Our true environmental situation

Hartmann Report - “I’ve never said this before to the media, but it’s too late,” said David Suzuki, scientist, broadcaster, and lifelong environmental champion, in a July 2nd interview. “We’ve passed seven of the nine planetary boundaries… If we pass one, we should be shitting our pants. We’ve passed seven!”...

Suzuki is talking about the nine thresholds scientists have identified: the very limits of a livable planet. Once breached, the systems that support life on Earth begin to collapse. And now we’ve broken through seven of them.

Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute, and his colleagues have mapped out the nine limits. They are:

— Climate change: The most obvious. We’ve gone well beyond safe CO₂ levels.
— Biosphere integrity: Species are vanishing at a mass-extinction pace.
— Biogeochemical flows: Runoff of nitrogen and phosphorus from agriculture is killing ecosystems.
— Land-system change: Forests and wetlands are being razed for short-term profits.
— Freshwater use: Droughts are getting deadlier; aquifers are being depleted.
— Ocean acidification: CO₂ absorption is turning oceans into acid baths, killing coral reefs and other marine life.
— Novel entities: Plastics, forever chemicals, synthetic toxins that are mostly unregulated and now everywhere.

Only two boundaries remain “unbroken”: the stratospheric ozone layer (partially healed through heroic efforts in the 1990s when politicians in both parties listened to scientists), and atmospheric aerosols (ditto), at least for now.

We are way past “concern” or “urgent.” We’re now in what Rockström calls the “danger zone.”

And what is the Republican Party’s official response? Essentially, “To hell with future generations. Let our grandchildren die, so fossil fuel billionaires can buy another yacht.”