It’s Not Nice to Fool (With) Mother Nature

Back in the 1970’s, there was a famous ad for a margarine product named Chiffon. Mother Nature tasted it believing it was butter then once informed it wasn’t, became upset and called down lightning saying angrily, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!”

Who would have thought that, if creatively deconstructed 40 years later, it could be seen as a brilliant and prescient statement?

Now, of course this was not in the minds of the Madison Avenue ad men (it was still men mostly then) when they designed this campaign but let’s put that aside for a moment and begin our exploration of what this ad could be seen to be saying.

Here we have Mother Nature, trusting in the work of human kind and being deceived by their corporate entities that intentionally attempt to corrupt and mislead her in an attempt to supplant that which is true in order to profit (fortunately, there are no international laws against torturing logic…or Mitt Romney would be behind bars).

Is this not in fact what this election has been about, not to mention the corporate propaganda campaign against the validity of Climate Change? Brazenly advancing lies and deceptions to deceive the public in order to seize greater power and profits.

Do the executives at energy corporations really not believe in science? Really? They don’t believe what 99% of legit scientists conclude with regards to man made Climate Change occurring right now and posing the greatest threat to the future of human civilization?

I would argue that the corporate opponents of acknowledging Climate Change know that it is happening but their greed and their only caring about how they can profit today provides them all the justification they need to lie about how they are continuing to fight against taking action to at least reduce the death and destruction the fallout from their products is causing to the entire planet.

And the politicians who depend on corporate financing of their campaigns don’t come off quite so principled either.

In a year when the hottest Summer on record was recorded, when record droughts destroyed crops and led to suffering, when the Republican National Convention was postponed and truncated because of a dangerous hurricane and when up to 20% of the population of America are in the path of a highly unusual and threatening hurricane/tropical storm…not one mention of Climate Change in the Presidential debates…the first time since the 1984 Presidential Elections, when Walter Mondale ran against incumbent President Ronald Reagan.

No need to anger the oil companies, in this post-Citizens United America our unprincipled Supreme Court has unleashed on America, politicians float in a flood of implied corporate extortion like helpless people trapped in a hurricane’s aftermath. Speak out against the wealthiest corporations in the world and any politician could soon be hit with a hurricane of corporate money spent to defeat him and insert a “friendlier” politician in their place.

And what is the end result of this corrupt, survival of the wealthiest and their lackeys system we now see supplanting our government?

Doing to the planet Earth what they did to the economy in 2008.

Dallas, Texas had three earthquakes this month that a geologist attributes to wastewater disposal From fracking operations. Two were above 3.0.

Before a series of small quakes on Halloween 2008, the Dallas area had never recorded a magnitude-3 earthquake, said Cliff Frohlich, associate director and senior research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics. USGS data show that, since then, it has felt at least one quake at or above a magnitude 3 every year except 2010.

Frohlich said he doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that an intensification in seismic activity in the Dallas area came the year after a pocket of ground just south of (and thousands of feet below) the DFW airport began to be inundated with wastewater from hydraulic fracturing.

http://news.yahoo.com/unusual-dallas-earthquakes-linked-fracking-expert-says-181055288.html

More information about fracking causing earthquakes can be found in the following article from NPR, “Does Fracking Cause Earthquakes?”:

http://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/tag/earthquake/

As many may have seen in the great expose documentary, Gasland, fracking is also poisoning ground water (and turning water flammable!) throughout the US…and thanks to Climate Change which the oil companies have been greatly contributing to, potable water is becoming less and less plentiful. An interesting video at Gasland’s website (http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/)

And a great deal of damage, deaths and illness from pollution by energy and chemical corporations devastate millions of families and cost billions.

Even though the primary motivation of energy corporations isn’t to kill people, destroy lives and civilization…if it helps profits, their thinking is, “It’s just the cost of doing business.”

This is crazy. We have corporations that are contributing towards worsening Climate Change and as a result, threatening the stability and possibly even the survival of modern society. They have been freed by the Supreme Court to intimidate any politician who might stand up to them. We had to stand by and watch as they sacrificed our economy and economic future in pursuit of their insatiable greed. Must we really watch helplessly as they continue wreaking their “destructive Capitalism” on the physical planet?

How bad do things have to get before people demand change? Record and unusual hurricanes, droughts, floods, tornadoes…no, this is not Biblical prophesy, scientists have been predicting this…and things getting worse, for many years but the corporate powers that profit from pollution have successfully campaigned against trying to blunt or reverse Climate Change.

We can’t bail out Earth with a literal TARP. It’s too big to fail but the human race isn’t. People around the world will live in greater deprivation when it comes to food and water, more “natural” disasters will occur with greater intensity, more property will be damaged and more lives will be lost. And none of this was necessary, none of this had to happen…at least not in the frequency and intensity.

If the Earth becomes a more hostile place to live, it doesn’t matter who is elected President, whose taxes are cut or raised, life will become more difficult and vulnerable for everyone.

If saving the nation from various types of destruction isn’t something that Americans can come together on, what can we come together on? And the same goes for the rest of the world, if we can’t come together to better protect people around the world from the wrath of pollution-caused disasters, how self-destructive would that be.

This isn’t the end of the world, Earth has gone through many eras of freezing over and becoming overheated, uninhabitable for millions of years. Earth will continue with or without a safe and secure human society. It’s up to us as to how we will impact this planet and impact our lives and future.

And the clock is ticking…