In late September 2015
your blog host had the privilege to receive the benefit of three days of
training in Miami
sponsored by the Climate Reality Project, of which former Vice-President Al
Gore is the Chairman. The training
created another core grouping of those who would earn the title of Climate
Reality Leader.
The purpose of the
Climate Reality Project is to raise awareness of the effects and consequences
of climate change occasioned by the phenomenon of global warming. The purpose is also to educate ordinary
citizens as to what we can do to stem the tide, mitigate the processes and
reverse the destructive momentum.
The training
effectively empowers Climate Reality Leaders to present a slide show which
updates information initially brought to light in Al Gore’s 2006 Academy Award
winning (2007) documentary film, An
Inconvenient Truth. In making the
film, Mr. Gore was the subject of an Intergovernmental Panel on climate change
of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
The fact is that the
global climate has begun to warm appreciably, especially over the past 150
years coinciding with the onset of the Industrial Revolution. While it may be true that the sun heats the
earth, it is also true that carbon heats man.
Hence, the term “carbon man” enters the vernacular. Coal had been the preferred fossil fuel,
prior to oil, and its use is widely still prevalent at the nation’s large
electricity generating power plants. The
phenomenon of fossil fuel burning on such a mass scale (coal burning in
combination with oil) is what scientists attribute to the concept of global
warming.
Scientists are in near
unanimous agreement (97%) that climate change is the result of carbon-based fossil
fuel emissions as a by-product of energy production mainly from oil, coal and
naturally gas. The film makes the
powerful case that stewardship of the environment is not merely a convenience
but, rather, a moral issue.
The statistics are
sobering. The US comprises less than 5% of the
world’s population, yet consumes about 25% of the world’s energy. Each and every ordinary American citizen uses
about 3 gallons of oil per day, twice as much as people in other industrialized
nations. America
is a throw away society, with dismal recycling rates, producing roughly twice
as much garbage as Europe. Until most recently, perhaps, the political
parties have seemed content to put the idea of economic growth on one side of
the spectrum and environmental protection on the other, as if the two are
somehow mutually exclusive.
But the wild card
today remains oil. The US consumes approximately 21
million barrels of oil per day, about 65% imported. It is
not an exaggeration then to say that US dependence on imported oil is a greater
threat to national security than any threat from terrorism, real or perceived. Perhaps at no time since the pre-Civil War South’s economic dependence on
slavery can it again be said that the US reliance on oil is so acute as
to constitute a life or death economic dependency. The need is so alarming, so encompassing, and
so pervasive, that any moral issue that may come up along the way, including
human rights and/or the environment, can also be dismissed as secondary. Which begs the question: Once the problem of terrorism
is theoretically dispensed with, are we then “free” to heat the planet into
oblivion?
The slide show presentation
challenges audiences to ask themselves three basic yet provocative
questions. First, must we change? Second, can we change? And third, will we change? As President Obama has stated, “We’re the
first generation to feel the effects of climate change … and the last
generation who will be able to do anything about it.” As leaders get set to gather next week in Paris, France
to attend the long awaited gathering on climate change, the stakes for our way of life --- including the survival of our planet as we know it --- can hardly seem greater.
-Michael
D’Angelo
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