Off the Keyboard of A.G. Gelbert

Why the 1% is responsible for more than 80% of humanity’s carbon footprint and why Homo sapiens is doomed unless the 1% lead the way in a sustainable life style.

Discuss this article at the Kitchen Sink of the Diner

Today humanity faces the fact that the parasitic relationship of Homo sapiens with the biosphere is depleting the resources hitherto relied on to maintain a standard of living somewhere above that of other earthly hominids like the chimps or gorillas that are, unlike us,  engaged in a symbiotic relationship with the biosphere. The chimps engage in rather brutal wars with other chimp tribes where the victors set about to kill and eat very young chimps of the vanquished tribe. This is clearly a strategy to gain some evolutionary advantage by killing off the offspring of the competition. It cannot be, in and of itself, considered morally wrong or evil behavior. Dominance behavior and territoriality between same sex and opposite sexes also can be filed under the category of “successful behavior characteristics” from an evolutionary standpoint.

Behavior that appears on the surface to have no evolutionary purpose (like male chimps humping less dominant males or sexually mature adolescent seals, locked out of mating by bulls with huge harems, violently thrashing, and often killing, small seal pups that stray into their area) are a function of hormone biochemistry, not good or evil. Scientists might say this is just Darwinian behavior to winnow out the less flexible, less intelligent or weaker members of a species. I don’t agree. I believe it is a downside of hormones that distracts species from more productive behavior but unfortunately cannot be avoided if you are going to guarantee the survival of a species by having strong sex drives. I repeat, excessive aggression or same sex sexual activity as a dominance display is a downside to the “strong sex drive” successful evolutionary characteristic.

This “downside”, when combined with a large brain capable of advanced tool making, can cause the destruction of other species through rampant predation and poisoning of life form resources in the biosphere. The Darwinian mindset accepts competition among species in the biosphere, where species routinely engage in fighting and killing each other for a piece of the resource pie, as a requirement for the survival of the fittest. Based on this assumption, all species alive today are the pinnacle of evolution. Really? How does a meteor impact fit into this “survival of the fittest” meme? It doesn’t. Why? Because any multicellular organism can easily be wiped out by random, brute force, natural catastrophes like a meteor impact or extensive volcanism. Darwinists are quite willing to accept the random nature of the initial creation of single celled life on earth but refuse to accept that the present multispecies survival is just as random. It’s more like “survival of the luckiest” than “survival of the fittest”.

From a strictly Darwinian perspective, the extremophiles are the real pinnacle of evolution because of their ability to survive just about anything that is thrown at them. There is a type of Archaebacteria that can live in an almost 32% salt concentration called halophiles. Halophiles can be found anywhere with a concentration of salt five times greater than the salt concentration of the ocean, such as the Great Salt Lake in Utah, Owens Lake in California, the Dead Sea, and in evaporation ponds.

If you want to talk about survival of the fittest, look at this humble organism: Halococcus is able to survive in its high-saline habitat by preventing the dehydration of its cytoplasm. To do this they use a solute which is either found in their cell structure or is drawn from the external environment. Special chlorine pumps allow the organisms to retain chloride to maintain osmotic balance with the salinity of their habitat. The cells are cocci, 0.6-1.5 micrometres long with sulfated polysaccharide walls. Carbon assimilation by Halococcus salifodinae, an archaebacterial The cells are organtrophic, using amino acids, organic acids, or carbohydrates for energy. In some cases they are also able to photosynthesize.

Halococcus archaea
This primitive life form is organtrophic AND, not or, in some cases, photosynthetic!Now that’s what I call a life form able to handle just about any catastrophe thrown at it. The more complex a life form becomes, the less flexible, adaptable and the more fragile it becomes. That is why I think the Darwinian approach to species interaction in the biosphere severely understates the fragility of “higher” organisms. Just as a type of fungus can infect the brain of an ant species to climb before it dies and thereby aid in fungal sporulation, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the symbiotic bacteria that constitute a high percentage of the human genes  (we cannot metabolize our food without them so they are an inseparable part of being a human)  actually drove our evolution to simply to aid in the spread of the bacteria.

Laugh if you want, but which is a higher organism, the fungus or the ant? A recent article in “The Scientist” explored the possibility that human evolution (evolution, in my view, includes advanced tool making for war, transportation and food resource exploitation) can be explained as bacteria driven. We may be a mobile expression of symbiotic bacteria trying to spread all over the biosphere by ensuring their human hosts do whatever it takes to blanket the planet for God and bacteria (not necessarily in that order  )!

