In more news from the battle to get action on Global Warming, from Reuters a short while ago:
Billionaire Virgin Group Chairman Richard Branson on Thursday committed an estimated $3 billion over the next 10 years, or all of the profits from his airline and rail businesses, to combating global warming.
“We are very pleased today to be making a commitment to invest 100 percent of all future proceeds to the Virgin Group from our transportation interest, both our trains and airline businesses, into tackling global warming,” Branson told a news conference at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York.
Excellent news….
“We must not be the generation responsible for irreversibly damaging the environment. We must hand it over to our children in as near pristine condition as we were lent it from our parents,” Branson said.
Hmmm. It is already too late for that, my friend. We are that generation. However, we do need to stop ourselves from further sliding into the hole we’ve dug for ourselves. Your money will help. Please tell your friends. Start a new and useful trend amongst the super-wealthy, please.
-cvj
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This evening’s ABC’s World News showed a snippet in the segment “Temperatures Rising” where Jim Hansen of NASA lemented that climate scientists find it hard to have the ear of the President while Micheal Crichton, a pseudo-scientist at best, was invited to the Whitehouse to meet the President after publishing his novel “State of Fear”. How could anybody confuse a novel based on fiction with peer-reviewed research?
Absolutely agree Clifford. I was merely expanding on your point as being part of that generation. My grandfather and his brothers were just as culpable laying out and overseeing the construction of facilities such as Rocky Flats and Hanford, several oil/gas refineries, and the placement of fertilizer and chlorine plants throughout the US. That is more than a hundred years of actively grinding down the earth.
Hi,
Interesting peek into a number of lives and recent eras. Thanks. But I do not think he meant “generation” in that sense. I think it is broader than that. I take the word to cover most of the activities of the last 70 or 80 years or so, and everyone who was alive and consuming and polluting without a care (or much) for the consequences. That would be all of us. In this, you and I and your dad are the same generation.
-cvj
Hmmm. It is already too late for that, my friend. We are that generation.
Acknowledging that people complain about people such as myself using this phrase: Before you were born, there were already members of my generation doing a rather terrific job of destroying the planet. For example, when they finished shooting the scene at the end of the original Planet of the Apes they didn’t know what to do with the large, green-painted styrofoam Statue of Liberty. The scene was shot at Point Dume in Malibu at the south end of Zuma Beach; and the access in those days was more limited than now. The solution was to blow it up, and for weeks after, chunks of foam would float around in the surfline at Zuma, while we lifeguards would be working. Those were also the days when the trash that accumulated at the beach would be raked up and bulldozed into the outgoing tide at night, or in the early mornings.
Even prior to that, one of LA’s infamous mayor’s ran on a campaign to free the residents of the city from having to recycle their trash, and burn the remainder in our backyard incinerators. Now granted that the stopping of the burning of trash was a very good thing, those were the days when LA County still had a very extensive and easily accessible electric trolley system and no freeways (thus auto smog pollutants were at a minimum). As a kid i used to make money, rolling my red RadioFlyer wagon around the neighborhood collecting lard (bacon and other fats rendered from home cooking) and bottles to recycle at the grocery store in Playa del Rey. For many years, my mom would have to drive around to different locations to do the family shopping: produce stands, citrus fruit stands, the dairy (when we didn’t have enough left from our home delivery), the butcher shop (stand alone store fronts), and the general grocery. This is LA. My generation made sure that none of that continued to exist, because we demanded convenience and mobility for ourselves and our children.
While we may have made the first real efforts to offset our damage for the planetary ecosystem (Earth day, clean air and clean water acts, endangered species acts, banning or limiting the previously unlimited spraying of pesticides and herbicides throughout all of LA, etc.) we did continue to ignore the crucial impact of our lifestyles. Our children (your generation Clifford) grew up in environs wherein automobile and energy fuel use was envisioned as unlimited and with no relation to anything like global climate change. I remember quite well one of the regional planners for Southern California arguing in the mid-1970’s that (then called) thermal pollution would become a major problem for all of us. We thought he was cool guy, though a bit loony; we laughed for a few years behind his back, until we realized, nearly too late, he was right about it all.
Perhaps the best example of how poorly my generation behaved is this. In the 50’s my brother and i would beg our dad to drive east on Telegraph Road towards Whittier after attending sporting events at the LA Coliseum or the Rose Bowl, on weekends. Our goal was to hope to catch a red sunset; you see, back then smoggy days were rare enough that that red setting sun was worthy of a special effort. I still apologize about that to my grandchildren.