Print

Earth Day 2021: Hope Illusions and Daunting Realities
By Michael Welch, Cory Morningstar, and Dr. Andrew Glikson
Global Research, April 23, 2021

Url of this article:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/earth-day-2021-hope-illusions-and-daunting-realities/5743405

“We’re here at this summit to discuss how each of us, each country, can set higher climate ambitions that will in turn, create good paying jobs, advance innovative technologies, and help vulnerable countries adapt to climate impacts. We have to move. We have to move quickly to meet these challenges.”

 U.S. President Joe Biden, opening of Virtual climate summit, April 22, 2021 [1]

.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

On Thursday April 22, U.S. President Joe Biden hosted a virtual climate summit attended by 40 other world leaders. [2]

In his opening speech given from the East Room of the White House he earnestly indicated a pledge to rework the country into a new clean economy. He would be devoting efforts to electrifying the system, abandoning oil and gas wells and coal mines and giving workers jobs making electric vehicles, installing and maintaining hundreds of thousands of vehicle charging stations, and engineering and constructing green hydrogen and carbon capture plants. His goal was “to cut greenhouse gases in half, in half by the end of this decade.” [3]

Bold statements, at least judged in relation to his predecessors. [4] But will even that be enough? Reports in this regard are rather disturbing.

According to measurements from the National Snow and Ice Center, from 1978 to 2021, the amount of ice melting at the polar ice cap has melted at a rate of 2.6 per decade, or 39,700 square kilometers. Over the entire 43 year period, that equates to 1.67 million square kilometers – roughly, that’s a loss of sea ice equivalent to the size of the state of Alaska! [5]

In a Siberian-Arctic coast, in the region 150 kilometres north of the Laptev Sea, Russian and Swedish researchers from the ISSS-2000 expedition documented elevated levels of methane at sea level. Methane is a greenhouse gas 80 times greater than carbon dioxide, and there are immense beds of these in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.[6]

Meanwhile, according to a recent report by Ceballos, Ehrlich and Raven in Proceeding of National Academy Sciences, the sixth mass species extinction is accelerating. [7]

For all our annual commitments of fighting climate change, all signs seem to suggest that our species is verging even closer to our biological annihilation. After 50 years in the U.S. since Earth Day was entrenched as an annual ritual, how fundamentally will we have to change our approach in order not to fulfill Einstein’s definition of insanity? The Global Research News Hour hopes to find alternatives to the solutions on offer this past half century.

Our first guest, Cory Morningstar, addresses the question of the role played by the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, how it has increased its grip on those out to protect the Earth, and how the COVID-19 ‘pandemic’ has increased the trend toward environmental action as the Green Billionaires would like to see it.

Our second guest, Dr Andrew Glikson, introduces some of the developments in Climate Science leading us to a more daunting prospect toward climate hope.

Cory Morningstar is an independent investigative journalist, writer and environmental activist, focusing on global ecological collapse and political analysis of what she calls the non-profit industrial complex. She resides in Canada. Her writings can be found on Wrong Kind of Green, The Art of Annihilation, Political Context, Canadians for Action on Climate, Change and Countercurrents.

Dr Andrew Glikson studies Earth and Paleo-climate science, works at Australia National University (ANU) School of Anthropology and Archaeology, ANU Planetary Science Institute, and ANU Climate Change Institute, and is Honorary Associate Professor, Geothermal Energy Centre of Excellence, University of Queensland. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 313)

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

Other stations airing the show:

CIXX 106.9 FM, broadcasting from Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. It airs Sundays at 6am.

WZBC 90.3 FM in Newton Massachusetts is Boston College Radio and broadcasts to the greater Boston area. The Global Research News Hour airs during Truth and Justice Radio which starts Sunday at 6am.

Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in  Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 7pm.

CJMP 90.1 FM, Powell River Community Radio, airs the Global Research News Hour every Saturday at 8am. 

Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday afternoon from 3-4pm.

Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 9am pacific time. 

Notes:

  1. https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/joe-biden-kamala-harris-earth-day-speech-transcript-leaders-summit-on-climate-session-1
  2. https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/22/politics/white-house-climate-summit/index.html
  3. https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/joe-biden-kamala-harris-earth-day-speech-transcript-leaders-summit-on-climate-session-1
  4. https://truthout.org/articles/biden-opens-climate-summit-with-pledge-to-cut-us-emissions-in-half-by-2030/
  5. http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
  6. https://www.pnas.org/content/118/10/e2019672118
  7. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/24/13596
Disclaimer: The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in this article.