George W. Bush always did look like a thug. In the days running up to last year's American presidential election, he held informal press interviews on the grounds of his Texas home wearing faded jeans and a tight bomber jacket. He looked more like some hoodlum kid from a 1950's B-Movie than a presidential candidate. Quite a contrast to Al Gore, the opposition candidate, who came across as a slick college intellectual. As fate - or perhaps the rigging of the Florida vote count - would have it, the thug was victorious. The thug now hangs up his bomber jacket in the White House. The thug is now the most powerful man on Earth.
Regardless of his suspect appearance, Prescience readers might be interested to know that president Bush is in love with power plants. He openly admits this. But which kind of power plant? Peyote? Or maybe cannabis? After all cannabis is indeed a classic power plant which many American presidents have admired and utilised. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both grew cannabis hemp on the their plantations. Benjamin Franklin was known to have smuggled high quality cannabis hemp seeds out of China. Offering the human race strong fibre as well as psychological recreation, cannabis is a power plant par excellence and has served the human race well. Thus, the simple fact that Bush has openly professed his love of power plants might convince us that he not so bad after all. Along with Washington and Jefferson, Bush might simply be calling for America to re-initiate symbiotic relations with Gaia's potent greenery. If the power plant in question does happen to be cannabis, then maybe he'll be swapping his bomber jacket for a blue velvet number. Maybe the thug has smoked some good gear and seen the light. Maybe Bush is in love with bush…..
Unfortunately, the power plants so beloved by Bush are not the botanical variety but the man-made ones. Power stations to be precise. These kinds of power plant burn fossil fuel and emanate billions of tons of greenhouse gases. Its exactly what they are constructed to do. And Bush loves them. A further search of Bush's bomber jacket would confirm this fatal attraction as we would more than likely find oil stains and coal dust in all the pockets. The president's blatant infatuation with fossil fuels and power plants might be good news for the oil barons and mining companies but it is bad news for the rest of life. This is because the greenhouse gases produced by fossil fuel burning power stations cause global warming - a problem that adversely affects everyone. However, Bush does not give a hoot about global warming. As we shall see, he hardly even acknowledges that global warming is happening.
Stoking the Fire
The bulk of the world's carbon dioxide - a principal greenhouse gas - is emitted by power plants and cars. Both consume prodigious amounts of fossil fuel such as coal and oil which, after combustion, give off this gas. Fossil fuels - as their name implies - come from the fossilised remains of ancient organisms. In other words, modern human culture is plugged into the past handiwork of Gaia. Millions of years worth of evolutionary effort and evolutionary innovation gets fossilised and deposited in the form of vast organic tracts of coal and oil. Dug up and extracted millions of years later, these deposits are used as a source of energy and power with which to run human culture. In a real way, the biosphere accumulates solar energy by locking it up in organisms and then buries this energy as a kind of underground battery. Whilst this availability of coal and oil has proven to be useful to us, we are now realising that there is a price to be paid. That price is the exhaust products which are produced when we play this energy game, when we exploit this handy battery for too long.
Over the hundreds of years since industry began to use massive amounts of fossil fuel, the exhaust gases gradually began to accumulate in the air and sky. Since carbon dioxide is invisible and odourless, the human race was initially oblivious to its increasing presence. We just got on with building more and more machines and burning more and more fossil fuel. However, with the drastic changes in global weather patterns over the last decade or so, it is nigh on impossible to ignore the fact that this gradual build up of carbon dioxide is having an adverse effect upon the planet as a whole. The global heat is on. The world's weather patterns are, to be blunt about it, fucked. What was stable for hundreds of thousands of years is now unstable. Whether an all time wettest month or an all time warmest year, even a small island like Britain has experienced all manner of bizarre changes in the weather in recent years with countless meteorological records being broken.
Elsewhere, the effects of global warming are more telling. In the Antarctic Peninsula the Larsen B ice shelf has gone. Vanished. The fact that this huge mass of ice had a name indicates that it was considered a significant and stable land mass. And yet in a period of a few days in 1995, it disintegrated, all 1300 square kilometres of it melting back into the ocean. So remote was this icy expanse that few mourned its loss. Despite its remoteness and the fact that no lives were directly lost in the wake of its untimely demise, the melting of the Larsen B ice shelf is a clear warning signal. Just as a stroke is a clear signal that the body is ailing, so too can we see in the melting of Larsen B a critical warning sign that the planet is ailing. The ice shelf was not simply under the weather, it was destroyed by the weather. And since it is human culture which is causing global weather patterns to change through its relentless burning of fossil fuel then it is we who are to blame for such planetary illness.
The weather, of course, is linked to all life on Earth. Once weather patterns change then all and any life forms can be unduly effected. It has been reported for instance that polar bears in the Hudson Bay area are losing body weight due to the shortening of their hunting season - which is linked to the availability of seals which is itself linked to weather patterns. This is just the tip of the melting iceberg. Weird tropical fish are turning up on British shores. The migration patterns of birds are changing. Global warming means that the entire tree of life can, and will, suffer. Of course, we could argue that life has always been intimately linked to global weather patterns and that it is normal to have ice ages and other weather changes. But ice ages are natural and take aeons to materialise. With man-made global warming we have a problem that is unnecessary and is happening too rapidly for organisms to adapt to. This is the tragedy. We are putting so much stress on the Gaian system that the consequences will invariably be dire.
