At the bottom of the food chain - what we all need to live

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Posted on November 1, 2006
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality, Ecology of war and peace

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

I wanted to emphasize something that Nicholas Kristof writes about in the Op-Ed that I included in last night’s post.  He describes an aspect of the natural carbon cycle, how carbon dioxide (CO2) is absorbed by the ocean waters, producing carbonic acid, “the same stuff found in soda pop.”

Too much of this stuff begins to kill off ocean life, including phytoplankton, those ubiquitous organisms that are at the bottom of the food chain, the foundational source of all marine life.  Let’s see, what happens on the gallows when you open the trap door on which stands the person whose neck is in the noose?

Thus, the importance of phytoplankton.

The death of plankton means more than the death of marine life (which alone jeopardizes the lives of hundreds of millions of people who depend upon it).  Those little critters are also a major ’sink’ for CO2.  As the plankton die-off, one of those pesky little ‘positive feedback loops’ will be created — the exponential acceleration of global heating as more CO2 collects in the atmosphere.

Scientists worry about these feeback loops a lot because, at a certain tipping point, they become irreversible.

“In the United States,” reports the NY Times on Monday, “annual federal spending for all energy research and development…is less than half what it was a quarter century ago.  It has sunk to $3 billion a year in the current budget [which is less than one week’s worth of spending on the Iraq war - my edit] from an inflation-adjusted peak of $7.7 billion [which is less than 2 weeks of spending on the Iraq war].

Or we could compare these numbers to the bloated defense budget which is about to hit an all-time peak of $500 billion - not including the Iraq war, running at more than $200 billion per year right now.

I recommend going to the BBC web page that I linked to last evening and to take the time to watch the video of Sr. Nicholas Stern delivering his report on climate change and the catastrophes that await us.   Then, if you really want to hang your heads in despair, go visit the new climate change website at the US government’s Environmental Protection Agency.

Light bulbs?  Recycling?  Voluntary programs?  The onus is on you, folks, to turn your heat down, replace your light bulbs, and stop buying those SUVs for which the government continues to provide subsidies and tax breaks.  But don’t expect your government to join you with carbon taxes or carbon caps or mandatory emissions standards (as in California) or any burden on corporations.  Those corporate money politicians that run your government tell you that such things will hurt the economy.

Talk about fiddling while Rome burns…  How much will the economy ‘hurt’ as the world descends into climate catastrophe?

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