We have a war that actually started in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and declared that is was their territory anyway. The war that started then continues today. Russian is now bombing civilian areas indiscretely. At some point the United States must say, enough is enough.
What we must do is go to Ukraine’s assistance by using specialized troops on the ground. Not a single troop needs to be infantry, rather they should be artillery and air defense artillery along we a wing of U.S. Air Force fighters.
Early in this conflict, Putin sabre rattled that he would use battlefield nukes and maybe more. He has a problem there and it is call MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). That means we have just as much as he does, and this is not including the European countries. And if a single nuke gets used on the battlefield, it will be like 1943 where the U.S. was still building up its strength while winning battles everywhere.
To put a period on this type of action, we would have to declare India, Brasil, China, North Korea, and Russia as enemy combatants. Once we have unilaterally gone into battle, it would not take much for the rest of the NATO countries to join in, and for Russia, that is very bad. At that point Russia would have nothing to gain and everything to lose and just by the troop movements, there might be an immediate end of hostilities. NATO must stand strong and demand that Russia pull all its troops at least 200km from any non-Russian border. Not a single bullet shot by any NATO country but by putting up is enough to get Russian to shup up.
With the exception of Belarus, Russia has no friendly countries in the rest of Europe. When nearly the entirety of Europe lines up against you in a show of strength, you do nothing but admit defeat as the victor’s demands.
For a month now, I have seen on television the record high temperatures being realized in southwestern America and now it is moving towards the plain’s states. But this is not just an American phenomenon. Across the globe, countries are being ravaged by heat waves. The Saharah Desert is moving more southward. The polar ice of both poles is melting at an alarming rate. And today, I heard on NBC news that the water temperature in the Florida Keys is 101!
In the north polar regions, many animals rely upon a polar cap just to survive. The polar bear is the one being hurt the most buy our climate change. What happens in the north pole ice disappears completely? What happens in the Greenland glacier melts away? What happens in the ice shelves of the south pole disappear? What happens is there becomes an ecological disaster!
Since the dawn of industrialization in the 19th century, the world has been moving towards this moment in time. People seem to be either blissfully unaware or just refuse the looming disaster. Our planet survives because of a synergy between all the animals on earth, from the microscopic to the largest of whales. There are whales that eat only plankton. What happens to them when the plankton disappears? What happens when water temperatures rise to high for certain fish and mammals that cannot adjust? And what happens to people when their water supply and food supply dwindles?
People may not believe that survival of the human race as it is, is at stake. We must cut carbon emissions to zero and fast. A scientific project for the year 2030 was 7 years off! That project has been met this year.
Scientist has warned that a rise in the average temperature of the earth but just 2 degrees Fahrenheit will kill off many species of animal that are part of the food chain and thereby cause a food chain calamity. We are a part of that food chain and yet we do very little.
The United States, China, and India are among the biggest contributors to global warning. China is still building coal fired power plants. Coal is a huge polluter!
We need only look at the planet Venus to find out what happens when a planet’s upper atmosphere is so thick with gases that hold in the sun’s heat to see a possible future for our planet.
The answer is really simple. All the peoples of the earth must switch to a power grid of electricity powered by the sun and stop the usage of fossil fuels and nuclear fuels as well. Nuclear power plants are heat polluters because of the great amount of heat they give off. We have a number of carbon zero methods of electrical generation: the sun itself, wind, water of rivers and the water of the oceans. In some places the use of volcanic steam is possible.
Our technology is evolving but it can evolve faster if the demand for is grows faster. The wind farms of today will look nothing like those of the future. The use of solar panels should become a mainstream part of every country’s power grid.
We have two choice and only two choices. We can continue as we are and guarantee a future of desperation world-wide or we can use the technology that is at our hands to change the course of our human existence.
First, I must give credit to the Boston Globe, November 12, 2022, p. A4, for that heading, it being, excepting the setoff word, climate, a direct copy of its subtitle to “War may have put climate goals out of reach.”
