The Worst Source of Pollution

There is a constant barrage of news and documentaries on global warming and climate change that is linked to the use of fossil fuels like gas, oil and coal, all of which leave a “carbon footprint”. There is also commentary on the hidden dangers of frozen methane being released as a result of temperature rise in the polar regions, in the seas and the permafrost. In addition, there is the threat of ocean acidification and the consequences of that releasing more carbon and killing off all corals and shellfish. Much methane apparently is being released as of the time of this article, sometimes explosively. The use of fossil fuels is pervasive and encompasses all aspects of our lives such as in our home, our cars, boats, commodity transport, planes, cruise ships, naval vessels, military aircraft, bombs, bullets, and rockets. For the most part, Joe and Jane Average are cajoled into reducing their carbon footprint by cutting down on personal consumption in all areas of life. This is effected in two ways; voluntarily and non-voluntarily. They are further cajoled into going green by using alternative sources of power like wind, solar, geothermal and other sources of power, even if they have to go into ruinous debt to do so, without help from anyone. This is the essence of green-speak.

But there is stiff opposition to green-speak from big gas, oil and coal and they hire their point duty people to deny climate change and promote their products as sustainable even if obtained by controversial hydraulic fracturing, aka, fracking. They are also interested in seeing increasing consumption. They will cajole whole nations through lobbying pressure to back war to feed the insatiable appetite for fossil fuels. This last bastion of fossil fuel greed is perhaps the single most polluting action on the planet considering that entire oil fields are set ablaze such as in the Kuwait oil fires of 1991. But that is far from the total destruction wrought by war. By now, we see desolation from the use of depleted uranium, agent orange and other perils hardly ever mentioned. Why then is war hardly ever mentioned as one of the main contributing factors in carbon release? The short answer is that much of the so called green technology is made using fossil fuels and even transported using fossil fuels. Electric cars are often recharged using electricity generated from coal fired generators. Green technology, such as solar cells also contribute to pollution due to the toxic chemicals used in making such electronics. The rare elements needed for many green products are only located in a few places and they have to be extracted from there and somehow taken to where the technology is put together. More on this will be exposed later on. Green technology also plays a part in war and battles. These few facts show that we are still a long way from anything beyond green-speak.

Fossil fuels are needed to run most of the navy (nuclear aircraft carriers and subs excluded), the fighter jets, the bombs such as fuel bombs, bunker busters along with more traditional ammunition, all of the various UAVs and rockets. It takes a tremendous amount of fossil fuels to extract, transport, process, refine and deliver to the point of consumption. Political policies also affect the entire process and these decisions and acts in the main, are bribed into life by lobbyists from the corporations and financing institutions. It is said that in Canada alone, extracting and processing Alberta tar sand oil requires the consumption to two barrels of oil per one extracted. Then there is activity such as Margaret Thatcher's destruction of coal mining in Britain (1984) in favour of importing it from China via the sea as a result of the act of destroying unions at home. Much of this also goes to fuel the war industry, the single most profitable enterprise on the planet and at its heart, a war for the surplus production financed by loans at interest. The cycle of war is fuelled by the extraction of fossil fuels to be used in military equipment to bully more fossil fuels out of the resource rich regions in order to fuel the war machine for more bullying and extraction. Round and round it goes in the ultimately useless waste of war, the genocidal pogroms and infrastructure destroying process that took plenty of fossil fuels to build in the first place. But when wealth is to be acquired, little else matters and the first thing to go is the truth in the endless propaganda spinning to justify all of this.

