Lies that Damage Earth

Lies that Damage Earth

By FRANK LINGO

Lies are old as dirt. Some lies are told just because the teller isn’t capable of telling the truth. But most lies are told to gain some advantage, whether for wealth, for domination or love.

We humans as a group are vulnerable to lies. We tend to believe the words other humans say, especially if we are taught the lies when we’re young, if they say the lies convincingly or if they are trusted tribe members.

Through history, racist lies have been used to excuse genocide and slavery. Atrocities have been perpetrated by nearly every race and ethnicity around the world, all justified by lies about “the other.”

In the last couple centuries, there are newer liars among us with age-old motivations of wealth and domination. These are the corporations that control everything from our transportation to heating our homes to our health care.

It was plenty bad when the power struggles occurred just between human tribes but now the conflict the corporations wage has become terracide – a war against the Earth.

If that seems over-dramatic, consider the 2019 report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

Based on over 15,000 studies, the report found that about one million plant and animal species are threatened with human-caused extinction. This could have serious consequences for the stability of ecosystems around the world, which in turn could directly affect human health, experts say. The interactions between animals, plants, humans and the environment make up a complex web. Disruptions to any part of this biological architecture can have significant, cascading effects.

So knowing the harm we’re causing to the world that sustains us, we humans have jumped into action to protect the planet, right?

Hardly. If anything, we’re getting worse at taking care of the ecology. Further, millions of humans — and Americans are among the worst – are buying into the lies concocted by corporations that everything will be OK.

USA Today ran an article on Dec. 30, entitled “Lies about climate change that continued to circulate in 2022.” One false narrative said that solar and wind energy had made power grids, especially California’s, fragile and unable to cope with high demands.

In fact, the opposite is the case. It was proved that planning and green innovations can successfully meet those challenges.

The article also noted lies that believing in climate change is only for the far Left, and that climate change can’t be fixed, so why try?

“I call them zombie arguments because you can explain that they’re not true but they still go stumbling around,” said Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech.

One pernicious pretense perpetrated by petroleum’s Exxon is the denial of global warming — even tho the company’s own research from over half a century ago proved that its products like gasoline would cause the greenhouse effect of warming the world and harming the atmosphere. It’s a lot like the tobacco companies claiming there was no proof that smoking causes cancer even after their secret research revealed that it did.

Some good news in the midst of all these lies is that many people are wising up. A 2022 Yale University survey found that 71% of Americans are worried that global warming will harm plants, animals, and their grandchildren. That number has risen steadily over the years.

Still, it’s scary how sophisticated the deniers and their allies can get. There is a new spyware called Pegasus which can infect your phone to read your texts, listen to your calls and even pinpoint your location without you having a clue that it’s happening. This privacy invasion device could distort and discredit environmental advocates in social media to deceive a gullible public.

President Joe Biden and the recent Congress made some progress in late 2022 by including many billions of dollars for ecological endeavors in the Inflation Reduction Act. It’s a start, but it was long overdue, because little legislation has been enacted since the 1970s.

The world is far behind to make good on even the modest pledges of nations to reverse the damage to our atmosphere. It’s time to face the truth and call the climate condition what it is – a crisis.

Frank Lingo, based in Lawrence, Kansas, is a former columnist for the Kansas City Star and author of the novel “Earth Vote.” Email: lingofrank@gmail.com. See his website: Greenbeat.world

From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2023

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