It is estimated that there are 100 times as many microbial genes as human genes associated with our bodies. Taken together, these microbial communities are known as the human microbiome.

These findings have the potential to change the landscape of medicine. And they also have important philosophical and ethical implications. A key premise of some microbiome researchers is that the human genome coevolved with the genomes of countless microbial species. If this is the case, it raises deep questions about our understanding of what it really means to be human.

If the microbiome, on a species level, coevolved with the human genome and, on an individual level, is a unique and enduring component of biological identity, then the microbiome may need to be thought of more as “a part of us” than as a part of the environment.

More important in the context of ethical considerations is the possibility that if the adult microbiome is indeed relatively stable, then such early childhood manipulations of the microbiome may be used to engineer permanent changes that will be with the child throughout life. There is thus the potential that an infant’s microbiome may be “programmable” for optimal health and other traits.²

The article assumes WE are the ones that could engage in the “programming”. It doesn’t mention WHO EXACTLY was doing all that “programming” during evolution. There is a greater quantity of microbial genes than what are considered “human” genes but it’s really just one package. Genes drive genetics and evolutionary traits, do they not? I made a big joke about it in the comments:

Perhaps the scientific nomenclature for “us versus them” organism energy transfer relationships need to be expanded upon; terms such as parasitic, commensal, symbiotic, etc. don’t address the fact that the ‘them’ is really a part of “us”. Pregnant women don’t think of their future children as parasites (which is what they technically are – even the beefed up immune system the future moms get is a function of that short lived organism, the placenta).  Perhaps we are just some giant “pre-frontal cortex” type of ambulatory appendage which exists for the purpose of spreading bacterial colonies. Oh, the irony of self-awareness and tool making intelligence being an evolutionary device in the service of getting that bacterial colony to vault over the edge of the giant petri dish called Earth. Can you picture the scientific community awarding Escherichia coli a PhD? Dr. E Coli, you are the best part of us!  :>)

We must now bow and scrape to the pinnacle of evolution, the reigning king of Darwinian evolutionary competition, that fine fecal fellow, Dr. Escherichia coli. Now some folks out there on Wall Street might take offense to being outcompeted by Dr. E. coli. They might even say it’s a shitty deal! Others will have no problem relegating Wall Streeters and the rest of the 1% to the category of “lower life forms” in comparison to gut bacteria even if the other 99% of Homo sap are included. A commenter named, Lee Davis was not amused by the implications of research in the direction the article was pointing:

Absolutely. “Manage” the Earth’s biodiversity at your own peril. Destroy the rainforests at your own peril. Acidify the ocean with CO2 at your own peril. I read “Science and Survival” by Barry Commoner in 1964. Since then, human “management” of the planet has continued apace, with little regard for long term consequences. The only thing he called attention to that was actually changed was the halt in atmospheric nuclear testing, but we’ve managed to replace that pollution with the exhaust from nuclear power plant meltdowns. Half-assed demigods we certainly are, not playing with a full deck and with little understanding of how the game is played. Of course, we Think we know it All now…and if we don’t, our computing machines certainly do.

Leaving bacterial driven evolution, which stands the concept of the purpose of intelligence and toolmaking on its head for a moment, consider human society and sexual dimorphism. Female and male pheasant Male Orgyia recens  moth is bigger Female Argiope appensa spider is bigger Mallard ducks – The male has the green colored head

 Dimorphism just means that, when there are two sexes in a species, they are different in some way. The difference can be size, color, etc. In humans, as we well know, “mars” and “venus” differences are not just about physical characteristics like body strength and pelvic size. Those hormones affect behavior far removed from mating rituals. Freud thought EVERYTHING was about sex but most would agree today that we aren’t that mindless. Is the aggressive, testosterone driven male human responsible for the mess we have made of things or are both sexes equally culpable? I think both sexes share the blame equally.Are women superior to men? Would women have, whether driven by their microbial genes or not, somehow avoided pushing the biosphere to the point that doomed themselves and many other species had they been “in charge” instead of men? Of course not! Who, exactly, raised human male children since we’ve been around? Who trained them in most activities prior to reaching adolescence? The roles women had in primitive societies were many and varied including some where they ran the show. Women have been just as capable of mass slaughter when leading armies as men, though this has never been the norm. The relationship of mankind to the biosphere has been parasitic but the relationship of the two sexes to each other has been, although certainly asymmetrical in regard to power, strength and dominance, unquestioningly symbiotic. There are those who equate historical female submission to a form of slavery. This is not now, or ever was, true.

