepare for them. The additional cuts to the NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency that studies, tracks and prepares us for weather events, leave our country in a bizarre conundrum, one that I can’t help but ask about.

When as human beings did we become resentful of the planet that keeps us alive? When did we in our arrogance grow our egos to believe we can spit on nature and not have it return to us as a giant loogey?

I get it. We’re a capitalist nation. But being capitalist has never meant being utterly stupid or incompetent. What good are the billions we MIGHT save now if they’re going to be poured right back into having to rebuild entire cities or regions? What happens if our heat index reaches a point where people can NO LONGER GO OUTSIDE in the summer in many regions? Forget about storms, what will happen to farmers and our food supply? Are we prepared for the massive shortages that will inevitably result?

Add this to our wonderful take on our healthcare, and it appears from this writer’s point-of-view that the Trump Administration is actually leading a global movement for a population reduction. This ‘die-off’ may not be something we can recover from should diseases begin to mutate out of control.

A friend of mine just wrote a novella on such a series of conditions entitled NEW ANIMAL from Broken Tribe Press. While it may be a work of fiction about these kind of changes, and one of many out there where sci-fi author are prophesying disaster, they are worth considering.

I have children. They are the future of this planet. For my generation, nearly every generation preceding mine had made the following generations’ life experience a better one than theirs. Am I going to be part of a generation that makes it worse? And when I say worse, I’m not speaking about just financially. I’m talking about survival.

It’s time we wake up and open our minds, and more importantly our mouths. We are in a very precarious situation right now, and by the time things happen that actually force this kind of correction, we will be in no position to alter course. The time to alter is now.