By Frosty Wooldridge
August 25, 2022
Re: “Taking Climate Seriously” by Justin Worland, page 48, November 23, 2020 issue, Time Magazine, Update in 2022
If you visit any truck stop in America during the summer or winter, you will see 90 percent of the big rigs idling without their drivers sitting in the seat. They’re drinking coffee at the diner counter. In fact, each trucker in America wastes an average of 1,000 gallons of diesel annually, from idling. All of it exploding the “carbon footprint” upon this planet. Can you imagine the figures for truckers all across Europe, Australia, South America, China, India and beyond?
If you pass Department of Transportation workers in your state as they pave our highways, they leave trucks running all day long with no one in them—just to keep their orange lights blinking. That’s an insane amount of wasted fuel and horrific carbon footprint spewing into the atmosphere.
As a journalist, I watch what’s happening in Denver and many other cities during my summer travels throughout the USA. This summer, I’ve traveled through Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, California, Oregon, Seattle and over to Glacier National Park in Montana.
I see lights being left on all night at baseball fields. I see lights burning in office buildings 50 stories high in big cities. We’re talking millions of office rooms with the lights burning all night with no one occupying the room. Total waste of money, lights, and of course, explosion of carbon footprint to keep them burning!
Every single light left on all night in every empty office in America contributes to billions of tons of coal being burned to power the systems that create electricity. Take that worldwide, and you’ve got unimaginable waste, fossil fuel burning, and sheer destruction of our biosphere’s ability to keep balance.
Let’s present the facts: nobody takes “Global Climate Change” seriously at all. A better term, “Catastrophic Climate Destabilization” defines it more compellingly. Why? Because it’s wreaking havoc on the natural world. With all the fires and hurricanes, along with warming oceans, nobody addresses its main driver: human overpopulation. Not one world leader speaks to it, period. Yes, we hear every kind of mitigation plan, but none of them takes into account that we humans remain on course to add two billion of ourselves within 30 years. Which means, there’s nothing that will change our fate as the Earth’s environmental systems go haywire.
At this point, the three largest populations in the world include China, India and America, yet they accelerate their growth numbers. China, at 1.4 billion expects to add 100,000,000 by 2050 to reach 1.5 billion according the United Nations Population Projections. India at 1.3 billion is projected to add 250,000,000 to reach 1.55 billion within 30 years. America will jump from 335 million to 440 million around 2050.
Worland’s article gave descriptions of the disasters that occurred in the USA alone in 2020. Those wildfires continue in 2021. But not a peep about the fact that we humans add 83 million more of ourselves, net gain, annually on our way from 7.9 billion to 10 billion by mid-century!
So why are we pretending? Why all the fuss? The worlds’ largest religion with 1.5 billion members stresses having more children rather than less. Africa’s population explodes off the charts and expects to double from 1.4 billion to 2.0 billion by mid-century. Capitalistic systems demand more consumption, not less. Humans consume ever more natural resources and exhaust more carbon footprint. We ravage the planet without any understanding of what we’re doing to ourselves. You won’t hear one word about 5 trillion pieces of plastic floating or submerged in our oceans—killing millions of marine lives annually—but not one world leader will pitch an international 50 cent deposit-return law to stop THAT insanity.
My challenge to Time Magazine editors: get off your complacent rear-ends and start reporting the down and dirty facts of what we face: massive human die-off, endless animal extinction rates, accelerating water scarcity, growing loss of energy, exhaustion of natural resources, toxic biosphere from 10 billion people burning fuel to eat, keep warm and transport. Can you do that for all of us? Because what you’re reporting now is “pure pretend.”
Would you like to write your own letter to Time Magazine and demand they address what we all face? Here’s their address: letters@time.com or letters@timemagazine.com Also, 60 Minutes: 60M@cbsnews.com Also, thestory@foxnews.com Also, watters@fox.com
You and only your actions will force the big media networks to stop avoiding the obvious. If you write and 10,000 other readers of this column write to those addresses—something monumental will happen. Do it for your kids.
© 2022 Frosty Wooldridge – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Frosty: frostyw@juno.com
