We’re an egotistical, delusional lot, us humans. We’re the only species on the planet who despoils its own life support system and who does not live within biological limits. Does that make us the most intelligent or least intelligent species?
Preservation of our environment remains well toward the bottom of our priorities. Personally and collectively, in our daily lives and in the media, we fixate on career, financial accumulation, economic growth, political performance, consumerism, entertainment, social media, and external validation. None of these aspects of our lives mean anything without a livable planet full of basic resources, and every one of these fixations contribute directly or indirectly to our planetary degradation.
Noam Chomsky has even begun to recognize that our precarious environmental predicament – primarily envisioned as the issue of climate change, though it encompasses so much more – is the most crucial existential threat to human life on the planet. Of late, whenever you see Chomsky interviewed or hear him speak, he tends to emphasize that of many injustices and dire risks to the people of the United States, the people oppressed by U.S. empire, and humanity as a whole, all pale in comparison to the our environmental crisis.
In the fall of 2017, a group of world scientists issued a second warning to humanity (the first of which was delivered in 1992): if we do not make significant changes to our way of life immediately, we will no longer be able to ward off the inevitable precipitous decline of our planetary ecosystem as a result of our poor environmental stewardship. Still more scientists cautioned as recently as August 6, 2018 that if we do not undertake a societal transformation, a host of positive feedback mechanisms would be unleashed that could soon render the Earth uninhabitable to many species, including humans. The scientific tendency toward conservatism in predictions of risk, as evidenced by the underestimation of the timing and severity of climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC), would imply that time is of the essence. While an individual ecosystem is able to withstand and adapt to deleterious forces for a certain amount of time, if that injurious bombardment continues unabated, the ecosystem will finally reach a threshold, at which point it will collapse. The Earth’s entire biosphere is no different.
And yet charlatan academics who cherry-pick data outside of their fields to support their elitist perspective, like Steven Pinker, as well as ecomodernists, such as Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger at the Breakthrough Institute, and tech giants such as Elon Musk, would have you believe that we are living in the greatest era known to manand that our human intelligence and innovation – particularly of the technological sort – will carry us through these perilous ecological times. It’s an optimistic message that everyone likes to hear, but it is hollow at its core. Just read through their proclamations and manifestos. What you will find is wishful-thinking based on flimsy, unsubstantiated premises that we all want to believe so that we in the first world can carry on in our daily lives with little disruption to our usual profligate consumption, and especially, to corporate capitalism. Indeed, fourth-wave environmentalism, which too many of the large environmental non-profit organizations like the Environmental Defense Fund, the Nature Conservancy, and the World Wildlife Fund promote, is predicated on corporate-environmental partnerships and technological modernization. It is touted as “win-win” – yet in practice, it is nothing but a loss for the biosphere. . .
Source: Dying of Consumption While Guzzling Snake Oil: a Realist’s Perspective on the Environmental Crisis
The Most Revolutionary Act 
i often say, if environmentalists were serious they would recognize the two biggest causes of global warming: the US military and chemtrailing. they’d be working to reduce both. instead they dont even acknowledge chemtrails exist, least of all that it is poisoning our soil and water even as it dims the skies. all the other efforts they make to curb greenhouse gases is just nibbling around the edges of a solution. it amounts to controlled opposition to the most critical problem facing the earth. fiddling while the world burns.
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Thanks for your comment, nomad. You could definitely add capitalism to that list.
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Nordhaus and schellenrger are nuke shills.
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I guess the thing that angers me the most about the pro-nuclear power movement, Teri, is that the nuclear industry would be long dead if taxpayers hadn’t been subsidizing it. It’s clearly the most economically inefficient form of power.
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I saw something before, on here about asbestos. Trump dregulated it. Everyone knows, how carcinogenic it is! Few acknowledge its radioactivity.
One here from 2009
Proc Jpn Acad Ser B Phys Biol Sci. 2009;85(7):229-39.
Accumulation of radium in ferruginous protein bodies formed in lung tissue: association of resulting radiation hotspots with malignant mesothelioma and other malignancies.
Nakamura E1, Makishima A, Hagino K, Okabe K.
Author information
Abstract
While exposure to fibers and particles has been proposed to be associated with several different lung malignancies including mesothelioma, the mechanism for the carcinogenesis is not fully understood. Along with mineralogical observation, we have analyzed forty-four major and trace elements in extracted asbestos bodies (fibers and proteins attached to them) with coexisting fiber-free ferruginous protein bodies from extirpative lungs of individuals with malignant mesothelioma. These observations together with patients’ characteristics suggest that inhaled iron-rich asbestos fibers and dust particles, and excess iron deposited by continuous cigarette smoking would induce ferruginous protein body formation resulting in ferritin aggregates in lung tissue. Chemical analysis of ferruginous protein bodies extracted from lung tissues reveals anomalously high concentrations of radioactive radium, reaching millions of times higher concentration than that of seawater. Continuous and prolonged internal exposure to hotspot ionizing radiation from radium and its daughter nuclides could cause strong and frequent DNA damage in lung tissue, initiate different types of tumour cells, including malignant mesothelioma cells, and may cause cancers.
PMID:
19644223
PMCID:
PMC3561846
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19644223
Get a geiger counter that measures alpha, beta, and gamma. For samples that have water. The water, has to be evaporated, leaving a residue. For other things with water, they should be dehydrated. Many smoke alarms have a radiation source in them, that will tell you how well your geiger counter is. Dont listen to bullshit, about background radiation.
Radiation detection with a good detector is simple. Keep it so.
You can tell with a radiation source, like a smoke detector or thorium welding rod, that your geiger is working properly. You will be able to tell, after getting a feel for the geiger counter.
You will know that there is
something radioactive around or, there are excess radionuclide particles, in the air.
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