Campaign 2008: The Things They Won't DiscussWed, 02/27/2008 - 19:12 — dlindorff
While Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination debate and compete over whose healthcare reform plan is best, and over whether or not it’s okay to talk with “America’s enemies,” and while Democrats and Republicans lob attacks over whose foreign policy is more muscular, there is a lengthening list of global catastrophes all of which are simply being ignored.
Let’s look at that list:
Famine According to the United Nations, there is a global food shortage approaching quickly, egged on by the rising cost of fertilizer, the declining availability of water, the erosion and urbanization of cropland, and the substitution of ethanol-producing crops—primarily corn—for food crops. By next year at this time, we could start to see starvation in Asia and Africa on an unprecedented scale, with no stocks of grain in reserve to relieve the crisis.
The collapse of the US dollar With the world’s reserve currency plunging in value to record lows, and the US trade deficit soaring out of control, leaving the Federal Reserve with no ability to stem the fall, it’s only a matter of time before the US becomes a broken economy, unable to fund its deficits any longer. Already, shop owners in New York are accepting Euros and Canadian dollars for goods, seeing those bills as a better store of value than the Greenback. The OPEC nations, for sure, will not be far behind. Iran has already set in motion plans to accept only payment in Euros for its oil.
The loss of the Arctic ice sheet It is increasingly looking like it is only a matter of years before the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free in the summer. Greenland is losing its huge cap of ice too at an accelerating rate, way past the outer limit imagined by UN scientists only last year. We could be looking at sea rises measured in meters in a matter of years, not decades, if this keeps up. There is growing evidence too that the Western Antarctic Ice Shelf too is melting at an increasing rate, adding to the risk.
An end to commercial fishing Fish stocks in most of the world’s key fisheries—a primary source of protein for much of the world—are nearing collapse, and the habitats, thanks to the scouring of sea bottoms by industrial fishing fleets—are being destroyed forever. Add to that the acidification of the oceans thanks, to airborne and river-borne pollutants, a process which is destroying the plankton at the bottom of the oceanic food chain, and we have another major food crisis on our hands, not to mention the loss of the world’s primary carbon sink.
Climate disruptions The oceans are warming, with a concomitant risk of ever worse El Nino phenomena in the Pacific, and the slowing and shrinking of the Gulf Stream and other ocean currents critical to the global weather patterns upon which the world’s current population centers have depended. This doesn’t just mean more severe storms along America’s coasts. It means, most likely, growing drought across the nation’s midsection, a loss of snowpack in the Rockies, critical to irrigation in the western US, and catastrophic droughts in Africa, Asia, South Asia and South America, and possibly even Spain and southern Europe. ........(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/?q=node/112
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