Some news just hits like a ton of bricks; this is one of those.
Congo to Auction Land to Oil Companies: ‘Our Priority Is Not to Save the Planet’
The Democratic Republic of Congo, home to one of the largest old-growth rainforests on earth, is auctioning off vast amounts of land in a push to become “the new destination for oil investments,” part of a global shift as the world retreats on fighting climate change in a scramble for fossil fuels.
The oil and gas blocks, which will be auctioned in late July, extend into Virunga National Park, the world’s most important gorilla sanctuary, as well as tropical peatlands that store vast amounts of carbon, keeping it out of the atmosphere and from contributing to global warming.
“If oil exploitation takes place in these areas, we must expect a global climate catastrophe, and we will all just have to watch helplessly,” said Irene Wabiwa, who oversees the Congo Basin forest campaign for Greenpeace in Kinshasa.
As if the trends in Brazil after Jair "no really, I am probably even worse than tRump" Bolsanoro has ravaged the Amazon for years, turning it into a net negative (exporter) of carbon emissions, we now have this.
I'm left speechless here. Questions like What is it going to take? seem vacuous.
Usually when someone has a life-threatening addiction they either hit bottom and turn things around or die. In the case of our endless lust for oil, it appears we are glibly choosing the latter.
Perhaps too many years of poor messaging have led humanity to think that the consequences of climate change will occur "someday". So they whistle past the graveyard trying not to feel guilty of leaving their descendants a dumpster fire for a planet.
News flash, folks - the effects have been happening already for decades. And the worst effects are going to keep worsening!
They say an addict can keep hitting lower and lower bottoms until he has a moment of clarity and turns his life around.
It's looking more and more like we will truly need a series of miracles of epic proportions to save ourselves from our own self-destruction.