 Consider that Homo sapiens would have died out long ago if both sexes had equal strength. A female bodybuilder injects testosterone into her body to build up muscle. Nature has selected women to be, on the average, physically weaker. And mind you, for most of our existence, it has been ALL ABOUT who is bigger and stronger. Why hasn’t that changed now that, with industrialization and modern weapons, women have the physical ability to assume leadership roles in society that would, theoretically, save us from ourselves due to women’s less aggressive nature? Because they aren’t “cursed” with testosterone! Women are every bit as smart as men. The default setting of a human embryo is female. That is the basic template. It’s the hormonal changes triggered by the male chromosome that modifies the default female setting. All males are initially females that receive a hormone bath and become males. The fetus itself, regardless of the fact that it starts out as a female, is a “take no prisoners” parasitic invader. The placenta fools the mother’s immune system into not rejecting the foreign body (sometimes that doesn’t work and the fetus dies – RH factor problems) even as it strengthens the mother’s immune system to protect the fetus and the mother during gestation. Through the placenta, the fetus sends waste into the mother’s bloodstream and takes oxygen and nutrients that it needs, regardless of whether the mother does or doesn’t have enough of them. Pregnant women can become anemic or lose too much calcium and be in danger of breaking bones because when the fetus needs something, it just TAKES IT. If the fetus is male, aggression and territoriality come with the testosterone during and after he grows to manhood. So, the idea that if we could just put all the women in charge and we would have peace and harmony is never going to fly because, as long as testosterone is around, men will prevent it.

 The enemy is not “HE”. The enemy is failure by BOTH sexes in the human power structure to envision environmental collapse from rampant resource extraction. So, are we doing all this because our microbial DNA just wants to spread and spread and we are really just gut bacteria robots? I don’t think so.  Mankind got into trouble with the biosphere when he got carried away with his tool making. We’ve discussed this here at length. To a degree, we appear to be an evolutionary dead end because we quite literally cannot stop (industrially, not physically speaking) “shitting” where we “eat”. The biomass of humans is smaller than that of all the ant species on the Earth yet they don’t have a carbon footprint problem. We have a serious carbon footprint problem coupled with a lot of biosphere poisoning. The media love to remind us of this. But here is where the “shit where you eat” metaphor breaks down. Carbon footprint is about poison, not feces. Seven billion humans could quite conceivably make excellent use of their humanure to eliminate the need for chemical fertilizers and much of the wasted water used in sewage treatment. It ‘s a very convenient dodge to claim the solution to our problem is to reduce the population. The false claim is made that then all those cars and trucks wouldn’t ruin the planet and the biosphere could have a chance. That is a “solution” that only solves about 20% of the pollution problem and leaves the real heavyweights (about 80% of the pollution), industry and military operated of, by and for the 1% elite, out. That is where the major carbon footprint is.

For those who are shaking their heads, go look at those U.N. stats on how many people out there are living on 2 dollars a day and tell me THEY are the problem. They aren’t, no matter what Bill Gates says. The combined feces of all the ants and every other life form out there, far, far exceeds how much we defecate. As RE, myself and many others here have correctly pointed out, the people at the top refuse to accept responsibility for their horrendous attack on the biosphere and are trying to shift the blame on the rest of us. Those of us little piggies in the USA and Europe are the favorite whipping BOYS of those who say we 55k or less (median income in the USA at present) share almost as much as the 1% in the pollution blame. They hasten to add that depopulation, especially in the piggy countries like ours, is rational. I would support it if it was rational but it is irrational because it fails to deal with, and make an example of, the worst offenders FIRST. People will not give up their pickup trucks until Warren Buffett gives up his jets and multiple houses. The fact that a few of us have reduced our carbon footprint voluntarily as an act of conscience does not mean that most aren’t still Bernays brainwashed.   What we need is a detailed map like this one of UK for the USA:

Experian have found a direct link between wealth and willingness to embrace a green agenda; those most concerned about climate change tend to live in the wealthiest parts of the country.
Poorer and greener But here’s the rub. The company has also found that the richest constituencies… are also the most polluting.²

And that’s just the homes. Try adding the carbon footprint piggery these rich have added to their homes with stock portfolios, ownership of retail space, factories, ships, office buildings, jets, etc.The 55K or less crowd have none of these things. At any rate wages don’t even begin to tell the real carbon footprint piggery story; the real story is in who owns what. More on this later. Here’s a breakdown of carbon footprint by income decile in Sweden, a country with far less extremes in wealth dstribution than the USA. Notice that the top decile have nearly 6 times the carbon footprint of the lower decile. ³

