BY FR. SHAY CULLEN
LAST THURSDAY, Nov. 30, over 160 world leaders opened the UN Climate Summit in Dubai called COP28. This is perhaps one of the most important of these annual events that bring the world together to avert a growing catastrophic disaster as ever-increasing temperatures are heating up the planet.
This change in the climate is causing growing disasters in every part of the globe. No nation is exempt from this crisis, everybody is being impacted negatively.
The other disaster is how few people in the world know about it or the causes of it. Many ordinary people, 8.1 billion of them, know little about what is happening around them when disasters strike or why. They suffer the impact and feel helpless to stop it as they are powerless.
We can see the evidence of this crisis before our eyes: more frequent and intense typhoons, and storms and devastating floods lasting months in some countries. Then, there is no rainfall and droughts last for months or years, forest and bush fires rage across Europe, Russia, the United States and Australia and the Amazon.
These disasters have destroyed millions of trees and plants and animals that once helped absorb CO2. The CO2 in the atmosphere is constantly increasing and temperatures keep rising.
The rich nations at COP28 have agreed to pay compensation to the poor nations suffering disasters caused by climate change, to prevent more tragedies like landslides and to build barriers to halt rising ocean levels, destruction of property and loss of animals and so on.
It seems the environmentalists are losing the battle to stop the temperature from reaching a tipping point of 1.5 degrees. That could be a point of no return unless all CO2 is removed from the atmosphere and we stop burning fossil fuels.
The causes are rooted in the greed and profiteering of the giant oil corporations and government officials in cahoots with the industrial complex that allows and contributes to global warming. The policies and practices of the global oil, gas and coal industries, mostly in the western countries like US, UK, EU, China, India, Australia, and South American countries, are mostly increasing production and not reducing as they promised to do at previous COP meetings.
Phasing out oil and gas drilling, closing coal mines and shutting down fossil fuel powered-electricity generation plants is economic disaster for the oil, coal and gas industries. This is if they have not invested in the renewable, emission-free CO2 electricity generation alternatives like wind and solar power, hydro and geothermal, tide and wave power generation.
The industrial burning of fossil fuels to produce electricity by burning coal, gas and oil in plants and vehicles is controlled by the financial industry. These are controlled by powerful money moguls, captains of industry, kings of Wall Street, the oligarchs of oil corporations and corrupt government officials that all go to bed dreaming of the billions of dollars they earned.
They wake up from the happy dream ready to fight to save the age of oil and their massive profits. They earned revenues of five trillion dollars in 2022 alone. They fear the encroaching age of renewables and impede its growth. They have only invested a miserly one percent of renewables worldwide. (To be continued)/PN
