State Of The Planet 2024

By FRANK LINGO

President Biden did a good job with his recent State of the Union address to Congress and the nation. For Earth Day 2024, I’ll attempt to assess the State of the Planet.

OK, I’m not president or representative of anything. But for over 30 years I’ve been writing on ecology in an effort to face the problems caused by our mistreatment of the Earth — and suggest solutions we can use to repair the damage.

The list is long. There’s extinction of hundreds of thousands of plant and animal species, including a cataclysmic loss of butterflies and bees, which pollinate an estimated 75% of fruit and vegetable crops. There’s poisoning of oceans, lakes and rivers with our trash and industrial waste. There’s environmental racism where toxic material is dumped on or near the lands where people of color live. There’s the destruction of forests which support a wondrous web of life, which tree farms do not. There’s the depletion of topsoil, which all crops depend on, due to poor farming practices.

But at the top of the list is the climate crisis, caused by humankind’s burning of oil, coal and natural gas. As a result, the temperature of the planet keeps rising (2023 was the warmest year on record), air quality keeps dropping with death and damage to humans, and weather patterns have become dangerously extreme, like droughts for decades and a precipitous rise in hurricanes. The warmer temperatures are melting the polar icecaps and raising sea levels, which will drown coastal cities.

There are bright spots in the haze of that pollution, mainly the advancement of wind and solar sustainable energies. The cost of these clean alternatives has plummeted while their efficiency has improved, making it a no-brainer to adopt their use.

Yet, like people hooked on cigarettes, we’re still smoking ourselves into Earth emphysema. Drilling and mining for fossil fuels continues at a ferocious pace all over the world, including record production of oil in 2023 for both the world and the United States. The oil companies try to greenwash their public image with commercials claiming their commitment to renewable energies. The reality is that these fossil fools generally spend only about 1 or 2 percent of their corporate revenue on renewables.

Remember when conservative meant you wanted to conserve things like trees and rivers? Not anymore. Now conservative in America has nothing to do with conservation, it means conserving the status quo of keeping the oil companies in charge of fueling our cars and the coal companies in charge of powering our homes and businesses.

If you still live in a democracy, (I’m talking to you, America!) then you have the political process that could change policies from polluting to protecting the planet.

The state of the planet is precarious. But we have the means and the know-how to prevent worsening of the world’s climate. It really is up to us. Do we have the will to make the transformation to clean energy? That’s the question of the century.

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, May 1, 2024

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