The figure illustrates three types of emissions presented by adult equivalents. The direct emissions come from the household’s consumption (the private consumption) of fuel and heating. The indirect emissions come from the production of goods and services in the Swedish private consumption. International indirect emissions come from the production of goods and services consumed in Swedish households, before being imported. All three types of emissions above sum up to the total emissions from private consumption in Sweden.³

In the USA, the per capita CO₂emissions of about 21 metric tonnes is VERY misleading. (This data is about 5 years ol and. as of 2012, is much lower) This paper studies the differences in emissions from state to state without addressing income levels.

If U.S. per capita carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions were equal to those of its most populous state, California, global CO2 emissions would fall by 8 percent. If, instead, U.S. per capita emissions equaled those of Texas, the state with the second-largest population, global emissions would increase by 7 percent.
What makes Californians’ emissions so different from those of Texans, and from U.S. average emissions? And are the factors that explain these differences amenable to replication as policy solutions?⁴

If you live in any one of the following states (or D.C), your per capita CO² emissions are less than 10 metric tonnes:NY, DC, OR, CA, RI, WA, VT, NH, AZ, CT. In Vermont, direct residential of about 3 tons is an average. Just one mansion here can equal 4 or five 2,000 sq. ft. houses and the small homes like mine with less than 1,000 sq. ft. are much lower. People like myself, and there are lots of them here, are probably not running a carbon footprint above 3 metric tons due, in addition to having less house to heat, to driving less than 2,000 miles a year. But what is published is the national 21 metric tons. NY’s per capita footprint appears the lowest in the nation at around 7. That’s obviously not taking into account the Wall Street Banks and investors in NY that own stock in retail space and just about every other high carbon footprint venture in the USA including weapons contractors. I’ll wager NY’s would be double AK’s 34, the  state with maximum per capita footprint,  if the real estate throughout the country that the banks owned (Bernie Sanders said it was 60% of the country’s wealth) was figured in. Since the study just looks at homes and not the money the rich spend to “green up” their homes with geothermal (remember Bush’s ranch?) or PV while they own stock in and support weapons contractors and dirty industries elsewhere, it is expected that the study would come up with this gem:

The lack of correlation between income per capita and transportation and electricity emission per capita demonstrates that, at least among states of the U.S., there is no rigid relationship between affluence and emissions.10 Similar incomes can be associated with very different levels of emissions. It is possible — as evidenced by the contrast between California and Texas — to enjoy the typical American lifestyle with per capita emissions that are widely divergent from the U.S. mean.⁴

The above statement is an excellent example of scientific blinders in the service of raw wealth. The hypermobility alone of these rich would skew their footprint up (lots of vehicles of all sizes) if those engaged in this study had bothered to count boats, cars, airplanes, etc. They do, however, provide a sensible explanation of why states like Vermont keep their carbon footprint relatively low:

Information about policies that have succeeded in reducing emissions in some states should be circulated to the rest of the country. How have some states managed to reduce their emissions well below the national average? In broad strokes, states with low per capita emissions: ” Drive less per person and have, on average, better fuel economy; ” Use less electricity per person in their homes; ” Have higher gasoline and electricity prices; ” Rely more on public transportation; and ” Use less oil for heating and less coal for electricity generation. What does our analysis say about the difference between per capita emissions in California and Texas? Transportation emissions are almost one and a half times as great in Texas asin California.⁴

WHY don’t these carbon footprint researchers look at this kind of data?

FAA statistics show the number of U.S. business jet flights grew 11 percent in 2010, after plunging 20 percent in 2009. And providers of private jet services are expanding: In March 2011, NetJets (owned by Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway) placed a $2.8 billion order for 50 new Global business jets from Bombardier, with options for 70 more; last fall, it ordered up to 125 Phenom 300s from Embraer—and it bought Marquis Jet, a marketer of private jet cards. Also in March, CitationAir by Cessna added six 604-mph Citation Xs—which it calls the fastest business jet in the sky—to its fleet of 81 jets, targeting “busy executives and business travelers who often need to be in multiple cities within a compressed timeframe,” a spokesman says. XOJET has added to its fleet as well and has hired 45 new pilots.⁵

Does anybody want to take a stab at what umpteen executive jets used EXCLUSIVELY by the 1% do to the USA carbon footprint? I know a little something about airplanes. I never flew a jet for hire but I flew Piper Navajos for a year or so. Each engine used 18 gallons per HOUR. Now when people start talking about all those J6P pickup trucks out there while ignoring executive jets, I sigh. The carbon footprint of those jets is massive.

