Climate fate

I was sitting in the waiting room when you flashed across the screen

A heatwave smothered India and you were on the scene.

As you tried to cross the street, your shoe stuck to the road

So you ran on scorched bare feet, as the black tar slowly flowed.

Where there once were straight white lines, a crazy pattern morphed and swirled,

As if a giant with a paintbrush splashed out and dwarfed the world.

You long for cooling rain, but the monsoon will be late.

And this is how some people face their climate fate.

You’re a woman of Maharashtra; farm life is what you know.

With the earth so cracked and bare, nothing green can grow.

As the debt piles up for the chemicals and seed,

As you wonder how to fill the many mouths you have to feed,

As you turn to your husband to say somehow you will cope,

You see in his eyes there’s no more room for hope.

Your nightmare just gets worse, the day you lose your mate.

And this is how some people face their climate fate.

You’ve lived in Karachi all of your life,

There with your kids, your parents, your wife.

Last year the heatwave rolled in and swept a thousand lives away,

Overwhelmed the morgue, corpses left out to decay.

This time you swear you will be ready and not have to face that smell

Of those left to rot in the very place they fell.

So you dig out mass graves and pray for rain while you wait.

And this is how some people face their climate fate.

When Sandy struck New York, you’d left for somewhere calm.

Flew back when it was over, once you knew you’d meet no harm.

Another super-storm to hit won’t be so inconvenient,

Even if next time, Mother Nature is less lenient,

For you’ve bought yourself a condo with rooms sealed water-tight,

Floodgates, pumps, power and emergency light.

So you gamble on oil stocks, knowing you’ll be all right mate.

And this is how some people face their climate fate.

References:

Independent: India's roads melt as record-breaking heatwave continues 

New Indian Express: Farmer Suicides

Reuters: Pakistan digs mass graves

This Changes Everything (in Facing the Anthropocene)

When the climate comes for you

Past sick sadistic tyrants made each victim dig their grave,

Mowed them down without mercy, in wave after wave.

But now heat is the trigger set for the many by the few

Will you be ready when the climate comes for you?

In Karachi they’ll be ready when the tide of death rolls in

When the poor and frail fall prey to the oil barons’ sin.

This time the corpses won’t lie rotting, morgues overfull anew –

Will you be ready when the climate comes for you?

Mass graves are dug as the local people wonder

Who will die and who, survive, the planetary plunder.

Will the very ones who dig the graves be swallowed by them too?

Will you be ready when the climate comes for you?

From the heatwave of South Asia to the drought of California,

First the scientists spoke up – now Mother Nature’s out to warn ya.

Burning coal and oil and gas, releasing all that CO₂,

Will you be ready when the climate comes for you?

A new epoch is upon us; climate chaos, the new normal.

As we strive to cope, we’d better make people’s power structures formal.

Bury this greed-driven system, before it buries you.

Will you be ready when the climate comes for you?

Oil giants, warmongers, banksters, you who profit from disasters,

We’re not content to count the dead, and have you stay as masters.

Grave-diggers for each other, or for the filthy illthy few?

Will you be ready when the people come for you?

Reference:

Reuters article 

100% renewable energy - needed now more than ever

As South Asia swelters through a record-breaking heatwave, with reports of hundreds of lives lost in India (on top of hundreds of farmer suicides this year owing to crop failures due to drought), a May 20 report by Reuters that Pakistanis were digging mass graves in preparation for heatwave-related deaths brings into sharp focus the grim situation we are in. Climate change is here, and the people of the underdeveloped nations least responsible for it are among those hardest hit and least able to withstand its impacts.

In August, geologists will decide whether to formally adopt the designation “Anthropocene” to mark the Earth having entered a new geological epoch. Whether or not they do, it’s a term that is in wide use among earth system scientists, owing to the impact human society is having, not just on local ecosystems, but on earth systems as a whole – biodiversity, chemical cycles, freshwater, land use, ocean acidity, climate and more.

As Ian Angus documents in his new book “Facing the Anthropocene,” humans’ impact on earth systems and in particular, climate, stem from the explosive growth in fossil fuel use driven by the US oil giants, car manufacturers and military, along with the growth in suburban living, road and shopping mall construction, and changing (fossil-fuel dependent) agricultural practices.

After the Pleistocene epoch with its recurring Ice Ages, in which humans first developed, it was the last 11,500 years, the warmer Holocene epoch, that made agriculture, fixed settlement and civilisation possible.

Graphic taken from ice-core data study by Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

The determinants of global temperature and climate (in particular, greenhouse gas concentrations) have now reached levels beyond those of both the holocene and pleistocene, so that we are on course for a chaotic global climate regime outside anything we know for sure can support the agriculture on which most of the 7 billion humans now living depend.

Graphic from NASA http://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/24/

Whether or not it is possible to return to the relative climate stability of the holocene will depend on how quickly we can reduce our greenhouse gas emissions (mainly carbon dioxide and methane, but others too) to zero and remove the excess that has built up in the air and oceans.

To stabilise the climate, or failing that, to make the inbuilt inevitable climate changes slow enough to have a chance to minimise loss of life and social disruption, we need to treat climate change as the emergency it is and make a rapid transition away from fossil fuel use. Halting deforestation and increasing the amount of land that is covered by forests will be another essential component.

Environmental think-tank Beyond Zero Emissions produced a report in 2010 showing that using commercially available technology, Australia could transition to meet all our stationary power needs from renewable sources within a ten-year time-frame, for a cost of around $37 billion a year. Under the plan, 60% of electricity would come from concentrating solar thermal plants that allow the sun’s heat to be stored overnight and converted to electricity continuously; 40% from wind generators; and a small proportion from rooftop solar, existing hydro and burning crop residues to supply back-up when solar and wind wasn’t enough.

What this shows is that there is no technical reason to keep using fossil fuels for electricity generation.

More capital is invested in fossil fuel infrastructure than in any other industry, with a 2011 UN report estimating existing fossil fuel and nuclear power infrastructure at U$15-20 trillion, with big oil alone making over US$650 billion in profits between 2001 and 2008. The bulk of the global economy – from transport and construction to agrochemicals, synthetic textiles and the biggest single greenhouse gas emitter, the military – is dependent on cheap oil for power and on petrochemicals for inputs.

With the fossil fuel industry’s economic clout comes political power, and so far this political power has been used to resist every measure to curb fossil fuel extraction and use.

Rational argument by the world’s most informed scientists hasn’t been enough to convince the decision-makers of the coal, oil and gas giants to voluntarily stop holding a blow-torch to the planet; nor to persuade the political leaders of the LNP, ALP or Greens, to go beyond what is palatable.

It will take a groundswell of action by the majority – a mass movement of concerned people prepared to defend current and future generations from the devastation of run-away climate change – to break the power of the fossil fools over our economic and political life, to create a new grassroots democracy and to begin to make the transition to a sustainable economy based on renewable energy.

Socialist Alliance seeks to work with others to build such a grassroots, mass movement.

Originally published at Green Left Weekly.