Barnaby
The ONLY solution.
Currently our world is driven by exploitation and greed, and this is nowhere more obvious than in the destruction of our own ecological environment. The very basis on which we live and survive is being destroyed largely for political and corporate profit. We see many pictures from space satellites of the diminishing forests around the world, and coupled with pollution, the changes that this is causing, not only to the local areas where the action takes place, but everywhere on Earth. It is as though the world, like in the old cartons, is sitting on the limb of a tree and cutting it off behind itself. As laughable as it may seem, it is that stupid!
Hundreds of millions of years ago, the atmosphere of the world was unbreathable and would not support any animal life as we know it. As plant life emerged, by absorbing the poisonous components of the atmosphere it slowly transformed it into the oxygen rich gas that we know today. The carbon dioxide content was locked away in a biomass that slowly fossilised and became coal and oil, where for aeons it lay buried and dormant. We are now in the process of unlocking this again and releasing it back into the atmosphere once more, with already disastrous consequences. That the situation will get worse, there is no doubt, and scientists argue only about ‘the rate of change’. It is quite possible that the world could reach a ‘tipping point’ where the changes suddenly leap forward totally out of control, and the entire human race and every living creature could be facing an extinction. It has already happened three times in the world’s history and, and one of those was attributed to an atmospheric pollution by volcanic activity over a prolonged period of time. How far are we ourselves off such a calamity? The world in its entire history has never seen an event like humanity, that is capable of changing the entire conditions for life in such a short time span. And we call ourselves the most intelligent species!
Only recently are people becoming aware of the problem, with the media taking up the cudgels at last and governments starting to acknowledge and worry about the consequences. Al Gore and Richard Branson have made it a personal crusade, even going so far as to offering large cash prizes for any solution that will clean the atmosphere.
From a point of view of sheer physics, this is an impossible task. Carbon dioxide can be cleaned out of the atmosphere in small amounts by ‘dry ice’ factories, but once you have removed it, what do you do with it. It is a volatile substance that is only known naturally in two forms, solid or gas. There is NO liquid state! There are schemes to clean smoke emissions and
pump the results underground, but that technology is many years away, even if it is possible. To chemically recapture the gas and convert it into a permanent solid state will take more energy than it released it the first place when it was burnt, so that is obviously self defeating. Add to that the fact that we are rapidly destroying the only filter we have for reducing this deadly gas, and that is our forests. We are clearing them at an unprecedented rate.
Each tree represents a biomass of carbon that is permanently locked up for the life of the tree. By cutting them down, one way or another, we then release the carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere, and in doing so, we have also reduced the natural filtering action that is attempting to handle the ever increasing amount of pollution that we are still releasing by other methods. To substitute small trees for large also substantially reduces this biomass and is not a creditable argument, especially when plantation material is designed for reharvesting in a very short time.
There is ONLY ONE SOLUTION. Apart from reducing further emissions, whether we like it or not, and at whatever cost, we must immediately stop cutting down the lungs of the planet. The corporate and government pleas and scare tactics involving ‘thousands of jobs at stake’ must be seen as sheer profiteering at everybody’s expense. There is alternative employment available in reconstructing and saving the planet, as well as in tourism, etc. If the much vaunted and obviously untrue quantity of job losses is the price we have to pay, then so be it. By losing ten thousand jobs, we may just be saving six billion lives!
Barnaby Drake.
