Vietnam War protesters, union organizers, urban blacks, and slave liberators often had skin in the game – gluing one’s shoes to the ground is child’s play next to burning a draft card in public or taking a club to the head to unionize or desegregate. America has not been this divided since the Vietnam War but is now splintered over carbon dioxide gas. Yet those protesting on behalf of climate ignore the environmental disaster of the War in Ukraine.
Protests against the Vietnam War were volatile, a cauldron of tension boiling beneath the nation’s socio-economic landscape. More recently, many Americans protested against the indefensible war in Iraq. But nary a peep from the erstwhile peacenik left against the Ukraine War. This is tragic, likely due to the lack of American military personnel being shipped overseas to battle in Ukrainian grainfields (let alone a draft!). The tennis-court-gluers would not be so bold if they clutched draft cards instead of $1,000 cellphones that pollute the planet, risking only their loafers.
The greenhouse gases generated by the ongoing Ukraine conflict increase daily, joined by toxic chemicals. Cluster bombs manufactured in the USA contribute to significant warming in that region – a heat wave of demonstrably anthropomorphic origin. American elementary school children are conditioned to think that burping cows are an existential threat, and that humanity has but a handful of years within which to avert certain doom. Even those schoolchildren can see that, if that is true, the munitions and destruction in Ukraine threaten to destroy the entire planet irrevocably unless peace is sought immediately.
A recent UN report claims that drastic shifts in finance, industry, and consumption are required to sufficiently reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avert disaster and that it is unlikely this can be achieved. The report calls for eliminating fossil fuel subsidies, which will drive up consumer energy costs by trillions of dollars to “incentivize” struggling communities to use less fuel. It also claims meat consumption must be reduced by eighty percent, immediately – quite a good deal for Bill Gates’ creepy synthetic meat, especially since the UN calls for global domination using “both supply and demand side measures” to technocratically control markets!
The Nord Stream Pipeline was sabotaged as a consequence of this un-climate-protested war, by actors unconcerned by environmental impacts. The German Environment Agency estimated the climate impact of the explosion to be equivalent to roughly 7.5 million metric tons of carbon. That equates to a whole bunch of Dutch cows, yet cows are targeted by the UN, with no concern for war.
The rippling effects of the Ukraine War are cataclysmic in greenhouse gas terms. Beyond the munitions and explosions, and the Nord Stream Pipeline, there are Pantagruelian dimensions of increased greenhouse gases. Per one report:
Germany has followed through on the controversial decision to close its six nuclear power plants (NPPs) and has restarted its coal-fired plants to replace lost Russian gas imports. Germany is currently burning an all-time record amount of coal to keep the economy powered. And it’s not just Germany: Turkey overtook Germany and Poland in June to become Europe’s top producer of electricity generated at coal-fired plants.
Perhaps they are watching tennis, glued to their TVs.