Government Climate Change Report - 2

In the first post of this series we discussed a government report which had been mandated by a law passed in 1990 by the U.S. Congress, then signed into law by Bush I.

The current version of that report early on contains the statement "Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present" (Government Climate Change Report, January 2013).

In many posts Dredd Blog has tried to sound an alarm by, among other things, estimating what the government response to that report, and others like it, would be.

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog began a ten-part series on September 28, 2009, New Climate Catastrophe Policy: Triage, which ended with New Climate Catastrophe Policy: Triage - 10, on October 30, 2012.

The gist of that series was to argue and show that the federal government has no plan to prevent the continuation of damage to the global climate system, rather, it only has a plan to bury the bodies and take the debris to some landfill as the damage occurs.

That policy is clearly a fatalistic policy (An Old Catastrophe: Climate Policy) that is much like addicts on their last legs, looking forward only to catastrophe and further demise.

In the oil addiction case, we can add some additional data to the basic observation which indicates that the controlling oil addicts have a fervent religious element --which does add "something" extra to the basic fatalistic outlook (The Universal Smedley - 2).

Regular readers also know that another Dredd Blog theory for why the government has that attitude (an attitude reflecting that the government does not seem to think it is capable of doing anything about it) is that in fact the government level is not the level where the controlling decisions are made (Epigovernment: The New Model - 3).

The controlling decisions are made by a private empire, the 1% Plutocrats who control government through the influence of economic power and persuasion, and who have revealed on the record that they are "not an American company" (MOMCOM: The Private Parts - 5).

Their senseless policy which controls the decisions of the Obama Administration (and Bush II Administration) were pointed out a while back in several Dredd Blog posts (see e.g. Barry & Oil-Qaeda vs Arctic Wilderness and Oil-Qaeda: The Deadliest Parasite Of Civilization).

The utter senselessness of their policy toward the damaged global climate system was recently noticed by a British journalist:

At the heart of the White House's new Arctic strategy is an elementary but devastating contradiction between what President Obama, in the document's preamble, describes as seeking "to make the most of the emerging economic opportunities in the region" due to the rapid loss of Arctic summer sea ice, and recognising "the need to protect and conserve this unique, valuable, and changing environment."

Despite repeated references to "preservation" and "conservation", the strategy fails to outline any specific steps that would be explored to mitigate or prevent the disappearance of the Arctic sea ice due to intensifying global warming. Instead, the document from the outset aims to:

"... position the United States to respond effectively to challenges and emerging opportunities arising from significant increases in Arctic activity due to the diminishment of sea ice and the emergence of a new Arctic environment."

In other words, far from being designed to prevent catastrophe, the success of the new strategy is premised precisely on the disappearance of the Arctic summer sea ice.

(Guardian: Arctic Strategy a Climate Time Bomb, emphasis added). As pointed out in the beginning of this post, this scenario is exactly what Dredd Blog has been pointing out now for several years.

The fact that burning fossil fuels is causing the Arctic Ice Sheet to melt is of no concern to the government policy --the only concern is getting more oil from the Arctic.

Using that oil will cause more damage to the global climate system, which means more catastrophe is coming our way.

The government incessantly obsesses over national security, yet it is uncanny how this senseless Arctic Policy ignores national security on several fronts:

America’s top military officer in charge of monitoring hostile actions by North Korea, escalating tensions between China and Japan, and a spike in computer attacks traced to China provides an unexpected answer when asked what is the biggest long-term security threat in the Pacific region: climate change.
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[Another] Navy Admiral even believes that Singapore will no longer be the greatest ocean port, but that a port in Greenland will take that honor, because after the polar ice caps melt in the Arctic, the fabled Northwest Passage will become strategic, and the Panama Canal will become somewhat of a museum piece.

(All Weather is Local - 4). Since 97-98% of scientists agree about coming climate catastrophe, it is quite difficult to dispute the notion that sanity of government actually peaked some time ago (The Peak of Sanity - 3).

Likewise, it is difficult to dispute that the degree of insanity that replaced that sanity is somewhere high in the psychopathic range (When You Are Governed By Psychopaths - 4).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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America:

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