The Awesomizer

Listening to the radio this morning, yet again in my car (if we had mass transit, the Awesomizer might not exist), I heard several reports, stories, etc., on the environment because of the current Copenhagen summit. What caught my ear this morning, however, was a conversation about how the discussions of the environment, carbon emissions, global warming, greenhouse gasses are all economically based …

Holy crap, I had never noticed that before, but they are totally right. It IS all economically based … at least the substantive discussions, the ones that could actually lead to something that might have an impact on the environment. Of course there are all of the hippies, tree huggers, earth lovers, bleeding hearts and such who are screaming at the tops of their lungs about how there is a different kind of impact … you know, to people and animals and plants and stuff … but in the defense of the large corporations that are doing the most damage to the environment, it’s really hard to hear individuals yelling over the grinding of the gears of industry and the heavy machinery that is destroying the rain forests.

However, the yelling of cold, hard cash is easy to hear over the din, and actually makes sense to industry. So in some ways it is good that the bulk of the discussion is about economic concerns … how much will it COST to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? What will the impact be on our BOTTOM LINE?

The sad fact of the matter, though, is the bleeding hearts and tree huggers and hippies are really the ones concerned about what matters about the situation. because when it comes down to it, how much does money matter when we can’t breathe anymore? Or when our shorelines are flooded? Or when our current systems of agriculture are not able to provide food in the same way they were able to when the globe was not too warm?

It might just be me, but who gives a F%&K about money when our actual survival is on the line? Which might seem a little drastic or over the top or reactionary or whatever, and this might not be anything that any of us will have to worry about in our lifetimes …

… but that, to me, is just the argument that you would expect from outright human arrogance … “it won’t impact my life, so why should I care?” Which is what has gotten us into this mess to begin with. We want more, bigger, better, faster … money, products, conveniences, automobiles, you name it. We are willing to have children slaves in international waters make our tennis shoes to save and/or make a buck … we are willing to genetically engineer our crops and livestock beyond recognition (and have our livestock live in completely abysmal conditions) to save and/or make a buck … and we are willing to rape the land for everything we can burn or process to burn to make fuel to drive the machinery that allows all of these other things to happen …

… To make and/or save a buck.

But our arrogance as human beings (that which is probably our one defining characteristic … F%&K ingenuity or industriousness or whatever you want to call it … we’re F$%*ING arrogant) keeps us from being able to just sit back and admit, “hmmmm, maybe we are screwing ourselves over in a bit, and no matter what the costs or impact to our bottom lines, maybe we SHOULD do something about it.”

But we won’t, as the arrogant sons-a-bitches we are, and we will continue to drag our feet and try to figure out the most money-saving way to GIT’R'DONE!, while we continue to belch smoke into the atmosphere and dump toxic waste wherever we can.

And we turn to the juggernaut of SCIENCE to back ourselves up … because no matter how conclusively scientists prove that the icecaps ARE melting and the globe IS warming, some jackhole can call up to a show and spout some bull$h!t like “it’s a scientifically proven fact that the globe has been warming consistently for the past 20,000 years, sine the ICE AGE, so global warming is a heap of horse manure.”

Okay, science is flawed, we all know this … or we should. Science is not the ANSWER to our problems, it is a way to try to FIND an answer to our problems, and it is as flawed as anything else. It is a constant process of refutation and revision … of hypothesis testing and theory generation …

… THEORY generation. That is an important thing to keep in mind. Of course some theories are more solid than others, and we can actually claim to have proven some things … but when we are dealing with a question about what the temperatures were 10,000 years ago or 5,000 years ago, can we really be sure?

This is where common sense should come in for how we attempt to solve our problems now … sure science may tell us certain things about trends in global temperatures and weather patterns and such, but really … shouldn’t we also just open our F%&*ING eyes and take a look at what is happening?

Doesn’t common sense tell us that if we clear-cut thousands of acres of rain forest and suck all the oil out of the Earth and burn it, and send coal smoke belching out of thousands of smokestacks (or hundreds of thousands), and pave over the Earth, and pollute the oceans and the lakes and build and destroy and blah, blah, blah that WE MIGHT ACTUALLY BE DOING SOME KIND OF DAMAGE THAT SCIENCE HASN’T “DISCOVERED” YET?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

I’d say that’s a real possibility … but if it costs too much to fix, or if we can point to “science” that says we’re not doing any damage at all, why bother worrying about it.

We’d be too arrogant to admit it anyway.