by Tom Engelhardt
Terracide and the Terrarists
We have a word for the conscious slaughter of a racial or ethnic group: genocide. And one for the
conscious destruction of aspects of the environment: ecocide.
But we don't have a word for the conscious act of destroying the planet we live on, the world as humanity had known it until, historically speaking, late last night.
A possiblility might be "terracide" from the Latin word for earth. It has the right ring, given its similarity to the commonplace danger word of our era: terrorist.
The truth is, whatever we call them, it's time to talk bluntly about the terrarists of our world. YEs, I know, 9/11 was horrific.
Almost 3000 dead, massive towers down, apocalyptic scenes. And yes, when it comes to terror attacks, the Boston Marathon bombings weren't pretty either.
But in both cases, those who committed the acts paid for or will pay for their crimes.
In the case of the terrarists - and here I'm referring in particular to the men who run what may be the most profitable corporations on the planet, giant energy companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhilips, BP, and Shell - you're the one who's going to pay, especially your children and grandchildren.
You can take one thing for granted: not a single terrarist will ever go to jail, and yet they certainly knew what they were doing
It wasn't that complicated. In recent years, the companies they run have been extracting fossil fuels from the Earth in ever more frenetic and ingenious ways.
The burning of those fossil fuels, in turn, has put record amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere.
Only this month, the CO2 level reached 400 parts per million for the first time in human history.
A concensus of scientists has long concluded that the process was warming the world and that, if the average planetary temperature rose more than two degrees Celsuis, all sorts of dangers could ensue, including seas rising high enough to inundate coastal cities, increasingly intense heat waves, droughts, floods, ever more extreme storm systems, and so on.
How to Make Staggering Amounts of Money and Do in the Planet
None of this was exactly a mystery. It's in the scientific literature. NASA scientist James Hansen first publicized the reality of global warming to Congress in 1988.
It took a while - thanks in part to the terrarists - but the news of what was happening increasingly made it into the mainstream. Anybody could learn about it.
To read the full article, please click here:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175703/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_biggest_criminal_enterprise_in_history/
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