By Stephen Fitzgerald
You may have read the AIMN articles Creating conflict, Our best future and Feeding the monster. There is a thread that ties these narratives together. What has been outlined is the state of the world at the moment and where we are headed as a global community. There are two pathways that present themselves for humanities future. One is the marriage between governments and the power brokers controlling fossil fuels and war and the other is a move to a sustainable energy future.
The headlines are shocking beyond belief: There are four warring factions, in Yemen, fighting over 4 billion barrels of oil representing 90% of the country’s exports. For the war machine, arms manufacturers and arms dealers to prosper, you need something to fight over. In the Middle East it’s oil and natural gas. They don’t care about the 85,000 innocent children who have starved to death already, in Yemen. It’s all about money, power and control at any cost to humanity.
There is 1.5 billion barrels of oil and 200 billion cubic metres of natural gas being tapped by Israel. A large proportion of Israel’s fossil fuel wealth lies beneath land under Palestinian control. To suck all that oil out from under the nose of the Palestinians you need conflict and diversion. Once again, the fight for oil and natural gas feeds the global war machine and arms manufacturers. And, makes a few people filthy rich.
The war in Syria. Whoever controls Syria controls 2.5 billion barrels of oil. Once again, it’s the fight for diminishing natural resources that drives these conflicts and once again, it’s the war machine and the oil barons that profit.
So, war and control of depleting oil and gas reserves go hand in hand. There are trillions of dollars to be made from war and fossil fuel. If we transition away from fossil fuel to renewable energy that than takes away the need for warring over oil and natural gas. It also takes away the massive profits from both. Keeping that in mind, against all the scientific evidence, who are most likely to be in climate change denial to protect their own selfish interests?
Anyone associated with profit from fossil fuels and/or the fight for control of fossil fuels will naturally be in climate change denial. It’s where the big money is, and these people don’t care about the outcome or who gets hurt. They don’t care about the death and destruction of societies and the murder of the innocent happening right now in real time.
They most certainly don’t care about what may happen in the future. They don’t care about pending catastrophic climate change and they don’t care about the possible collapse of civilisation as predicted by Sir David Attenborough at the UN climate summit. Those in climate change denial only care about short term profit and screw the planet, screw the rest of us and screw civilisation.
If we let the fossil fuel and war barons drag us down their path to fight over and burn all the fossil fuel on the planet, we won’t have a planet capable of supporting life as we know it. We will have a 9.5 degree increase in average global temperature, melting of the polar ice caps and 200 feet sea level rise, catastrophic and extreme weather events and mass extinction. We may as well have a nuclear war now because, the end result of ignoring climate change will be the same. Destruction of the planet and the collapse of civilisation.
Once again, anyone in climate change denial is all about fossil fuel, war and profit and, what is outlined above is the future they are pushing us towards. It’s catastrophic devastation driven purely by greed. To diffuse this situation, we need a rapid transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. This removes the need for fossil fuel wars and safeguards our fragile global environment. We must immediately remove any government that embraces the war machine and we must remove any conservative government that is not 100% committed to the transition to renewable energy.
It’s our children’s future, it’s our grand-children’s future, it’s the future of the planet and all life is on the line. It’s a fight worth fighting. Clean energy from the sun and the wind and, not fossil fuel wars. It’s a pretty simple choice and one that needs to ripple through the community and across the entire planet. Working together we can pressure a responsible progressive governments and we can change our future for the better.
In the conservative belt it’s really easy to say I’m doing O.K Jack, society is working rather well for my family and myself. Why change what’s working, for us? That’s why it’s called being conservative. It’s O.K. right now but, what about the future for our grand-children and beyond. What about looking further than our own back yard. What about looking at the bigger picture and the overwhelming evidence of where we are headed on our current path. What about the common sense and forward-thinking vision one would expect from educated and dynamic people? What about a shift in thinking and a more bipartisan approach to safeguarding the future?
Conservative versus progressive and fossil fuel wars versus renewable energy are the overriding issues of our time. We can save humanity and the natural world if we put aside our political differences, use our heads, meet in the middle, and get moving on this.
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