[intro music, ocean sounds]
Welcome to World Ocean Radio…
I’m Peter Neill, Founder of the World Ocean Observatory.
The political climate of the day is attempting to direct history, to shape it to private advantage, against the best interests of the world. The facts are simple. The science demonstrates the truth of climate change, the preemptive causes, today calculated in terms of short-term profit and gross domestic product, not in terms of human health, peace, and any consideration of the future consequences of emissions, pollution, externalities, and measure of long-term implication for the future.
The focus is, of course, is the affirmation of oil. This is not new news: we have been made aware internationally of the cost of this intentional damage on our bodies and communities, the denial of alternative energy generation technology, the frustration of all attempts to create international policy or national regulation to counter the amplifying degradation of our quality of life, our collective and individual health, and the prognosis for us and our children today and our inheritors tomorrow.
The statistics inform us without equivocation. A recent report by InfluenceMap, a UK-based think tank that track pertinent climate trends, declares that 32 companies, nationally and privately owned, emit more than half of the world’s CO2 emissions, thus propagating and amplifying more than half of the far more than half of the associated negative consequences measured by air quality, extreme weather, pandemic, ocean acidification, freshwater pollution, financial inequity, social unrest, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of very few to the detriment the millions of us otherwise, non-participating victims.
This power is concentrated in the hands of a very few private executives, company directors, and shareholders, as well as government officials, sovereign wealth fund managers, participant banks, and lobbyists who are the public agents of this concentrated global endeavor. I would read the list of entities aloud, but you know who they are, and you know that they are complicit, responsible, and indifferent to our well-being and future survival. They are unaccountable, proudly and profitably engaged in the business of natural resource depletion and as perpetrators, co-conspirators, and profiteers. They are not troubled by conscience or inter-generational impact. They have created their own self-serving ethos, and from their behavior it would seem that you, and I, and all the rest of us, are not included, even considered, in their purview. These individuals and their behaviors are described by the report as being on the “wrong side of history.”
Today, we are confronted with growing autocracy, by a concentrated few who believe history is theirs to re-dress and re-shape with no concern for those who must live in their detritus. Call it what you will, “fascism” or otherwise, the outcome is upon us as they take the future from us, appropriating it as their own. [ The arrogance and condescension are palpable, in the form of dis-respect for cherished principles and institutions and for the compromise and removal of rights that have served so many as core freedoms for shared benefits for so long. ]
This is the true denial. Not just of the science. Not just of the obvious poisonous consequence, now evident to all. But, most essentially, of the right of redress and affirmation of self-governance for and by the people, for liberty and justice for all. Do we really want to hand that unique privilege over to the “business of depletion?”
I always come back to the ocean as symbol and reality, as the truth found in the natural system that sustains us all. That dynamic place, that cumulation of power and circumstance affects us, every one. And there too we are experiencing debilitating compromise, from the same forces of pre-meditated self-interest. But that ocean has been at the core of our history, and from it, forever then, and now, we cannot escape. We can sustain it, and by that ourselves. We can dare to corrupt it, beyond our air and our landside home, but its power and beneficence, its fulsome ethos, its democratic taking and giving, its utility for cleansing ourselves of ego, greed, and willful ignorance will not be denied. It is a place where those on the wrong side of history go to drown. It is a place wherein we choose to fend for each other and swim for ourselves.
We will disuss these issues and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
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[outro music, ocean sounds]
