03 February 2007

Earth Day



It is Seattle coffee in the drip percolator this morning. The Russian stuff has run out, and I will not be re-supplied until next month. It is back to the industrial-sized bags of beans that produce and industrial-size buzz. I am confident that the Seattle name has nothing to do with the beans themselves, which are supposed to be from the highlands of Columbia.

“In Seattle,” It is said, “You haven't had enough coffee until you can thread a sewing machine while it's running.” I know I need a lot of it to get up to speed, and it must be worse where the skies are always gray and the rain is always about to fall.

It is the same, for sure, for the Russian stuff, where it used to be so cold. The stuff I brew actually comes from some refugees in Colorado. Thus, it must be the roast. I can connect the dots as well as anyone.

I just wonder why the Columbians don't roast the stuff themselves, and cut out the middleman? It must use a lot of energy shipping all those beans around the planet. There has to be a smarter way to do all this.

Which is something we need to take a look at, I suppose, since we have a new international holiday. I read about it in the Times this morning, a little edgy from the caffeine. It was the headline quote, “Feb. 2 will be remembered as the date when uncertainty was removed as to whether humans had anything to do with climate change on this planet. The evidence is on the table."

So was my coffee mug. I glared at it, fixing it in place. “Global Warming 'Unequivocal,' said the headline, describing the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in Paris. Not Paris, Texas. The real one. 

Achim Steiner is the executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, seemed to take a grim satisfaction in the report. He was like the dentist who tells you that it is time to finally pay the piper for not flossing better.

He appears to want his own holiday, since the panel did not wait to make the announcement until the 22nd of April, the anniversary of the first Earth Day back in 1970. Maybe they do not consider there to be enough time.

We could have done something sooner. I remember those days. “Up against the wall,” was the phrase of the day, followed by something that is actually printable now, a little trite, but at the time it seemed radical and fresh and a little metaphoric. Now we are all lined up against the wall and, while it is certainly radical, it is definitely not fresh.

It is hard to believe how long it took from wanting to see them lined up to being lined up ourselves. Almost forty years to get our government to accept the notion that there is something major going on.

People are contributing to the climate change, says the report, and we the people have been doing something measurable in that direction since 1950. Trends are going to accelerate and get worse if we do not do something right now. The temperatures are going to keep going up, the seas are going to rise, and the weather patterns are going to shift- already have, if the last few strange winters had not been enough to convince us.

There is a full moon fading into the dawn's early light and it is cold this morning, but the coffee helps me remember just last summer, when the heat lay on us like a wet humid blanket and the air conditioners were running overtime and finally blew out the ancient sub-station and for two days we sweated, windows open, no breeze, hyper-alert, listening to each other sweat in the dark.

Welcome the future. It is so damned ambiguous. I got a nice letter in the mail yesterday from Dominion Electric, who informed me breathlessly that I will be sweating a lot more if I do not support a new a new 500,000-volt  (500 kV) transmission line through the Civil War battlefields to the west. The company tells me we are running on the ragged edge here, and my comfort depends on driving 150 towers across the rolling green hills of Prince William, Loudoun and Fauquier counties to West Virginia.

I threw the letter away, forgetting that they do not re-cycle the contents of the trashcan in front of the mailboxes in the lobby. The postman loads up the boxes, and then we unload them, putting almost everything in the trash. We could cut out the middleman, I'm sure, and just have the delivery guy trash the stuff for us.

I contribute to a fund that attempts to conserve the last of the unspoiled areas where they fought, so that someone after me will be able to imagine what it might have been like to stand in a line and march into the muzzle of a cannon over some abstract idea. But suppose it means that an unspoiled site-line means I will be left in the dark with no ice-maker?

They may as well have put out signs of welcome for the future down in central Florida yesterday. Twisters spawned by angry thunderstorms ripped through there, killing nineteen as the tight mad spirals blew double-wide trailers apart like God's improvised explosives.

It has been thirty-seven years since the first earth day. We knew something was going wrong then, but we allowed ourselves to be lulled into complacency, that it was somehow about esthetics, and not a species struggle of life and death, Mother Nature red in tooth and claw.

I think we can learn, and I think we can act, if we are forced to confront reality. The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq proves that. It took only months to coordinate a community-wide position that the situation is going to shit, that it is not a civil war there, it is a veritable kaleidoscope of multi axis inter-sectarian murder, accelerating in pace and scope.

It was refreshing to hear quiet Bob Gates describe the four wars going on in Iraq from the podium in the Pentagon. I have held charts there, describing the progress of other wars. This one, it appears, is “Shia killing Shia, then Shia murdering Sunni, and vice versa, in Baghdad, and the insurgency, and of course, the original bad guys who were not part of Saddam's Iraq, Al Qaida.”

I'm paraphrasing, of course, since I count five wars there, or six or more if you select those parties who periodically decided to kill Americans first.

So, connecting the dots on that, I was gratified to find that my back-of-the envelope estimates of the defense budget for this year was pretty close. The announcement of the budget request was in the paper, too right along with the climate and war. It is a base budget request plus supplemental funds amounting to $622 billion for FY-08. There is an additional request for FY-07, the year we are currently spending, just shy of another hundred billion.

Don't get me wrong. I support the defense establishment, so long as they are pointed in the right direction, and I want the troops to have the lethality they need to accomplish the mission. I believe in aircraft carriers, and fighter jet and submarines. I belie that if there was an honest accounting, the total for what we are going to spend to flex our muscles will be around a trillion dollars a year.

Believe it or not, as titanic as that amount appears to be, it is the smallest percentage we have spent since World War Two, measured against gross domestic product.

But I ask you honestly over this last cup of Seattle's finest: when do we start spending some serious cash on what we have done to Mother Earth? If we do not settle down and act rationally, we may not have that many more comfortable days left.

I am going to make another pot of coffee and write someone a strong letter.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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