The Kyoto Protocol
Fortunately, the Kyoto Protocol was drafted in 1997 in order to deal directly with global warming. The aim was to get the world's industrialised nations to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. The Kyoto Protocol was thus the very least that human culture could do to stem the ceaseless flow of greenhouse gases into the Earth's atmosphere. By agreeing to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide the world's leaders were both acknowledging that there was a global problem in need of resolution as well as outlining a course of action to deal with it. According to the Kyoto Protocol, industrialised nations like America are supposed to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by 7 percent over the next 10 years. America agreed to do this - they signed the treaty, right there on the dotted line. And yet George W. Bush, his bomber jacket tightly buttoned, has failed to honour the Protocol. Worse than that, Bush refuses to even concede that global warming is a reality.
As an insight into evasive way Bush's mind works, consider the following debate on global warming between Bush and Gore:
BUSH: It's an issue that we need to take very seriously. I don't think we know the solution to global warming yet and I don't think we've got all the facts before we make decisions.
GORE: But I disagree that we don't know the cause of global warming. I think that we do. It's pollution, carbon dioxide and other chemicals that are even more potent. Look, the world's temperatures going up, weather patterns are changing, storms are getting more violent and unpredictable. And what are we going to tell our children?
BUSH: Yeah, I agree. Some of the scientists, I believe, haven't they been changing their opinion a little bit on global warming? There's a lot of differing opinions and before we react I think it's best to have the full accounting, full understanding of what's taking place.
Regarding carbon dioxide, the principle greenhouse gas, Bush has this to say:
"I do not believe, however, that the government should impose on power plants mandatory emissions reductions for carbon dioxide, which is not a "pollutant" under the Clean Air Act."
Talk about ducking the issue! Bush's reluctance to acknowledge global warming and his crass appraisal of carbon dioxide emissions are undoubtedly connected with the fact that petrol, oil and coal are cheap to scour from the Earth and cheap to burn. Basically, if Bush honours the Kyoto Protocol as he is supposed to then bucks will be lost. Bush is well aware of this as his closest staff are gas men. Not the innocent kind of gas men who come and read the meter but the kind who trade oil and petrol and whose ruthless love of money outweighs any care for the environment. Vice president Dick Cheney for example is a former oil company executive. Other staff in some way linked with the oil business include Bush's Treasury Secretary, Commerce Secretary and his Interior Secretary. The White House now resembles Southfork, the ranch where the TV series Dallas was set. Like JR Ewing, Bush knows no scruples when it comes to the petroleum industry. All that matters is oil and gas and greenbacks. Slap 'em down………
A major effect of this unbridled fossil fuel consumption is that America produces fully 25 percent of the world's output of carbon dioxide. Given the amount of people in America - only 4 percent of the world population - this is a staggering statistic. In terms of weight, this profligate burning of fossil fuel results in a whopping annual production of 6000 billion kg of carbon dioxide. That's more than a lot. In short, America is leading the way in global warming. When a small inhabited island in the Pacific starts to submerge then a finger can rightly be pointed at Bush since Bush has decided to completely ignore the Kyoto Protocol. Indeed, its business as usual in America with the oil and coal industries steaming ahead as if nothing were amiss. Bush is even calling for more oil exploration including drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Drilling for oil at such a pristine location on Gaia's skin is akin to stabbing a virgin girl and sucking out blood. Bush is even trying to find ways to overturn regulations passed by Clinton which protect vast tracts of American forest. If he is successful it will mean more logging and more mining for coal. The man is hell bent on burning more and more fossil fuel!
Becoming sensitive to Gaia
Even though Bush might not admit it, global warming is a reality. In a way Gaia is now forcing us to realise our intimate relationship with the rest of the web of life. Gaia is informing us in no uncertain terms that we must scrutinise very carefully our activity as we scuttle about upon the sensitive living surface of this planet. We cannot simply do as we please without any consideration of the consequences. We cannot keep burning fossil fuels and dumping waste everywhere otherwise we shall drown - either in warm water or thick smog. Whilst Gaia may have been powering human civilisation with fossil fuels for thousands of years, the time has come when we can both acknowledge the truth of Gaia (that the biosphere is a single interconnected living system) and see that we need to pay more attention to what we do, in particular to how much energy we use and from where we derive this energy. Renewable and clean sources are called for - such as solar, wind, wave and hydrogen - as well as a re-think as to the values underlying our culture.
Bush's response to global warming represents the dying remnants of an old and outdated way of thinking. Political agendas at the behest of money have reached their expiry date. Which leaves Bush as a sort of thuggish villain. Actually, Hollywood, with its current fashion for casting British actors as movie villains, could not have dreamed up a better home-made bad guy than George W. Bush, a man intent on converting the entire USA into one big anus, with stinky gaseous waste pouring out of every conceivable orifice, whether it be chimney stacks or the millions of car exhaust pipes that line America's jam-packed highways. Does the average American want this? I think not. This madness has surely got to stop. As the Belgian press put it: "Things must be clear; if everybody on the Earth was living like Seattle, Philadelphia or San Diego, life on this planet would be impossible before long."
So it's a pity then that the power plants so beloved by George W. Bush are not the psychoactive variety. Whereas the green psychoactive variety produce fresh oxygen for us to breathe as well as innervating chemicals with which to stimulate the human mind, the power plants favoured by Bush merely provide us with foul air and mess up the world's climate. What will it take to force Bush to change his mind I wonder? Will New York have to be submerged by an encroaching and rapidly expanding ocean before he reconsiders his agenda? Will the White House have to be invaded by tropical malaria carrying mosquitoes before he carries out his Kyoto Protocol obligations? Or will he only see sense if a hurricane whisks his Texas home into the Gulf of Mexico? We shall see. One thing is for certain though - Bush cannot hope to take on the might of Gaia. The ancient biosphere is far stronger and wiser than he. We defy it at our peril.
