Dear Earth, take Care! E-Book

Erich Schröder

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 130

Beschreibung

Can humanity still control climate change? Do we have to apologize to our grandchildren? Why are politicians failing in this crisis? This book is not a scientific treatise on climate change and other environmental problems. Rather, it is a very personal reflection on the current situation of people on Earth, inspired by news and discussions from print media, TV and books from 2020 and the first quarter of 2021. The author, a physician, engineer and political journalist, sees humanity as technically and intellectually capable of solving our actual and urgent environmental problems. In terms of implementation, he recognizes some positive efforts and trends, but also a political inability of the world community to initiate solutions together. His appeal and proposal are for a pragmatic approach by politicians to avert the impending catastrophe for humanity.

Leseprobe

A very personal reflection on the

current situation of people on earth,

inspired by news and discussions.

from print media, TV and books

from the year 2020 and the

first quarter of 2021.

INHALT

Dear Earth

Wonderful Modernity

Corona is only the Beginning

The Power of Climate Change

Migration

The Mysterious World of the Oceans

Order in Space

Resources in Waste

Time for Change

Humans - Cause, and Solution?

The Failure of Politics

The Power from Below

Freedom

The State of Affairs

A Price for CO

2

Energy Consumption of Buildings

Electromobility

Do we have Enough Electricity?

Hydrogen as an Opportunity

The Transformation of the Oil Industry

Travel

What's Next?

Fear of the Future?

Dear Earth,

first of all, I must compliment you: You are beautiful, really beautiful! I had the chance to see and experience much of you, and I was always overwhelmed by your diversity and beauty. Your landscapes, mountains, rivers, oceans, coasts, deserts, your vegetation, the diversity of forests, plants, flowers, the diversity of species in the animal world from elephants to ants, and finally your climate, which offers a comfort zone for people, animals, and plants like probably on no other star. Your uniqueness, which made our life on you possible in the first place.

Unfortunately, in the last hundred years - a second in your lifetime - we have not always behaved well towards you. Your seemingly eternal beauty has suffered, it has developed wrinkles that don't look good on you at all. Your oceans and now your beaches are full of plastic waste. Your beautiful rainforests are being cut down, burned, or poisoned by faulty oil wells. We have polluted your waters and damaged your atmosphere and climate with our exhaust fumes. For several decades now, we have suspected that our highly praised progress, consumption, and lifestyle are far beyond your resources and capacities. The realization is by no means new, we have just successfully suppressed it for a long time. In the meantime, the consequences of our way of life are already showing themselves even more seriously beyond the given conditions.

Even if the beauty of your landscapes and of the animal and plant world suffers heavily under our bad influence. You will survive it - we, however, may not. Stephen Hawking was probably the most prominent physicist of our time. He gave already in 2017, few years before his death, the prognosis that in 100 years the bases of life of humans on earth would be destroyed so far that mankind would die out. Only his conclusion to emigrate to a distant planet for the preservation of mankind, I cannot follow. A barren and inhospitable Martian landscape without atmosphere and viable climate is hardly a real substitute for you, our beautiful Earth, even if our technology would make a survival there perhaps possible.

Because you, dear Earth, are really an amazing entity with almost fantastic and for your living beings ideal characteristics. Despite your high age of about 4.5 billion years, there is still an almost inexhaustible glow inside you, a huge reservoir of energy. Occasionally, when a volcano erupts, we can see a small piece of your embers and sense your tremendous powers. Forces that in the course of time have piled up mountains and shifted entire continents as if in a puzzle. Equally immeasurable are your water resources, without which our life would not be possible, and which also decisively shape your climate. And finally, you have this comparatively thin layer of atmosphere, which makes life on land possible and in which your climate takes place. This combination of your properties is unique, each for itself and all together. To our knowledge so far, there is no comparable star in the universe with these properties in this combination.

Even more we should make every effort to protect, nurture and preserve you - not least to safeguard our own livelihoods. Most of us have understood this by now. Nevertheless, there are obviously some circumstances that make it exceedingly difficult to change our previous and still harmful behavior and to prevent further destruction of these bases of life. And although we would actually be intellectually and technically capable of doing so, it is by no means certain that we will succeed in making the necessary change in time. The gloomy prognosis of Stephen Hawking hovers over us.

