Happy Earth Day from easyJet
I don’t want to ruin everyone’s great pandemic but its Earth Day, and it’s not looking good. All of the problems we’ve ignored are still there for us when we get out of this.
Global temperatures have risen by around 0.9C since the first Earth Day in 1970. In other words, over three quarters of all warming since pre-industrial times has happened since the first Earth Day fifty years ago.
So, that’s not so good.
According to the WWF’s Living Planet Report, the wild populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians have shrunk, on average, by 60 percent since the first Earth Day.
That’s not good either.
Today Drax biomass and coal power station in Yorkshire is burning wood imported from clear-felled biodiverse forestry.
In 2007 the station produced 22,160,000 tonnes of C02, making it the largest single source of CO2 in the UK.
Between 2000 and 2007, there has been a net increase in carbon dioxide CO2 of over 3,000,000 tonnes.
The station has the highest estimated emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) in the European Union.
It gets £2 million a day public subsidy to maintain that status.
In lockdown an email from easyJet pings into my Inbox: “Flights now available up to 18 April 2021, plus bags still only 99p. Flowers in bloom, long bank holidays and new beginnings. Hop ahead and make some memorable moments with friends and family in 2021.“
Flights for 99p? We aren’t really taking this seriously are we?
The airline was bailed out by the Treasury and Bank of England’s emergency coronavirus fund with a huge loan of £600million after its founder warned it will “run out of money by around August”.
We really can’t imagine a world without easyJet?
National Geographic reports ‘By not doing enough to fight global warming, we’re trashing the planet.’
Watch Greg Palast’s Deepwater Horizon: BP’s SECOND Blowout–The Secret History
“Ten years ago, April 20, 11 men on the Deepwater Horizon were incinerated when the BP/Transocean oil rig blew out and exploded.
“Accident”?
“Here’s what I reported after a four-continent investigation for Britain’s Channel 4 TV and Europe’s ARTE channel: Just 17 months before the Deepwater Horizon destroyed 600 miles of Gulf Coast, BP covered up a nearly identical blowout in the Caspian Sea. Watch this 12-minute film—taken from my feature-length documentary seen in Europe, banned in the USA.”
The coronavirus crisis is coughing up all of the shortcuts to climate survival we need: re-thinking the growth economy, grounding planes, ceasing mindless consumerism. As James Dyke explains our failure stems from our inability to conceive of anything other than incremental change, even when disaster is staring us in the face.
We don’t have another fifty years of Earth Days left.
Orgamisms call it cancer. We call it development.
https://www.catherineingram.com/facingextinction/
Is there any point in ‘re-thinking the growth economy ‘ if we don’t re-think the growth in population?
“Flights for 99p?”
Only if you are a bag. Tortured marketing syntax/punctuation aside, it would be unjust to let bags carry the can for abusing fossil-fuel flight.