Editor:
Citing a “survey of voters,” McKinleyville resident Edward Webb claims “we” feel helpless or are in denial over climate change, (Mailbox, Jan. 10). In reality, voter polls represent sharply divided minority-views demonstrated in last November’s election, despite the corrupt developer in the White House (“The Grifter In Chief,” Dec. 27).
A generation of bipartisan legislation has returned a Gilded Age to America, far worse than the last, further undermining voter turnout. The largest segment of America’s non-voting majority is ages 18 to 25, they’re rarely polled and are excluded from election turnout reports. Hard-hit by poverty, homelessness and decades of oppressive student debt, they are, nevertheless, the majority of protesters demanding a sustainable green economy. For two decades their demands have led to increasing academic offerings in environmental sciences at Humboldt State University, a nationwide phenomenon indicating the changes ahead.
Unfortunately, fear of economic inconvenience not seen since the Antebellum South, (AKA “greed,” not denial or helplessness), is protracting a profound crisis at the hands of bipartisan local, state and federal governments. For example, despite accelerating worldwide biodiversity collapse, rising tides and mass human migrations, Humboldt County supervisors have focused on serving corrupt local developers by unilaterally deregulating our county’s General Plan and Guiding Principles, courting violence by unleashing industrial marijuana onto our headwaters without requiring professional water carrying-capacity certification.
Parents, teachers, mentors and other lifelong participants in America’s corrupt, unsustainable culture are struggling to model the atonement required by today’s youth to forge a new path. Webb’s contribution to his health and the environment by eating less meat is a start, however, forgoing consumption of 1 ton of jet fuel to sample the sardines in Spain for 10 days is imperative, it’s this nation’s largest single source of carbon emissions and significant source of cancer-causing radiation at 30,000 feet.
George Clark, Eureka
This article appears in ‘We’re Coming Home’.
This nations largest single source of carbon emissions:
Commercial aviation is responsible for about 11% of all US transportation CO2 emissions; transportaton and electricity production each account for about 28% of US CO2 emissions.
Source??
If most American’s trips abroad are for frivolous junkets consuming a ton of jet fuel per-person, that’s nearly the same that an average U.S. commuter burns in a year, and probably enough to keep a South American village in cooking fuel for months…as opposed to deforestation.
Scandalous by any measure.
28% are for greenhouse gasses, not CO2.
Correcting a large statistical error with a lesser one, while entertaining, shows the importance of giving this world’s most pressing challenge the focus it merits in media, education and government.