If there are folks who remain “climate sceptics”, your Eyewitness suspects they must be living in the Arctic, Antarctica or somewhere five miles up the Himalayas! And even there, the evidence would’ve been before their eyes – and under their feet – of glaziers melting like ice cubes in a swirled glass of whiskey over rocks!! As for the rest of folks – like your Eyewitness hanging out in dear old mudland – he’s been reduced to reclining languorously in his Berbice Chair with his legs askew, hoping this months-long “heatwave” would recede soon!! But when a heatwave has enveloped most of the world, even he had to accept there are larger forces at work pushing Mother Nature’s equilibrium!!
As to what those forces are – while he ain’t gonna discount stuff like the earth’s axis tilting and such like – he’s gotta deal with contingencies within his reach. And this brings us to burning fossil fuels generating Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere – leading to “global warming”. Very simply, Carbon Dioxide traps heat entering the atmosphere from the sun – making the Earth into a giant greenhouse. Hence – along with methane from cows’ farts and burps – “greenhouse gases”!!
So what to do? Well, we know from the shrill hysteria of a few activists who live in the developed countries that we should stop using fossil fuels and one way is to cut supply. Hence the campaign of some Guyanese cohorts for us to leave our 11 billion barrels of oil under the Atlantic!! Their logic is impeccable: if burning fossil fuels causes global warming, then if you don’t have any to burn, that’ll solve the problem, no?? But like most quick fixes, there are at least fifty shades of grey that make this fix problematical!!
The biggest one is to convince the largest producers – the Mid East, Russia, the US, and Nigeria, etc, to cut back production. But the thing is – even though we’re at the tipping point of no return – all those countries are ramping up their production – making ours look like not even a trickle!! And that brings us to the key variable – the demand!! It’s like drugs. You can have all the “wars on drugs” you want – and America’s been trying with THAT for the longest while! – but if you can’t stop the demand, you can bet your bottom dollar the supply’s gonna be guaranteed. It’s money that makes the world go round, baby!! All those countries want to keep on living high off the hog – which needs energy – and the rest of us want to join them!!
But what about “renewables” that were supposed to have us eat our cake and have it too?? Not gonna happen when we still have 100 years’ supply of fossil fuel!
…Rigging?
Back in 1971, with preparations for the 1973 elections in full flow, some of the measures were being debated in the National Assembly. With the 1968 rigging still fresh in their minds, MPs were bringing up inconvenient questions like horses voting in London and wads of ballot papers tied with rubber bands floating in rivers here!! Matters got so heated that when PPP MP Boysie Ramkarran observed the parliamentary protocols and referred to Forbes Burnham as “my friend”, Burnham irascibly snapped, “Let’s be accurate: I’m not your friend”!!
But pertinent for our present, PPP Parliamentarian EMG “Coco” Wilson posed this question: “Mr Chairman, I should like to speak…(and) the first point I should like to make is to ask the Government to let the National Registration Office reflect in the office what is the ethnic composition of the country outside. When you enter that office you think that the people there were appointed by ASCRIA”!!
How different was it in 2020??
…kowtowing
If Britain’s Rishi Sunak thought he’d receive a wave of adulation when he attended the G20 meet in Bharat – since he’d like to be seen as “local boy made good – he was in for a surprise.
No “special relationship” here!!
