{"id":956,"date":"2013-05-14T14:05:53","date_gmt":"2013-05-14T21:05:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/?p=956"},"modified":"2013-05-27T13:07:17","modified_gmt":"2013-05-27T20:07:17","slug":"400","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/2013\/05\/14\/400\/","title":{"rendered":"400"},"content":{"rendered":"

Headline: As of Thursday, May 9, 2013 the daily 24 hour average of CO2 in the air, as measured by the U.S. monitoring station in Mauna Loa, Hawaii was 400 parts per million<\/strong> – the highest level that any human (homo sapien) has ever seen.<\/p>\n

IF Stephen Colbert heard about this, here\u2019s what he might have scripted for his nightly Colbert Report on the Comedy Channel:<\/p>\n

(Spinning around in his chair waving an American Flag, Colbert begins)<\/em>
\n400!!<\/strong>
\nFour Zero Zero! Wow!
\nCongratulations Nation. We did it. We broke a 2 million year old record. But we can do better because humans have only been around for 200,000 years. And we Americans can be particularly proud. Nation, we in the U.S. of A deserve a lot of credit. Sure, we red, white and blue Americans are only 5% of the world\u2019s population; but we can still excel. We may be 38th in the world for health care and we may be 25th in the world for educating our kiddos in math , but we are number one – numero uno on the planet for how much fossil fuel we burn and how much CO2 we dump into the atmosphere. That\u2019s right folks, number one.<\/p>\n

We not only burn over 25% of fossil fuel on the planet, but the 50 red and blue states of America can take credit for dumping 25% of the CO2 into our global atmosphere every day. Sure those Chinese workers now manufacture everything we buy, but a typical Chinese worker dumps only 1\/5 of the CO2 in the air that an American non-worker does. OK, sure there are five times as many Chinese people, but our country is still numero uno on the total greenhouse gas emissions scale. We have a secret weapon called fracking that releases secret amounts (its proprietary information known only by the natural gas companies) of methane (also a greenhouse gas) into the air. That\u2019s something China doesn\u2019t do (yet).<\/p>\n

400 parts per million! You can go to any major city during rush hour, suck in a deep breath of the air and just smell success. OK, so that smell is the ozone and N2O and maybe the methane (natural gas), but they also count as greenhouse gases. 400 ppm! Make no mistake, this is a momentous achievement for humankind. Just 60 years ago it was less than 300.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s be fair, Nation. We couldn\u2019t have done it without the combined effort of corporate America. Some credit does have to go to the coal, oil, and natural gas industry and especially that not so attractive blond lady in black who teaches us how clean natural gas is every night on TV. And sure some credit goes to the auto industry and their ad agencies. Without these TV ads, I never would have learned that I need an all terrain, all wheel drive SUS to drive the family into the city to see Grandma on Sunday afternoons. Those TV ads also reminded me that the Hummer isn\u2019t just another great gas-guzzling vehicle made in good old America \u2013 it adds safety to that trip to the grocery store. Can you imagine what would happen if you hit a pot hole on the way home in a normal car? USA! USA! USA!<\/p>\n

And last but not least, credit goes to our political representatives who fortunately are still in a state of denial. If they knew that we Americans burned 20 million barrels of oil every day plus an equivalent amount of coal & natural gas with the subsequent dumping of 5.3 billion metric tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, who knows what that might do to disrupt their congressional gridlock.<\/p>\n

President Obama is right to remind us that our nation\u2019s energy policy must be \u201call of the above.\u201d By that he means we need to focus on burning everything we can get our hands on. Nation, we shouldn\u2019t be limiting our burning to just coal, oil, natural gas, tar sands oil, and shale oil. Let\u2019s go America \u2013 it wasn\u2019t that long again that we were cutting down everything that looked like a tree, and throwing it into some kind of fire. There are still plenty of trees in all those national forests. Folks, we can do better. I say we burn those trees before nature does. With all these droughts going around for some unknown reason, Mother Nature is going to burn everything anyway.<\/p>\n

And what about all those books in all the libraries around town. They burn.
\nAnd Nation, let\u2019s be honest. There is no reason to transition to wind and solar energy and geothermal, and these other wimpy sources of energy. Everybody knows that when you put a solar PV panel on your roof, there is not one single molecule of CO2 that comes out of it \u2013 not one. How can we expect to get to 450 with solar panels and these wind things. There is not one single CO2 molecule (or any other green house gas molecules) that comes out of a wind turbine. What good are these technologies in keeping America at the top?<\/p>\n

And for good measure, I say kill the electric car \u2013 we did it once before back in the 80s \u2013 we can do it again. I say bring back the Hummers and 6 miles to the gallon. And what\u2019s this about these plug-in hybrid electric cars that aren\u2019t doing their share to keep us on the top of the CO2 heap. What\u2019s that all about? A vehicle that doesn\u2019t dump CO2, or ozone or NOx into the air. This is America for God\u2019s sake \u2013 not Germany. Hybrids don\u2019t help us win the race to the bottom of the mpg mountain? We are making such good downhill progress in education and health care \u2013 let\u2019s just figure out what we are doing there and do the same in energy.<\/p>\n

Maybe we could try vouchers so everyone can buy gasoline at charter gas stations?<\/p>\n

Come on America – we need to burn like there\u2019s no tomorrow so there will be no tomorrow. \u00a0 And that\u2019s the word.<\/p>\n

(Brought to you by the number 400 and the satirical spirit of Colbert parody – making something even more absurd than it already is)<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Headline: As of Thursday, May 9, 2013 the daily 24 hour average of CO2 in the air, as measured by the U.S. monitoring station in Mauna Loa, Hawaii was 400 parts per million – the highest level that any human (homo sapien) has ever seen. IF Stephen Colbert heard about this, here\u2019s what he might […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-relationship-to-nature","category-identifying-unsustainable-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=956"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":968,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956\/revisions\/968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}