How much greater are the emissions from executive jets? I am indebted to HalogenGuides Jets, “the insider’s guide to private aviation”, for doing the stats. They reviewed 10 popular private jets using emissions stats provided by TerraPass, the offset company used by Chief Executive Air. The planes ranged from the Gulfstream 400, which burns up 32l of fuel a minute and can carry up to 19 passengers, to the Learjet 40XR, which burns more than 13l a minute to carry a maximum of five passengers. HeliumReport converts this fuel burn into carbon dioxide emissions per hour. If we assume the plane is fully loaded with passengers, they mostly come in at between 200-300kg of carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere per passenger per hour. But of course, the purpose of having your own jet is that you are not stuck with silly cost-cutting exercises like filling every seat on the plane. I know of no analysis of how full private jets normally fly, but let’s assume they are mostly half full. That gives emissions per passenger-hour of 400-600kg of carbon dioxide. That’s about half a tonne. How does that compare with a regular commercial flight? For one from London to Paris, which is roughly an hour, TerraPass reckons 59kg per passenger per hour, or little more more than a 10th as much as flying your own, half full, Learjet. If you are interested in carbon emissions, these numbers are scary. An hour’s flight on a private jet will emit more carbon dioxide than most African do in a whole year.⁶

The  African CO₂footprint referred to is about one metric ton but let’s compare it with our “rich” Americans making anywhere from 55k a year on down that only see executive jets in movies.  In 20 hours of of flying, an afterthought for the jet set 1% of the USA, they use up one yearly quota of J6P’s  “greedy irresponsible pig” footprint. Now count the executive jets and count the total hours they fly each year and you will absolutely gasp at the carbon footprint the 1% is happily spewing into our biosphere. There are over 10,000 private jets in the USA as of 2008.

How private jet travel is straining the system, warming the planet, and costing you money.⁷

And this is JUST THE EXECUTIVE JETS part of their piggery! And Buffett thinks it’s A-FUCKING-OKAY to add more.
China’s per capita carbon footprint, in the meantime, has become greater than that of several U.S. states, including Vermont.

The latest report shows that in 2011 China’s per capita emissions increased 9%, rising to 7.2 metric tons per person. ⁸

I am certain, as is the case in the USA, that the Chinese 1%’s carbon footprint is orders of magnitude above the Chinese version of  our “J6P”.  Those who love to point at J6P piggery in the USA should drop that broad brush and start looking at per capita carbon footprint and, when available, decile breakdown of that per capita carbon footprint. Please observe in this table that the per capita carbon footprint in the USA has been going steadily down over the last decade (as of 2012, it is down to 17.3 metric tons ⁹) and that there are 11 countries with a higher per capita carbon footprint than the USA.

⁹ USA highlighted in yellow. Click here for a closeup: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita
J6P makes a real convenient whipping boy but that does not reflect the facts on the ground even before you account for 1% piggery. What matters is not data points like how much retail space there is in the USA (a huge amount is now empty anyway since 2008) but who OWNS that retail space and all the other large carbon footprint piggery. The wealth breakdown in the USA (as of 2007 – it’s even more concentrated at the top now according to senator Bernie Sanders) shows that 1% own 42.7%, the next 19% own 53.7% and the BOTTOM 80% own 7%.¹⁰

I am using the financial wealth stats rather than the “net” worth stats because that reflects the sad reality that the 15% attributed to the bottom 80% is now about 7% and the “net” worth of the top 20% matches 2007 financial wealth percentages (The top 20%, but mostly the top 0.5%, have exponentially increased their ownership of everything in the USA since the Greater Depression began in 2007). The last time I checked, when you OWN something, you are responsible for it’s carbon footprint. The fact that the predatory capitalist “drug pushers” are out there pushing the consumerist “drug” does not justify blaming the addicts. The addicts must be treated but the priority is to get the pushers off the street. Every addict can go cold turkey and the pushers will adjust by giving the “drug” away really cheap until they hook a new set of addicts. Focusing on the addicts while giving lip service to the evils of the 1% to the point that the addicts are given a 40/60% (99% carbon footprint vs 1% carbon footprint) responsibility ratio in biosphere degradation when it is more like a  20/80% ratio is  just plain wrong and doomed to failure. Of course the 1% love this kind of “blame the victim” illogic. We need a REAL deciles breakdown like they did in Sweden of the CO₂ footprint of our population. Here is a look at carbon footprint in cities across the USA. Most of the heavy polluters are east of the Mississippi.¹¹.

