"DID NOT! DID TOO!" or Clean up on Aisle Oh Crap!

(As a side note before we start the main rant, let me state that I have officially given up arguing about Climate Change as a subject for Let. People ranting “See see it was all lies” just because it happens to get cold. Others claiming that the “Polar Vortex” is something made up by Climate Changers when the term and the effect have been in various text books and research tomes since the 1960s at least. People denying scientific evidence produced that supports Climate Change because it is being influenced by people out to make a buck or three while clinging to research that supports their dementia while ignoring the undeniable fact that 90% of their so called facts are bought and paid for by Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Industry. It is the best example of Cognitive Dissonance that I have ever seen and Brother, I have seen some beauts in my 50 years. So rail on and keep posting silly sound bites from Faux News or Good Old Rush Limbaugh. Keep getting your facts from “experts” like Donald Trump. I will snigger at you from not so behind your back and move on with my life. Okay now that we have that out of the way, onward and downward in a death dealing spiral!)

So ad oftentimes happens, there ensued on Facebook the past two days a rather lively that was prompted by this link: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/01/07/260438987/50-years-after-landmark-warning-8-million-fewer-smoking-deaths? Like it often does, the talk spread widely out from the original subject and somehow meandered its way over the subject of Climate Change and Pollution. One Friend who we lovingly call Mac©T posted this comment.

“i don't think that we are "Causing" climate change, but I do think that we are playing a big part in it. We pump gazillions of tons of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the air every year and cut down thousands of acres of trees that would help filter it. People can argue that volcanoes pump out more and stuff like that but it doesn't matter if other things do More because we still do a lot. We don't want to take the blame for the damage we are doing so we point out fingers to other things to try and disguise the poop we are putting out. or even worse, we use the things other people are doing to justify us not doing anything. "China pumps out more poisons then we do so why should we have to do anything?" That is a dumb argument because even if we are number 10, we are still poisoning our world. We need to stop making excuses and start fixing things because we only have one planet right now and we have nowhere to go when it is a toilet. “

You can well see why we consider her a very clever and wise young woman who always livens up any thread she happens to participate in. Another friend of mine who we label as TC came back with his own rebuttal to Ma©T's statement.

“Nothing wrong with being responsible, but here in the US, we are only a few hundred million. There's another 5 or 6 billion folks on this world, most of which are doing little to nothing about their own carbon footprint. Meanwhile, ours gets smaller just about every year. Every year, we use less gas and less power as a nation, and less resources on ourselves, while expanding more resources toward feeding more people worldwide. I got no problem with responsibility, but the majority are not being held accountable. I do have a problem with that. If we are going down this road globally, we all need to go the same way, not just a few of us carrying the rest. All or nothing. Parity. I see precious little of that.
As to the whole global warming thing, Ma©T, we know for certain a few things. We know our planet has hot and cold cycles, and has for millions of years. There's plenty of geologic evidence of that. Can we make it worse? Good question. I'm suspicious when the folks who came up with the theory in the first place, folks way more knowledgeable than me, say that the whole thing's been blown out of proportion. I'm even more suspicious when the government tries to make money off it, and seize more power because of it.
Can we make a difference? IMHO, only if the other 70% of the planet does the same things we are doing. Otherwise, it's a wasted effort. Hopefully, I'm wrong. “

(Before I continue, let me state that I love TC like a brother and think he is a highly intelligent person so I am not mocking him in anyway. Well maybe just a little because he still has an incredible head of hair and I have long since lost the battle of the bald but that is just being petty.)

TC's comment, in a nutshell (and in many cases I do mean Nut.) is precisely what is wrong with our attitude about cleaning up our messes. The attitude towards cleaning up the air and the land/water is downright pre-school in mentality. It is overwhelmingly this, “Well China and India aren't doing enough to clean up the world so we shouldn't do it either.” Basically, the mindset is that if other developing nations are doing their utmost to curb pollution levels, then the US should get a free pass too. I mean, as TC points out there are only a few hundred million of us so we don't make much of a difference.

Course the problem with this mentality is that the US isn't alone. A lot of other countries are also doing everything they can to curb pollution. Canada, the UK, Australia, Germany are just a few of the nations working on cleaning up their acts. Efforts are being made world wide to finally stop treating our world like a toilet.

People who are against doing more to help the world clean up are like a small child who is playing in a pool with other kids. He sees little China taking a dump in the pool and little India taking a dump in the pool and feels satisfaction because the dump he just took in the pool is much smaller. Never mind that he is still crapping in the pool.

Every single bit of crap we pump into our environment does damage to it. Every bit of CO2 we pump into the air hurts us. Every bit of trash we dump into our oceans hurts us. Maybe we can't stop other countries from crapping in the pool, we can can darned well make sure we stop doing it. TC is right in that we are polluting far less today then we were even 20 years ago. Our air is cleaner and so is our water. This happened because people struggled for years to stop chemical waste from being pumped into our rivers by factories and massive amounts of Carbon Monoxide, CO2 and Sulfur from being pumped into the air. It happened because emission controls were placed on fuels to make polluters like old style Diesel cleaner. Our country is cleaner because a small group of people fought against the tide and made change happen.

We still have a long way to go. There are massive areas in our oceans and seas where absolutely no life exists because run off from massive industrial style farms have pump tons of herbicides and insecticides into the rivers which flowed to the sea. These Hypoxic areas can stretch 1000s of miles and within those zones no life exists. There are islands in the world that are literally covered by metric tons of trash washed there by currents after countries like the US dumped the garbage into the waters. There are massive zones of ocean and sea where garbage floats for hundreds of miles. So we still have a lot of work to do.

Talking about space travel or even dimensional doors is fine, but D-Doors are still the work of Science Fantasy and true space travel where you can move large numbers of people is still a long way in the future. If we don't keep working at cleaning up the only planet we currently have access to, then we won't be around when these things happen.

End of Rant