This Citizen's View

Our human events seem to get exponentially faster for us personally as age advances. It feels that, as slow as it seems problems are solved, more problems pile up behind at a sonic boom level. Feet have given way to animals bearing us across land to human-made vehicles, and then into the air.

It is tempting to take the short cut when traveling. Short cuts have their purpose. Maybe we will reach our goal more quickly. Or, there will be unforeseen barriers. We may not be familiar already with the terrain. So, we put a certain amount of trust in guides, who know the territory. More and more, it is electronic, A-I types of tools we use for our movements. Gone is the paper map with creases and tears. It may not be an up-to-date map. Those roads are changing all the time with rerouting and closures. The guide is now Google maps which has its own troubles keeping up. It has improved, as we experienced on a long trip up the west coast to Canada. We still had our share of turn-around maneuvers.

The world is on a seeming “turn around maneuver” now, evaluating the movement of people and goods. We humans have a need to move. It is government, individuals, companies and non-governmental agencies evaluating and sometimes acting on this movement. The evaluating will mean nothing if there is no action taken. The warming of the skies, the earth and the oceans has been brought on, in large part, from what we now take for granted in the USA and other parts of the “advanced world”. Motor vehicles of all sorts, from passenger cars and pick-ups to transport trucks, moving people and materials by using carbon-emitting fuels. Ships on the water and planes in the sky are the other part of this carbon emitting equation. This is what warms our earth in ways that are destructive to people and places. These facts have been known for some time now. Oil extractors and sellers of petrol products, such as Exxon, knew decades ago. Profit was the prize and the sole objective.

Remember when all air traffic was grounded on the day of the 9/11/2001 attack? Air pollution over the nation disappeared. When mechanical movement stops, so does the pollution and the warming carbons emitted stop.

What will we move to? How will we move? How will we save ourselves? By collision/accident, our daughter and son-in-law became owners of an EV or electrical vehicle. Our family vacation was interrupted by an inattentive driver colliding with their car. They had to replace that car. Now they are part of what some believe will help solve the carbon-emitting travel of our age. It is such a small drop.

The G-20 met this past weekend. Global warming was on their plate. This is part of that evaluation I mentioned. I am writing this before knowing of any “movement” from this meeting of nations.

I think small drops do count if there are enough of them in concentration. What else?