http://ecoethics.net/2014-ENVRE120/20170924-EV&N-255-Link.html
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Our atmosphere is very precarious and changes in its composition are driving global climate change as Earth’s oceans and land surfaces are warming. Another very important dynamic process of ecosystemic change has been unleashed by the severe weather events that have occurred in several regions around the Earth.
In particular, we are witnessing the colossal destruction of topsoil through accelerated soil erosion following extreme weather events, including super-typhoons, massive hurricanes and historically unprecedented cloud-burst/rain downpour events. The horrendous loss of topsoil needs to be calculated in a “full-cost-accounting” of climate change, induced and accelerated by human’s excessive combustion of fossil fuels.
Those who have benefited from the extraction, refinement, transport and sale of mineralized fossilized fuels need to be held to account for the geological degradation and global havoc they have unleashed in their glutenous race to amass private profit.
Exxon Mobil has made more money for its shareholders than any other institution in human history, and to keep the profits forthcoming it is now apparent that their executives lied to regulators, to the public and to their own shareholders over the last forty years. This level of systemic has rarely if ever been paralleled, and now the former CEO of Exxon has become the Secretary of State of the most powerful nation-state on Earth, apparently willing to continue and expand massive military campaigns in the Middle East to assure the continued flow of petroleum to the United States.
The ecological cost of this pattern of privatized profit and the ecocidal warfare it has fostered is just now beginning to be paid for by humanity as a whole through the inexorable collapse of the relatively stable ecosystem that characterized the global climate regime throughout the Holocene and ever since the rise of agricultural civilizations.
For further discussion about the case for holding the fossil fuel corporations accountable for the devastation they have unleashed see:
- Climate Damage Assessment: Assessing the Full Cost of 40 Years of Profits, Lies, and Deception from the Fossil-Fuel Industries
- What is a ‘Dust Spike’? Who Cares? Abrupt Climate Change in the Past
- Collapse! What Collapse? A workshop at Yale October 20-22, 2017 | Yale Initiative For The Study Of Antiquity And The Premodern World
- Agents of Empire: Steps Toward an Ecology of Imperialism | T. C. Weiskel
- “Just take the case of agriculture…”
- “No Soil. No Growing Seasons. Just Add Water and Technology:” The Recent Evolution & Tragic Trajectory of the World Food System
- Ignorance, Arrogance, Overshoot & Collapse: The Destructive Power of Enduing Myths In Collapsing Civilizations
- Jeffrey Sachs’ speech at the UN Food Systems Pre-Summit (full speech)
and
Transition Studies 