I found this article absolutely stunning until I read its contents and then did a bit of research. It amazes me the amount climate change deniers still in the world today. Even more, those in political power who take no, or little action towards changing their nation’s responsibility towards reducing our greenhouse gas epidemic. It must be noted that most scientists, probably an overwhelming number, are agreement over our impended doom from these emissions.
The chart below lists the greenhouses emission by each country’s total in descending order. Notice the United States, which claims to be doing so much, is in the number 2 position! This is entirely unacceptable. Number 3 India is an interesting case that along with its status on this chart, it also has the ignominious reputation of have amount the 10 most polluted cities in the world, mixed in are Pakistan and other 3rd world countries.
Conservative Americans are amount the first to deny global warning and liberals are shouting about it. But in truth, it is the liberals who are failing the most simply because most compromise on issues where holding your ground is called for.
For the United States, there needs to be a much more concerted effort to reduce CO2 emissions by about 80% and well before 2031, the deadline. The United States cannot be a world leader in this fight when it comes in 2nd in total emissions worldwide. But the above chart is only referencing CO2 pollution. The chart below is referencing Methane pollution for the purpose of this discussion. I have not been able, thus far, to find a country-by-country accounting for this sort of pollution. In the United States, however, two of the most prolific forms of this comes for natural gas leakage at drilling sites and their pipelines, and also from fracking where the search for oil always finds a collection of natural gas which is supposed to be burned off but that only adds to the CO2 pollution.
For at least 30 years now, Europeans have been taking the problem with pollution seriously. Many cities, excepting England, have taken the tack of making their inner cities less friendly to automobiles, and in some cases, banning them altogether. In place of automobiles, they have doubled down of rail transportation and well set out bicycle ways.
Such tactics in the United States would be met with heavy opposition and politicians bent on saving their political butts would bend to that opposition rather than doing the right thing.
Consider, there is no city in the United States that can properly handle 4 lanes of traffic entering its limits with any ease at all, leading to a 40-mile commute taking as much as 1.5 hours or more. All cities on the East Coast plus Chicago, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, and a host of other cities cannot continue to maintain these roads and the problems that go with them for much longer.
Consider that the average length of a railroad coach is 67′ and that of an automobile almost 15′. Simple math tells us that even the 4 automobiles, were each carrying 3 individuals totaling 12 total is a far cry for the 60 to 100 passengers a single railroad car can carry. A rapid transit car can carry at least 50 people, light rail cars and buses the same. Highway maintenance on average, costs $14,500 per year. By shutting down one lane of a 4-lane highway in both directions for 25 miles saves $750k per year. Now, take the New Jersey turnpike which extends 41 miles from the Garden State parkway to Exit 7, Bordentown and is 8 lanes wide. Remove the 4 inner lanes in each direction, a total of 328 miles, and you have a total savings of $4.7 million a year. New Jersey has an exemplary commuter rail system as well-as an extensive bus system.
In probably every city their existing commuter rail, rapid transit, light rail and buses systems would have to be both modernized and expanded first. But this would give the public several years to plan on the eventual shut down of highway traffic lanes.
Such a bold step forward would cost in the 10s of trillions of dollars to properly implement. Couple that with all cities denying entry to their city center by private automobiles, another public screaming point, and inner-city pollution declines dramatically.
Right now, when it comes to public transportation, the United States is little more than a third-world country. Countries like Italy, Germany, Holland, France and a host of others, put the U.S. to shame in their approach to public transportation. Even China, the world’s greatest polluter, has a rail transportation superior to ours.
Why is this true. First, it America’s continuing love affair with the automobile, next, politicians of all stripes failing to inform the public of what should, by now, be painfully obvious, global warming is happening, and at an ever-increasing rate, just ask Floridians.
There is, however, one form of public transportation, which is one of the largest polluters in the U.S., the nation’s airlines! How do we reduce that? Simple, convince Americans to take AMTRAK on medium length journeys over air travel. This, of course, will require a heavy investment in AMTRAK but the rewards far outweigh the costs. Already, the Northeast Corridor of AMTRAK, from Boston to Washington DC, is heavily traveled by businessmen as well as private travelers. But routes such as Cleveland to Chicago, Atlanta to Miami, Dallas to Houston, Chicago to St. Louis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Detroit.