Dear Earth, so let's take a sober look at the current situation.

Wonderful Modernity

"We did not inherit the Earth from our parents - we borrowed it from our children." This phrase, often quoted by environmental activists, is sold as "ancient Indian wisdom," but its actual origin is rather unknown. The message of the wisdom is clear, a warning regarding the current climate and environmental problems that will ultimately burden following generations. The reference to this is an important appeal and a fitting image, but just one side of the coin. Because of course every generation inherits its living conditions, together with the condition of the earth, from the parents and passes all this on to its children sometime. We should not turn this into a conflict of generations, that would be about the last thing we need right now. Let's take a closer look at the current "handover of the earth". There is hardly any reason for a conflict because the bottom line is not so bad. Of course, every balance sheet has negative balances as well as positive ones.

Let's start with the positive balance. In almost every respect, the outgoing postwar generation leaves behind the best living conditions ever seen in Germany - and that built on the ruins of the Second World War. Probably the most important factor is a 75-year period of peace, unique in Germany and Europe. But almost everything else has developed for the better during this period. I will spare myself a list of the many improvements here and refer to the books of the Swiss journalist Guido Mingels ("Früher war alles schlechter," Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt), who writes in the preface of his first book (2017):

"Much speaks for the fact that man has never had it better on earth than just now, in the present. Health is improving. Life expectancy is increasing. Infant mortality is falling, almost everywhere in the world. Wealth is increasing, also almost everywhere. Birth rates are decreasing, as is maternal mortality. Poverty is decreasing; it has decreased more in the last 50 years than in the 500 years before that. Education is improving; four out of five people can now read and write. War deaths are decreasing, murder rates are falling. Vaccination rates are rising, diseases are disappearing. Agricultural yields per area multiplied. Forests are growing. Hunger is dwindling. Working hours are shrinking. There are fewer victims of natural disasters, fewer AIDS deaths, and fewer working children. Germans drink less alcohol, smoke less and kill themselves less often. The list is long."

Even if there are a few points where things are going backwards again today (2021), for example regarding forests, the overall development is overwhelmingly positive. With 115 impressive examples, Guido Mingels meticulously shows in his two books what the improvements consist of in detail. And then there are also groundbreaking innovations that have changed the world, such as the Internet and the smartphone. A world without Google, Amazon, Facebook & Co.? Hard to imagine today! And who would want to do without the convenience of their smartphone today, e.g. making free calls to the whole world from anywhere at any time with some apps? I still remember well the time when a phone call to a friend in Peru cost DM 50 for the first three minutes. And more groundbreaking inventions are just around the corner: The chance of beating cancer in a few years, for example, is not bad.

And that brings us to the negative balance. Let's start right here with the Internet, which has now also revealed its many dark sides. It offers corresponding anonymous forums for communication and trade for everything imaginable that is bad: weapons, drugs, child pornography and much more. Computer viruses enable fraud, theft, sabotage, and blackmail on a large scale with damage that can hardly be measured. Platforms like Facebook, with billions of customers, use their algorithms to manipulate opinions on an enormous scale and, by abusing their structures, even to bring about political change, e.g., by manipulating elections.

Increasing prosperity and standard of living as well as mobility also have considerable side effects that are becoming more and more apparent and are now already having a profoundly serious impact: Climate change with all its consequences, overfishing of the oceans with their simultaneous massive littering especially by plastic waste and oil, as well as uncontrolled and thus conflict-ridden migration movements towards the affluent nations. These undesirable side effects of increasing prosperity have gone unnoticed or ignored for far too long.

The bottom line is that younger generations have been starting their lives as adult citizens for a good 50 years at an unprecedented and ever-increasing level of prosperity and quality of life. For this life, they have a choice of options and opportunities like no other generation before. At the same time, however, there are currently several severe problems that require short-term and sustainable solutions in order not to seriously endanger the stability of our living conditions on earth.