So why is this almost never mentioned by any of the popular media, including the likes of Russia Today (RT) and especially not any mainstream US, UK or Canadian media? It is not convenient to any mouthpiece that is hired by the big corporations that serves as their news (read propaganda) to the people. Everyone else is encouraged to “go green” but there is very little call over the shrill furor that is pumped out daily concerning the ever grinding war on terror that is to go on perpetually. Further, many people are working for all the industries that are tied directly and indirectly to the war machine for the acquisition of fossil fuels and other resources extracted by the use of fossil fuels. In the context of capitalism that requires constant growth to maintain profitability, the root of what capitalism is about, there is an upper limit that ends with the destruction of the very planet for natural resources being extracted in an ever more accelerating and destructive manner. The upper limit in any such enterprise is the limit of the earth to sustain such activity. One cannot have eternal growth on a limited planet. Once that limit is reach; and it was reached long ago; there is no more growth and one of the pillars of profitability is destroyed. In the process, the capability of the biosphere to support life in the midst of resource extraction, shrinks dramatically. Capitalism has outgrown the planet and it is dying as a result of limitless growth. Capitalism is obsessed by growth and it is a major disappointment when the news bears tidings of a shrinking economy. It is reported that over the last forty years, the wild populations across the globe have declined by 48%. Many species have gone extinct! More go that route every day and life in the oceans is beginning to collapse. With that, we can see our own doom as all life ultimately depends on what happens in the oceans. Part of the problem with fossil fuels, directly impacts the oceans with billions of tons of plastic now polluting all the worlds oceans, treated as nothing more than a world wide sewer.

This damage would be far less if one activity of mankind is brought to a halt right now, and that activity is war. Nothing constructive is ever gained from war accept the bottom line of interest bearing bank loan ledgers from which the bank owners profit highly. It is in the interest of bank CFOs and CEOs to front loans at interest to all combatants in wars. Much of the modern equipment is expensive and usually has a single use capability. You can only explode a bomb once and then you need to replace it with more. Though much of the equipment is reusable, it is targeted for destruction by the enemy, needs constant upgrading and consumes vast amounts of resources that could be better used. The waste of these resources in combat ends with the destruction of much hard work, construction and the permanent loss of all the fossil fuels burned to this end.

When we compare various industries in their gross domestic output for consumption, the one that tops the list of costs, is the military industrial complex. Further, one country stands out as expending far more than all the other countries combined, and that is the United States. Almost a trillion dollars is sunk into the defence industry each year in the US and battles rage in several countries around the world in which the US is directly involved, or indirectly through hired mercenaries and proxies. So intense is this combat, that everything else is subjected to austerity through financial trickery in order to feed the voracious appetite of war.

We hear both of these wars and of the accelerating increase of carbon in the atmosphere and in the oceans. We do not hear about the connecting of these two facts; that the incessant wars is burning fossil fuels at an increasing pace for no other purpose than to destroy the competition and steal more fossil fuels to perpetuate the cycle of endless war on terror. In 2013 alone, fossil fuel consumption increased by 2.5% despite the fact that much was stated and done to lesson carbon accumulation. Of all the green energy being implemented, it only accounts for a mere 5% of the total sources of energy and fossil fuels make up the bulk of the other 95%, with nuclear energy a distant second. All green energy sources include all geothermal, solar, wind and tidal sources planet wide.

On the austerity side of curtailing carbon emissions, we have the emerging world of poverty that is also accelerating. It is the poor that are increasingly shut out of the economy and who themselves are contributing very little to carbon output. Yet, they are the ones who tend to suffer the most from climate change as the military and bank oligarchs bomb the planet into submission with ever increasing carbon output. How is this possible? It is possible owing to a little acknowledged fact and that is the long standing class struggle. A handful of elite rulers whether, company owners, bank heads, royalty, oligarchs, military leaders, priests, pastors and the like, exploit differences that exist among most of humanity. They know how to effect their rule and protect themselves by getting the rest of us to war among ourselves. That war is usually effected in the context of the prison house of apartheid nation states. Nationalism and patriotism march hand in hand as we are tricked into killing one another. As resources are not evenly distributed around the planet, it means that some regions have a surplus while others have nothing. The pretext for the struggle for the surplus has as its foundation, this natural state of preexisting conditions. Those who have not, envy those that have and failing to reach any kind of trade agreement, spells the pretext for a fighting war. There is plenty of cash at interest for war efforts as the bankers in particular have known that such loans are highly profitable and that they can control the outcome on any war to their greatest advantage merely by manipulating finances. This stage of warfare has been going strong for almost 200 years. Wars mean resources for the winners and the development of new technologies, which in itself is profitable. All that is needed is some pretext to trigger a war between divided nation states, and that pretext often comes in the form of a false flag attack event. Another factor that plays into war fever is the sanctions placed on targeted nations and accused and demonized enemy heads of state. Today, that process is being effected against Russia and increasingly China, with the result that it is the grass roots peoples of all sides that suffer and not the heads of states that are the focus of sanctions. History demonstrates that sanctions in the financial and resource sectors of society is often the trigger that leads to a shooting war. When people get desperate enough, they will fight back and often with military mobilization. Artificial scarcity effected through sanctions and austerity is thus the best method to provoke and cajole the masses into combat. That combat then wastes resources and lives and rushes us to a collective ecological disaster.

