Green Leaf Report

  Dr. James Hansen originally spoke in front of a Congressional committee on global warming in 1988.  He’s updated his warning with an eye-opening report on the current risks facing our planet.  The part that keeps running through my mind is where he suggests the heads of fossil fuel companies should be tried for their campaigns of disinformation:

Special interests have blocked the transition to our renewable energy future. Instead of moving heavily into renewable energies, fossil fuel companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, just as tobacco companies discredited the link between smoking and cancer. Methods are sophisticated, including funding to help shape school textbook discussions of global warming.

CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of the long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.

Certainly there have been plenty of warnings and our population is also to  blame for believing those who stand to profit from fossil fuel consumption.  But tobacco companies never actually forced lit cigarettes into anyone’s mouth and they were still found liable for deliberately spreading misinformation and incomplete information.

The biggest thing I have to wonder, though, is whether our civilization is following the WWII example of Germany: As long as my family isn’t harmed, I’ll do what the leaders say.  It doesn’t matter if later reflection shows the murderous immorality of the holocaust; at the time, people followed because they didn’t question, didn’t want to be isolated or separated from the society they knew, and maybe, deep down, believed it must be the correct thing because it was what they heard from leadership.

Maybe this is what is happening now: Our western civilization is continuing down a path of pollution and over-consumption that we know will leave the world in dire straits.  But, maybe if the sea levels rise, maybe it will only affect the poor who don’t have the means to relocate.  Maybe droughts will impact those at the bottom of society, those in undeveloped nations and not the rest of us…Maybe we need to look more closely at ourselves and our capacity to behave morally in the face of needed change.