BACK TO NATURE, MY ASS

Are we Green yet? Did we miss anything? The G-8 summit in Japan is over and they promised to reduce greenhouse gas emissions dramatically over the course of the next 30 years or so, or when all the pricipals are long dead or out of office. They offered no specifics at all, just a vague notion to stop poisoning ourselves by doing, oh, we don't know,... Green Stuff, yeah, good old healthy Green Stuff! Looking forward to next year's meeting where we can decide to end disease, poverty, war and starvation over the next, say... 75 years, yeah, that oughta do it. Thank you, thank you very much.

G-8 stands for the Group of Eight, presumably the 8 most industrialized and polluting nations, and the wealthiest, too. These self-appointed elites of the planet are France, The United States, Canada, Russia, The United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, and Japan. They used to be G-6 until Russia and Italy were invited into this exclusive men's club. In recent years they are unofficially G-9, the ninth member being a representative of the European Union who takes part but cannot host a meeting or cast a vote, as if these votes mean anything anyway. There's nothing binding in these photo-op meetings, and bedsides, they don't speak for China and India, two giant and growing economies that represent almost 37% of humanity and together contain 41% of the world's poorest people.

So maybe next year they ought to have a G-10 meeting in the laughable hopes that India and China will cease their safety-free polluting ways, those nations currently sending up industrial black clouds of gunk far surpassing those of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Sheffield, England back in the heyday of non-regulated industrialism in the Western World. The Industrial Revolution produced as much slow death as steel until those nations set some rules for dumping toxins into the water and atmosphere and started, with much corporate resistance even until this day, to clean up their acts. Many industries just threw up their hands and shipped their polluting operations to nations that wanted money more than the health of their citizens. So maybe G-192 is the way to go, 192 being the number of member countries of the United Nations.

Forget returning to Mother Nature for answers like some drug-addled hippies in a Volkswagon van and a tepee and a vague notion of organic living. It was always technology that solved mankind's problems, from fossil fuels that made modern living possible, to scientific labs curing diseases to air conditioning that made life bearable and productive in hot climates. Don't forget the huge building projects to build sanitation facilities that have saved more lives than all the world's doctors combined, simply providing clean water. This technology has almost never come from the halls of any government, but from private individuals and groups of people. Alexander Graham Bell didn't invent the telephone for the benefit of the government. Henry Ford didn't produce affordable automobiles on his assembly lines because the mayor asked him to. What governments can do, though, is to provide money for researchers and stay out of their way.

Farming in the United States is not the world's most productive per-acre because our farmers work sunup to sunset. Everybody's farmers do, but our farmers use an impressive arsenal of science and technology to constantly improve their yield and renew the fertility of their land. The results speak for themselves and America feeds a goodly portion of the globe. So with petroleum running out and the demand for it climbing every day, who will solve the energy and pollution crisis threatening the whole world with catastrophic climate change? Here's a clue; it won't be a committee and it won't be any government officials. It will be some really smart and dedicated people working on a problem that fascinates them, and people who will expect to make a lot of money from their inventions. This isn't a comic book where Superman saves the world for nothing.

And not only is this world being poisoned, but it's starving, too, to the tune of 36,000 deaths every single day. So growing our own gasoline might mean losing valuable farmland and then 100,000 deaths a day might be the norm, as if even one starvation death on a bountiful planet is normal or in any way acceptable. So maybe all those dreams of corn being our energy savior amounts to a death sentence for thousands a day. Is that okay with G8? Or anybody? And again, the answer is not less technology, but different technology and plenty of it.

Maybe by making water desalinization a simpler and cheaper process the people who live in dry climates might use the sea to grow their food. There are over 350 million people living in the Sahara and its surrounding dust bowl, and they're not moving to anyplace more hospitable anytime soon. Many of the nations there import 90% of their food staples, and with fuel being so expensive and farmland being lost to bio-fuels, food is getting too expensive for them and they're pretty much screwed without a long-term solution. So maybe some of these oil-rich tyrannies can pony up some dough before the oil taps dry up and they're back to making their own shoes and traveling from oasis to oasis on camel back reminiscing about the good old days when they ate caviar for breakfast and the Western world forgave them for enslaving their women.

That might involve building universities that teach more than religious fairy tales and leaning heavily on the knowledge and technology of the Western nations they consider infidels, but tough crap. Western nations are not crazy about buying oil from them either but they do anyway so that their people can live at a certain standard. That's supposed to be the name of the game for governments, protecting their citizens, not eating caviar for breakfast at the mortal peril of their nation's future. And helping your neighbor when he is starving is not only a good moral principle but a practical policy in case the shoe is on the other foot someday. Whatever religion you subscribe to, they all acknowledge that what goes around, comes around, whether they call it karma or do-unto-others or what-have-you. To have good neighbors you need to first be a good neighbor.

And in this global economy and increasingly smaller world, everybody is your neighbor. In anybody's neighborhood, the 8 richest of them don't get to set community policy for everybody else (Okay, maybe they do, but that's another problem people need to work on). And when those 8 neighbors don't commit to obeying the new rules themselves, well, they shouldn't be all that shocked when a brick or two sails through their windows. No one man can build a subway system or a Panama Canal, but a whole bunch of them sure can. But when those subways and canals are threatened with being underneath the melted ice cap-swollen oceans because we refuse to stop burning fossil fuels, maybe a whole bunch of us should collaborate on some new technology that keeps the seashores right where they are otherwise Mother Nature just might decide to irrigate the Sahara herself with a hundred feet of sea water.

And let's try not to be too disappointed if the new technology doesn't resemble some Utopian idea of vast green meadows and forests renewing themselves eternally while God's creatures frolic in the sun. That was what the planet was like before humans took over and multiplied ourselves like those Biblical grains of sand. And that's what it will return to if we join the dinosaurs and dodo birds on the extinct list. It's not the planet that is in any danger, it is us. Any volunteers for disappearing forever? Can I get a show of hands here? No? Okay, then let the scientists get busy and stop making vague promises that have no basis in reality and dreaming naive Green Dreams that don't take the great mass of humanity into account.