The reasons cited for such a desperate move, is pumped out through propaganda bullhorns that is incessantly drummed into everyone's consciousness. The manufactured enemy is the aggressor and the demon in the whole charade. This applies to both sides, but clearly, one side, usually the more powerful and imperialistic, is the real aggressor, while the other, lessor, non-imperialistic is painted as the aggressive perpetrator. It is important to realize that the media that transmits the ideas to the masses, is also involved as part of the whole process. Thus, in times building to war, the media is heavily controlled, aka, censored, and that both sides of the question are not fairly and equally represented. Religion, that substitutes for science based understanding, also plays its part by manipulating the emotions and fears of an ignorant and dumbed down population. As almost all of us are controlled by the bank issued fiat currency, this control is virtually automatic and easy for the elite. The fact that most folks are ignorant of virtually every other aspect of survival outside of their appointed job, is also of vital importance. Each worker has his appointed task in the whole complex and interactive fabric of the web of civilization, that as a whole, can sustain itself only under the condition of an infinite resource base. This means that almost all are slaves to the control of fiat income at the hands of the banks as transmitted to each company head and then handed out in the forms of stipend wages that are just enough to allow them to keep going to the job, or to some form of welfare in order to receive the next allotment of stipends. The control is ironclad and very difficult to break out of owing to ignorance, dependence, peer pressure and the sheer force of biological necessity. Civilization is thus a trap, controlled by the elite, who dispense with the rest of us as they see fit for the greatest self benefit of themselves without remorse for any consequence. Thus, if the best way to make a profit is to get most of us to fight each other in ever more destructive wars, then that is what the order of the day is; that is; war without end. This infighting amongst the masses also serves to protect the elite as they hire a segment of the masses as armed police, security, military or thugs to keep the rest under control. Again, this forms a virtually unbreakable steel band around most of our collective necks. We are paid to go to war against each other! It is almost at the point where war and mass murder is necessary for our survival. We now fight for things like fresh water, even in places where there is plenty, but it has been polluted by fracking for more fossil fuels.

This is now how and why we are now at a very dangerous cross roads. We are trapped in a warring civilization that feeds on fossil fuels and this warring is destroying the planet. It is the main source of carbon footprint pollution, as well as all other forms. This is effected by bombing, irradiation, poisoning, carbon buildup, acidification of the oceans and ever escalating consumption of fossil fuels on all fronts to run this incessant and escalating combat. There is but one solution! Clearly to continue with business as usual, we are doomed to extinction from a ruined planet. The solution requires an awakening across the breadth of humanity now under the thrall of a rigged civilization that benefits only the elite and not humanity nor the planet. Once awakened to the reality, usually through direct experience, then natural leaders among them have to challenge the hegemony of the elite with the full weight of the masses alongside them.

There are solutions to stop the use of fossil fuels and even in this late stage of development and prevent mutual assured extinction from needless war based consumption. Innovations abound, though often throttled by the big, rich and powerful transnational military industries. With the well directed and international cooperation of the worlds oppressed and exploited masses, war and the economy derived therefrom, can be ground to an immediate halt. Workers of all kinds have their hands on the levers of all industry and together, they can shut down this hellish war civilization and force the murderous elite to their knees. What is required is to ignore the calls and orders of this murdering minority. By this act, they will affect a giant leap into saving the overburdened environment and begin the process of planetary healing so desperately required for all of our survival. Then we can all begin to share a better world without the massively polluting wars.