Here comes the 1000-year dark age
ROY LICHTENSTEIN
Our planet is currently heating up fifty times faster than it has at any point during human civilization. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs doubles its profits and ExxonMobil’s CEO, Rex Tillerson, goes home smiling with a 15% raise – pulling in $40.2 million.
As sea levels rise and the Arctic permafrost begins to bubble, Tillerson announces that ExxonMobil is doubling the acreage it is currently exploring. Shale oil bonanzas are appearing everywhere and Australia’s Arckaringa Basin has $20-trillion worth of recoverable crude reserves – more than Alberta’s tar sands.
As the hunt for more oil and gas escalates, thousands of scientists around the world including dozens of Nobel winners warn us that if we continue doing business as usual, the Earth will experience temperature changes that humanity as we know it simply cannot endure.
Yet despite the math, the evidence, the common sense, most our intellectual elites are still calmly sipping their lattes … reports of record temperatures, unprecedented flooding and forest fires pop up almost daily, but these narratives are somehow disconnected from the larger story of planet Earth in peril. Distracted by fiscal crises, the growth imperative and maintaining power, our Obamas, Harpers, Camerons, Putins and Rudds pass no urgent climate legislation … Big Oil prevails by paying off legislators and funding disinformation campaigns whenever their business model is threatened.
Meanwhile the Federal Reserve keeps pumping $85-billion of stimulus a month into the financial system to keep the capitalist corpse twitching.
It’s a crazy do or die moment we’re living through and the big bang at the end of it may well shock us all.
Remember when unexpected blips started popping up on Wall Street in 2010? The Dow Jones plummeted 600 points only to recover twenty minutes later. It happened again in 2012 when 150 stocks spiraled 10 percent in seconds. And last April 23 the Dow suddenly lost 130 points in two seconds. What triggers these blips? An oil spill? A natural disaster? A rogue algorithm? An errant tweet? A hacker?
Could the mother of all blips be just around the corner? One fine day – maybe tomorrow morning – will this human experiment of ours on planet Earth spiral into the abyss and stay there for a thousand years…?
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