Counter Climate Change Under the One Percent Regime

An independent report commissioned by 20 countries in 2012 to study the human and economic costs of climate change, the study wrote that it: “linked 400,000 deaths worldwide to climate change each year, projecting deaths to increase to over 600,000 per year by 2030 Heat waves kill many, to be sure, but global warming also devastates food security, nutrition, and water safety. Since mosquitoes and other pests thrive in hot, humid weather, scientists expect diseases like malaria and dengue fever to rise. Floods threaten to contaminate drinking water with bacteria and pollution. When the report looked at the added health consequences of burning fossil fuels – aside from climate change – the number of deaths jumped from 400,000 to almost 5 million per year. Carbon-intensive economies see deaths linked to outdoor air pollution, indoor smoke from poor ventilation, occupational hazards, and skin cancer.”

In his book, “Age of Sustainability, Mr. Jeffrey Sachs said, “Like all living species, humanity depends on nature for food and water, material for survival, and safety from dire environmental threats, such as epidemics and natural catastrophes. Yet for a species that depends on the beneficence of nature, or on what the scientists call ‘environmental services,’ we are doing a poor job of protecting the physical basis of our very survival! The gigantic world economy is creating a gigantic environmental crisis, one that threatens the lives and well-being of billions of people and the survival of millions of other species on the planet if not our own.”

It now must dawn upon all of us that the real culprit and threat to humanity is climate change but such truism is being hidden through media collusion in cohort with powerful corporations. Through the use of fossil fuel alone and coal, some 19 fossil corporations are earning some 16 trillion dollars a year or 10 million dollars every minute and part of this raking goes to the media, the politicians, and religious groups. Let notice be served to one and all that climate change is a crime against Mother Earth, humanity, and the Creator during these most challenging times of moral collapse and religious. apathy. The pandemic called COVID-19 is indeed a wake-up call! By the Creator to awaken humanity that is still in deep slumber.

Indeed, the word development has been abused and mangled beyond recognition. Everything is done in its name and everyone claims to be doing just that, yet, the day-to-day life of the people speaks that it is not so. The regime of one percent whose total wealth is far greater compared to the combined assets of the ninety-nine percent of the world’s population has wrought havoc whose economic paradigm on corporate globalization is putting the earth on the precipice of its 6th extinction. Not only is that horrible regime killing Mother Earth through climate change but its dysfunctional control has built a military arsenal that can kill the 7.2 billion people 40 times over. That regime has gained so much wealth through massive manufacturing of armaments and if a US President would stop a war like what the late President John F. Kennedy did in the sixties in stopping the Vietnam War, he would be assassinated. A US Congressional hearing two years ago disclosed that it was not Lee Harvey Oswald who assassinated Kennedy but the assassination was done through the secret conspiracy of the FBI and CIA in connivance with big corporations manufacturing armaments as these corporations were earning then more than 500 billion dollars annually through the Vietnam War.

That heavy money-making continued during the Iraqi War as these corporations were the ones supplying the armaments of the two warring factions. When the ISIS brothers who were then taking PhD in the US knew of this horrible truism, they did not finish their scholarship but instead went back to Iraq and formed the ISIS combatants against the US whom they described as an “evil empire.”.

The kind of development being pursued by the one percent regime is so dysfunctional it is accelerating and intensifying, not only against human beings but against nature. It can be likened to the workings of an auto-immune disease syndrome (AIDS), where no less than the body’s defense mechanisms are attacking vital organs. We decimate our forests, we pollute our rivers and bays, and we produce food yet contaminate our water table following costly agricultural technologies tied up to the heavy use of toxic chemicals, modern living means adopting a lifestyle that what makes of a throw-away society – all done in the name of development.

That kind of development can only be described as ruthless and futureless which has made the impossible now possible, which is the end of life on earth. Biodiversity embracing billions of life forms has tremendously decreased as these life forms which have evolved on earth for billions of years are now extinct. As the earth warms and the oceans rise, we are now confronted with how to feed, clothe, and house the exponentially growing earthlings that will reach the 9.3 billion mark by 2050.

Mahatma Gandhi put it more succinctly when he said, “If man has to be saved from doom, development must be in harmony with nature and not at its own expense.” A Lumad leader was even more precise when he said, “Only when you have cut the last tree, only when you have caught the last fish, only when you have dried the last river, only then will you realize that you cannot eat your money.”