The Race of the Catastrophes

I know a way out, however.

Not long after the Surgeon General’s report on smoking came out, at age six, I asked the mother of one of my best friends if she would stop smoking, so that she would not die. I was in tears. That is my earliest memory of my health and environmental awareness, and my first-grade teacher remarked on my fascination with nature. Smoking has been a subject that I have long written about. I eagerly changed my diet when my family did, when I was 12, to whole food, began a fasting regimen at age 17, went vegan at 20, and I have been a vegetarian since the 1980s. My former partner, Dennis Lee, remarked in a book that the environment was my first love.

After my free-energy revolutionary days, as I hit the books in my radicalized state, I resumed my science studies. In 2007, I began studying in earnest to write what became my big essay on energy and the human journey. My recent essay is kind of my update of it for now.

One issue became very clear during those studies: climate scientists and biologists are in a panic about what humanity is inflicting on Earth today. I recently wrote about my studies in paleology and Earth’s past climate, which has alternated between hot and cold periods over billions of years. I cannot overemphasize that what humanity has done since the 1800s, as burning hydrocarbons has raised the atmosphere’s carbon-dioxide levels by 50%, is likely unprecedented in Earth’s history. Those kinds of changes took millions of years in the past, and humanity has accomplished it in less than two centuries. More than half of the world’s coral reefs have been wiped out in my lifetime – again, a process that has taken millions of years in the past. The megafauna extinctions that the human line began inflicting millions of years ago may well grow into one of Earth’s greatest mass extinctions. Climate scientists and biologists are witnessing it, it terrifies them, and almost nothing is being done about it.

Entire cottage industries are devoted to denying that these unfolding catastrophes are happening, which I recently wrote about. Denying that it is even happening is their first line of defense, and the next is that when it can’t be denied any longer, to deny that humans have anything to do with it.

If there is any “good news” about our profligate burning of fossil fuels, it is that we are fast running out of them. Peak Oil was reached in the USA in 1970 and globally around 2006. We might run out of hydrocarbons before we can turn Earth into a sauna, but the industrial nations won’t go quietly. We have already seen oil-control genocides inflicted or abetted by the USA (East Timor, Iraq), we have overthrown oil-rich governments (Iran, Libya), and World War III over Middle East oil will be on the table before long, if we do not trigger it over Ukraine or another imperial project.

I call that situation the race of the catastrophes, as humanity invites existential disaster on multiple fronts. None of this needs to happen, but unless a tiny fraction of humanity can reach a sufficient level of collective integrity and sentience, only something like an ET intervention will save humanity from itself. Helping the people I seek form that group is what my work is all about. If such an effort works, then all of this insanity can swiftly end. There is not a more important issue on Earth.