Americans, living near to large cities, must learn a new way of getting around or be culpable for getting the globe to “point of no return,” that point where warming accelerates at a rate no one can stop. Is that nine years hence? I do not know but it seems many scientists are thinking that way. Who are you going to believe, your next-door neighbor, you politicians, or the scientists?
I am only showing the pollution type below, that of “particulate matter” and in this case, that of plastics.
On final note on this. When I was taking a course in Astrophysics at Harvard University, my professor made a point of saying that anything which produces heat adds to global warming. That polluter is nuclear power and everything else which has the side effect of producing heat.
Here is a little exercise for you. Find a map of the world and count out 5113 cities and other targets that would be worth dropping a nuclear bomb on. That mean every country in the world because if you start eliminating “friendly” countries like most of Europe, all of South America and most of Africa, along with a number of Asian and sub-Asian countries your choices decline quickly. If you consider that dropping a single warhead upon one city is enough to totally destroy it and the same is so for all military targets, what is left?
There was a time the U.S. had in excess of 31,000 nuclear warheads! Those were the days of “mutually assured destruction.” The acronym for that would be “MAD” which seems about right. The idea was, if the USSR struck first we could not only return in kind but with enough force to assure their destruction. Well, Russia has about 1200 warheads these days, China about 300, and a few scattered around the rest of the world. Why do we have any at all?
The horrors of the atom bomb were well displayed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The after effects were felt for decades. No further proof was necessary. The USSR wanted what we had and did such. Then we wanted our bombs to be larger which we did. At one point 100-megaton bombs were being exploded. There was a sick sort of glory associated with each such accomplishment. But after a while the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks stopped above ground testing and then all testing. Finally it limited the amount of weapons any country could own.
It has been 67 years since man first unleashed the power of the atom in weaponry. You would think that by this time we would know quite enough that ownership of over 5000 such weapons should be something of a national embarrassment. Not only is it excessive, it is also extremely expensive to maintain such force.
There was a time when every warhead was designated for a particular target, even those carried aboard aircraft. I would hope that such days have passed but with an arsenal of over 5000 I cannot help but wonder if many are still specifically targeted. To me that says that some planners still believe there is an ocassion where use of nuclear weapons still exists. I want to know what circumstance that is. Russia is no longer a threat of any sort. China is happy within her borders and does no sabre rattling at all, unlike the U.S. There is North Korea, of course, but its ability to deliver any of its nukes is still quite questionable. Who does that leave? Of whom are we afraid? Or are we still supporting some secret agenda?
I firmly believe that in the future the ownership of more than a dozen or so nuclear arms will be deemed as sheer foolishness, and in some senses provocative. The ownership of such weapons will be purely deterrent. Our statement will be that we have a few that we can guarantee delivery to the target of our choice should the occasion arise. I expect such nukes would be the property of the U.S. Navy upon its submarines, and that all other nuclear weapons would be declared obsolete.
The United States defense industry has produced “smart bombs” and cruise missiles that have a degree of accuracy which should instill fear upon any warring entity. Addition of nuclear capability adds nothing. Furthermore, our stealth bombers and fighters, our advanced avionics and battlefield weapons keeps us as the most formidable force upon the Earth. Our strength lies in our ability to further such technology and not in how many people or building we can annihilate with a single blow.
Wars are inevitable and the continued strength of our military forces is of paramount concern. But that strength cannot come with a threat to the continuation of all humanity. No nation, no people, no group, can ever justify its actions when it puts in balance the survival of the human race.
A wise man once told me that I do not have to take on every fight I am invited to. Oft times the more intelligent thing to do is nothing. America stands for freedom and liberty but we do better by simply carrying the message to the world than trying to bludgeon it into our belief system. But when challenged in terms that allow us no other avenue, we are still stronger than any other nation on earth even before any consideration is given to our nuclear arms. Therefore, how much do we really need them, and how many?
You Didn't Ask But..... 