That’s a start but we still need to zero in on stock, high tech toys  and real estate ownership as a function of carbon footprint. Maybe then people would get a clearer picture of who the responsible parties for the biosphere degradation are. It is little wonder that no data of this nature is published in the USA. This is the reality that side issues like blaming gender or psychopathy for humanity’s biosphere degradation fail to address. It’s really an Occam’s razor type problem (a principle urging one to select from among competing hypotheses that which makes the fewest assumptions). The 1% aren’t just pigs, they are leaders. Evolution, regardless of whether Homo sapiens is an evolutionary dead end due to parasitic behavior and excessive tool making, allowed these members of the human family to be our leaders. The issue is not about gender or the criminal insanity endemic to psychopaths in the 1%; psychopaths are unfortunately represented at all income levels even if they are concentrated at the top.

Whether this super aggressive behavior destroying the biosphere is caused by microbes willing us to spread, testosterone in the male of the species or the inability of our big, but still brutish, brains to react to threats on a multigenerational time horizon, the fact remains that the main authors of the rampant biosphere damage are these humans in the 1%. It’s not the 99%’s biomass (e.g. ants have more than humans) that is destroying the biosphere; it’s the 1%’s carbon footprint by a huge margin despite their tiny biomass. A detailed study of per capita footprint which includes resource ownership by wealth would conclusively prove that. And as to males of the species being the culprit, the statement, “We have met the enemy, an he is us, and he is “HE”, is barking up the wrong tree! Perhaps a world where humans were all females and reproduction was by cloning would be less parasitic and become symbiotic with the biosphere but most women on Earth, not to mention G. I. Joe Testosterone and friends, would take offense to that notion (to put it mildly  ).

Putting women in charge, as long as there are men around, will not change our suicidal trajectory. Because the 1% are our leaders, the masses of humanity always attempt to imitate what the 1% do, period. When the 1% stop their massive piggery, the small scale piggery of the masses will stop as well. Claiming that the 1% only “do what they do” because the 99% are a bunch of sheep is a half truth. The 1% ARE mostly PARASITIC. But this is “blame the victim” illogic. What, exactly, do you expect from sheep? The 1% pushed, connived, lied and killed anything in their way to BE the 1%. They’ve got RE’s “Will To Power” on steroids. If all of us had the aggressiveness of the 1%, Homo sapiens would have self destructed long ago.

Sexual dimorphism and hormones dictate different levels of strength, aggressivity and dominance in human beings for real and valid evolutionary purposes. Nature cares not about egalitarian relationships among opposite sexes or societies (see the moths, ants, spiders, bees, ducks, lions, chimps, etc.); it “cares” about what works to promote the reproduction of a species. Asymmetric power relationships in societies and among the sexes in species aren’t democratic but they have more evolutionary staying power than horizontal relationships. That’s just the way it is. If you want to “improve” on that model, you’d better but your “God” outfit on and pack a lot of sandwiches because you are bucking up against millions of years of evolution. The ones who hold the power are ALWAYS in the driver’s seat. If they don’t adequately react to a threat to the species, it’s curtains.  The 1% enjoy their RHIP which provide them many privileges but they cannot evade their responsibility. This is not “Murder on the Orient Express”; this is the train engineer driving the train off a cliff. The 1% don’t have to lose their “better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” attitude for mankind to survive; they just have stop believing their own PR. If they bite the reality bullet and lead the way into sustainable living, we might make it. Otherwise, the fungi, extremophiles and the humble descendants of human microbial bacterial colonies will inherit the Earth. The planet will become hot as hell and only the simplest and toughest life forms will live here. Send this to someone in the 1% if you know any. Who knows? They might even read it and think about it.

1.   http://the-scientist.com/2012/03/01/who-are-we-really/#comment-464838811 2.  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8393081.stm
3.   http://www.scb.se/Pages/TableAndChart____104319.aspx 4.  http://www.e3network.org/papers/Why_do_state_emissions_differ_so_widely.pdf 5.  http://www.executivetravelmagazine.com/articles/flying-on-private-jets 6.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/oct/29/private-jets-green 7.  http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/high_flyers 8.   http://www.greendrinkschina.org/news/chinas-per-capita-carbon-emissions-solidly-reach-developed-nation-levels/ 9.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita 10. http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html 11. http://green.wikia.com/wiki/Carbon_Footprint_of_American_Cities