BY FR. SHAY CULLEN
WE HAVE to change, the world has to change, and the humans that are controlling the oil, gas, and coal industries and power plants have to change. They are the root cause of the CO2 in the atmosphere that is causing the planet to overheat. Immediate evidence of this is the present heat waves that are overwhelming parts of the world.
The news is so disturbing. Sometimes I don’t want to read about the devastating drought in stricken Somalia and Sudan, Mozambique, Iran, Morocco, and elsewhere in Europe and the United States. If you are a denier of climate change, the summer heat waves may convince you that the world is heating. We can’t hide from that truth.
More devastating floods in China and Bangladesh are ecological disasters, homes destroyed, animals drown and millions of creatures in the natural world die, crops are destroyed. The burning forest fires in Portugal is another ecological disaster. It is heart-wrenching to watch the flames endangering more of the massive two-thousand-year-old sequoia trees in Yosemite National Park or in California’s Sequoia National Park. In two years, forest fires destroyed 14,000 sequoia trees in California which is 20 percent of the world’s greatest tree. I have been to Muir Woods to see the giant redwood trees, they are truly awe-inspiring.
We can rightly blame their losses on human greed and selfishness and profligate lifestyles that are based on consuming electric energy coming from burning fossil fuels, gas, oil, and coal. Everyone must demand an end to these industries and replace them with renewable energy: wind, solar, geothermal, and/or wave-generated electricity.
Many continue to deny that we humans are causing global warming and that we humans are responsible for the heating of the planet and the destruction of nature. The resulting fires, floods, loss of habitat to forest destruction, and human activities are warming the globe and driving millions of creatures into extinction. Why are we so destructive of the natural world when we are a part of it and depend on it?
Money moguls and tycoons want profits from buying and selling destructive fossil fuels. Corrupt politicians are benefiting, too. In many countries, while lauding the change to renewable energy, they are approving payments of taxpayers’ money to the rich oil and coal companies to explore and produce more fossil fuels. Most of the G7 governments pay out as much as $775 billion to $1 trillion every year in subsidies to oil, coal, and gas companies. Their ulterior motive is to please their voters and get corporate funding for reelection campaigns. Most likely, the politicians have investments in the corporations, gross hypocrisy which makes them like white tombs of the dead, looking clean on the outside but rotten and corrupt within.
An important study by the International Monetary Fund in 2015 shows that the collateral damage and unpaid costs of the production of coal, oil, and gas fossil fuels are amounting to as much as $5.3 trillion annually or payouts of $10 million per minute for these companies. If this money was invested in alternative clean energy sources such as wind, solar, geo-terminal, hydro, and tide generation, the climate crises would be solved. (To be continued)/PN
