Pirate's Cove

This is brought to you by Excitable Juan Cole at the always nutty Truthout

In the Age of Big Climate Change, We Have to Stop Farting Carbon

This past year is what the era of Big Climate Change looks like. We are only at the beginning of the massive changes we are making to our environment by farting 41 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (a heat-trapping gas) into our atmosphere every year, but we can already see the shape of the future and it is alarming. (“Emissions” as a word is bland and means nothing to most people. Inform them that they are annually farting 18 tons of stuff into the atmosphere that you could light a match to, and maybe they will be a little embarrassed).

Despite the urgency of the crisis we have done almost nothing to reduce carbon farting on a global scale. In fact it increased 2% last year.

Got that? Carbon farting! It’s sure to catch on! Or not, because most guys will start snickering when you start talking about farts, and start telling stories about that one time when…..

Of course, Excitable Juan goes on to list all sorts of weather events that he just knows are now caused by Other People farting out carbon, till

US cable television news, which has big positions in fossil fuels stocks, reports on these calamities only episodically and desperately avoids linking them to carbon farting.

Really? MSNBC, CNN, the Weather Channel, etc, all take positions that this is the fault of Mankind.

The coming crisis can be challenging, severe or catastrophic. We have that choice. We can reduce it to only challenging by swinging into action. In a big way. Now. Coal needs to be outlawed ASAP, as French President Emmanuel Macron has pledged to do by 2021, in only three years. (And no, the pledge isn’t meaningless and no the market doesn’t dictate everything; public policy is important). China’s industrial Hebei Province next to Beijing has cut coal use by 44 million tons since 2013 and is going to cut out another 5 million tons this year! The Chinese Communist Party is simply setting emissions standards for the factories, which they have to meet. Air quality in Beijing, which is very bad, is nevertheless a little better as a result. (I was there in 2015 and went out to see the Great Wall with my little Nikon camera and all I got were pictures of smog.)

So, um, how much carbon did Climahypocrite Juan Cole fart out on that trip? Because there’s zero possibility that he walked across the U.S. to a port where he then took a sailing ship across the Pacific.

A challenging amount of global heating will be difficult. You will like severe even less. The third level and possibility is catastrophic, which speaks for itself. It all depends on how much we fart.