The Life Slant - Page 8

SAN FRANCISCO – This week, climate fires, climate floods, climate heatwaves and climate mega-droughts are laying waste to people and Mother Earth.

A mega-drought across America’s West is deepening. In California, a million acres are fallow. Billions of dollars forgone. No mid winter Sierra Nevada snowpack, no spring groundwater recharge, so millions of taps across the Golden State have begun to trickle.

In June amid record U.S. heat, the world’s coal producers announced 432 new coal mines, mostly in China, Australia and Russia. Avarice bankers, oligarchs and the world’s leaders are unconcerned about adding more combustion heat into the biosphere that has become a gigantic land and sea graveyard.

Why is only one day, each year, set aside to pay homage to our Mother Earth? Is it, so that for 364 other days we can turn a blind eye, or worse, rape her with impunity?

Our kith and kin, the animals, are terrified because ghastly man-made heatwaves, climate fires, climate droughts, climate floods and the GDP-driven Age of Extinction are accelerating at breakneck speed. Ladies and gentlemen, we need all the animals, old-growth rainforests, coral reefs, wetlands, salt marshes, mangroves, peatlands, kelp forests and marine grass meadows in-tact to survive and cohabitate on this hallowed blue planet.

The elephant in the room is human consumption and the insatiable fossil fuel and wood pellet combustion energy required to make more. Do you really need more?

We are currently facing massive areas on land and under the sea that are dead. It’s irrefutable and bloody frightening.

Man, the superpredator, is the culprit.

Ten Hiroshima atomic bombs, every second of the year, of fossil fuel heat in the oceans has once again lambasted Australia.  Historic climate floods deluged parts of Queensland and New South Wales.

These god-awful once in 100 years’ floods made the 2011 and 2020 climate floods seem tame. They, too, were deadly.

Fossil fuel stoked global heating has laid waste to the Aussie’s second favorite tree, the wonderful snow gums of the Alps.

Sprawling forest graveyards are strewn across Oz. From the lonely giants of the temperate southwest to the skeletons mangroves of the tropical northeast and along the bare high plains of New South Wales to the boiled ones of northeast Tasmania – it’s bloody grim.

I’ve walked in these eerie, lonesome tree cemeteries and lamented their loss to the nation. How many more millions of acres must we lose of these complex, climate-making, biodiverse hotspots replete with water-rich bastions before governments stop the annual $5.3 trillion in subsidies to the wealthiest and biggest polluters, the fossil fuel industry?

The climate generation (Gen Zs, or under 26s) comprises almost a third of the world’s population. These intrepid kind humans are fighting the climate crisis by ‘taking the rose by the thorn’ and eating plant-based diets to save Mother Earth. Happy dance!

The purchasing power of the Gen Zs is formidable. It exceeds $3 trillion. Recently, the UK’s BOL Foods became an entirely plant-based company with planet-friendly food for the burgeoning Gen Zs vegans. Additionally, that company is now saving 200 metric tons of CO₂ and 1.8 million gallons of water annually.