Let's get one thing straight right here: This is not an extraordinary burden on a younger generation. The post-war generation also had its severe problems at the beginning, the prevailing poverty, the cold war between East and West with an acute nuclear threat, and massive environmental pollution caused by a rapidly growing industry without protective measures. All of this has been resolved quite satisfactorily. Examples include arms control treaties and improvements in air quality in the Ruhr-district or water quality in the Rhine river. The generations before, during and between the world wars had to cope with even more massive and existential problems. (To be read in the authentic diaries of a family, published by Gerd Schrö-der in "Werth und Overhoff," Books on Demand, 2020)

I consider the current problems to be quite solvable intellectually and technically with a concerted effort. Why, despite all my confidence in our science and technology, I nevertheless have reservations as to whether mankind will succeed in finding the necessary short-term and sustainable solutions to the problems, we will discuss in the following chapters.

Corona is only the Beginning

The Corona pandemic has affected almost the entire world and disrupted its previous daily routine. Urgent other problems, such as climate change, unfortunately lost their focus as a result. The number of people who have died from Corona is in the millions, and many more have fallen ill or will fall ill. In many places, medical care for the sick is at its limit or already beyond it. The economic and social consequences of the pandemic are also enormous. Aviation, a major factor in the spread of the pandemic, has been marginalized in a noticeably short time and will not recover from this anytime soon - if ever it will take years. The previously thriving tourism industry is down. The cruise ships that have recently been so popular, albeit environmentally harmful, are bobbing around empty at sea in some cases because parking for the ships would be more expensive. What a gross nonsense! The entire gastronomy, hotels, and restaurants is struggling to survive, either had to close or has practically hardly any traveling guests. Theaters and cinemas have had to close, concerts and exhibitions have been canceled, the entire cultural scene has shut down, except for a few street musicians. Culture no longer takes place. Small businesses and individual entrepreneurs, like artists, have lost their last customers to cutbacks and austerity measures.

The state tries to alleviate the misery with various support payments, which unfortunately often reach those affected late. In addition, however, crooks also obtain these funds by fraud. All in all, the national debt is growing to gigantic proportions.

Citizens have been dreaming for a good year that everything will return to the way it was before the pandemic. But that may take some time, certainly until the end of 2021, perhaps even into next year. The pandemic and the measures to combat it have had a massive impact on people's daily lives. People are becoming restless, irritable, and many even aggressive under the considerable restrictions on daily life. As early as November 2020, everyone was talking about the need to have Christmas after all. The policy quickly buckled and allowed private Christmas parties with up to 10 people plus children - and the same for New Year's Eve and New Year. A Christmas party in a warm living room with three generations and more than 10 people, maybe also with singing Christmas carols together? Knowing full well that the virus spreads via aerosols in the air we breathe? Fortunately, in view of the sharp rise in the number of infections and deaths, politicians have finally issued somewhat stricter rules for the festive season. To what extent the population complied is another question. In any case, as expected, it was a "happy holiday" for the virus, and the number of infections rose sharply. A few weeks later, in January, more than 1,000 victims of the virus were counted every day - a high price for a pusillanimous policy that did not dare to impose the bitter reality, the necessary renunciation of the traditional Christmas meetings, on the people.

Then the first mutations of the virus were discovered, some of them even more contagious than the original version. Although in the meantime, after sensationally fast research and development processes, the first approved vaccines are available in limited quantities, the concern remains about a renewed flare-up of the pandemic in further and ever stronger waves. Will the vaccines also protect against these and other mutants of the virus? Even if they do, however, it will be another year or two before a significant portion of humanity is protected for the time being. It is likely that, as with the flu vaccine, annual boosters with protection against new mutants will be required.

But will things ever return to the way they were before the pandemic? And do we really want that? Or, after the severe shocks caused by the pandemic, is there not even a chance for a new beginning that avoids previous undesirable developments? Would there be a concept for this, a master plan?

A return to the past is, of course, in line with the current yearning of the majority. But that would probably only be an intermediate state. Because sooner or later, the restrictions caused by the pandemic will be followed by other and more far-reaching restrictions due to climate change. Or perhaps because of a mutation of the virus, or because of a new pandemic. In 2020, millions of minks had to be killed in Denmark because the animals were affected by the Corona virus. It shows that when humans and animals meet in animal husbandry, there is always a risk of transmission, host change and mutation of viruses. Animal viruses pass to humans and vice versa. The current coronavirus probably originated in bats; the animal intermediate host for transmission to humans is not yet known. It is probably an animal species sold in the animal market of Wuhan, China. This city is believed to be the origin of the pandemic. Similar transmissions are possible again at any time.