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by Peter A. Belmont / 2015-12-10
© 2015 Peter Belmont
There are a lot of dangers out there. And for some of them, guns can sure come in handy.
For one thing, there are criminals out there with guns. And if you buy yourself a gun (or yet another gun), you can hope that—if you are attacked by a gun-slinger—you will be able to pull out your own gun and have a shoot-out like those staged in all those old western movies, or like those real shoot-outs in all the current middle-eastern wars! Be prepared! That’s the ticket!
But since you are a climate change denier, I know one thing you are not scared of are the end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it prognostications of the climate change asserters. No, indeed! You know for sure that they are wrong and that the climate will remain hunky-dunky for as long as matters to you, or to your children, or to theirs—if, of course, you care about such things as future generations.
It follows that you know, and somehow you know for certain, that you don’t need guns to protect yourself from on-rushing climate change. All the predicted fires, flooding rivers, droughts (you know, like the drought they’re having now in California), rising sea levels, reduction in snowfall leading to a reduction of river water available for farming, general water scarcity, general food scarcity, vastly destructive storms and sea-shore flooding, and so forth, just ain’t a-gonna happen. No siree! Not a chance. Gosh, I wish I could be as sure of anything as you are about this.
But here’s an interesting thing. Even though you are certain that climate change is a hoax, a fraud, a political trick, a mistake, or whatever, a lot of people, indeed, most of the people in the world who think and read, believe that it is real. That’s why the governments of the world went to Paris in early December, 2015, to talk about what to do to head-off climate change. And the signs are that—as governments usually do—they will decide not to do much. Not to do enough.
For example, they will decide not to go on a crash program of spending to replace all the world’s electric generation plants that burn coal or oil or gas with “green” technology such as wind-generators and solar-cells—at least not to do so fast enough to have the job done by 2025 or 2030.
And the idea that rich nations like the USA will get up another “Marshall Plan” to lend (or give) money to poor countries to help them do what must be done is just plain silly! A non-starter! Even though all climate change asserters assert that climate change is a global problem, the politicians will surely continue to cut off their noses to spite their faces by refusing to help poor countries do what must be done, in their view, to save the planet and civilization.
Why, you may ask, are politicians not going to do much? It’s not because they don’t believe in climate change—because they do believe, they really do!
No, it’s because they are politicians, and they do what politicians do. Politicians dither. Politicians fight each other. Politicians pretend to listen but don’t really understand complex non-political issues—like climate change’s causes and what must be done to avert some of it. And politicians don’t have patience to learn what they need to learn. And, of course, politicians give in to political pressure—in this case pressure from coal and oil and gas producers, from automobile and aircraft manufacturers, from airlines, from the defense industrial complex and the military, all of which want to keep things going as they are going today, without disturbance, come what may. (“Come what may” means “though the heavens should fall.”)
Politicians also prefer to serve their ruling ideologies rather than to do their jobs. That’s why even after 2008 we still have banks too-big-to-fail, and they’re bigger and more dangerous today than they were then. And still not really regulated.
And, oh yes, politicians really, really hate to raise taxes, especially on corporations and the rich, even though it is precisely corporations and the rich which have enough money to pay serious taxes with! The same politicians in the USA who quite blithely spent $1T for a really useless and unnecessary war in Iraq (which has now generated the ISIS war in Syria and Iraq) are not willing to spend $1T for something useful and necessary—to fight climate change! Amazing. But it is hard to teach an old dog new tricks.
And so, climate change deniers, in a way, your “side” will win, because both the deniers like you and the tepid believers, like most politicians, will join forces to see to it that we—the people of the earth—do little or nothing to avert climate change.
The politicians will keep talking “climate change” but they will not do what it takes to avert it, and the world will continue, business-as-usual, just as you and the other climate change deniers would wish.
So what about guns, you ask.
Well, I hate to tell you, but I do believe in climate change. And I believe that within 20 or 30 years (because climate change happens slowly even if inexorably) there will be scarcity of food and water and gasoline for non-electric cars and transportation systems will break down and civilization will crash. More or less. Not all at once, maybe not that soon, maybe not everywhere, but you get the idea.
And as all that begins to happen, it will be everyone against everyone else, a war of all against all. Like the battles over Syrian refugees today, but a hundred times worse.
So, a war. Not a very long war. But very brutal. And you who have provided yourself with lots of guns and ammo will prevail (if someone else doesn’t get you first). Oh? Did I mention that I believe the medical system will break down when everything else does? So, you will prevail, at least for a while. Perhaps you’ll take up farming.
Did you hear the one about the train that was running at 100 miles-per-hour along a straight track toward a collapsed trestle 100 miles away? The engineer wasn’t sure what to do, whether or not to put on the brakes, but he was pretty sure that, whether he put on the brakes or not, and whether they worked or not, the train would soon stop, and in an hour if he did not use the brakes.
So although you are sure that climate change is not real, actually, it is. It is real, it is coming soon to a neighborhood near you. It just comes slowly. The “trestle”, so to speak, is an entire hour away, a long time away. And it is too far away to see from where you are. No wonder you are a denier.
So you have the same options everyone else does.
You can change your mind and begin to believe in climate change—and then begin to bang on your political and business leaders to get busy doing what needs to be done instead of hiding out as politicians so often do, as if the art of politics were a sort of “no show” job.
Fighting climate change is a war and should be treated with all the importance we assign to wars. It must be fought daily and fought strongly even though its ill-effects are mostly in the future.
That’s one of your options. The other is that you can continue to rest assured (but wherever does that assurance come from?) that climate change is a hoax. And do nothing.
And if everyone else also does nothing, be sure to buy those guns. Because it’s gonna get grim.
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