A History of Abuse

Global warming is one of the potent issues that face world leaders today, and it often plays an important part in elections since there are a growing number of individuals and organizations who concern themselves with this issue. In my opinion global warming, which is the effect that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide have on the global climate, all began with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. When the empires of Great Britain, Germany, and France began to industrialize during the late 19th century the amount of carbon dioxide and other noxious gases released into the atmosphere skyrocketed on a scale never before witnessed in our planet. In Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, a graph is shown that depicts a massive upward surge in global temperatures that reaches its manifestation today but has its roots at around the time of the Dreadnought Race during the late 19th century. The arms race to produce massive battleships like the HMS Dreadnought began in Europe and soon spread to the United States and Japan. During those days the battleship was a status symbol and those countries that owned a fleet of dreadnoughts belonged to an elite club, so many newly industrialized nations began either to build their own ships or purchase them from other countries. This is important in understanding how global warming came about since to produce such massive engines of destruction a massive input of manpower, steel, along with dozens of other types of resources. Unfortunately such materials require new factories to be built, and such factories require energy which was derived at that time from coal. As the arms race continued and World War I arrived, along with the internal combustion engine, more and more noxious gases were released into the atmosphere. This trend repeats itself during the Second World War, the Cold War, the new arms race (between the Soviet Union and the West), the space race, and the rise of new countries in the third world whose appetite for the latest weaponry has proved to be insatiable. All of these products; battleships, tanks, aircraft, artillary, rockets, and nuclear weapons are just a fraction of the huge output of industrial products, the fabrication of which involves a staggering amount of carbon emission. Unfortunately this massive production, involving all methods of production, continues today and will likely continue to coldheartedly pollute the planet well into the near future. The greed of mankind has proven to be limitless and self-destructive; there is a phenomena in economics called "the despoiling of the commons" and this phrase describes quite accurately what is happening to our planet. Since the "commons" are supposed to be some free and untaxable resource like a river or an ore rich mountain, blackguardly entrepreneurs will ravish this resource without let or hinderence. This is similar to what is occuring today in our planet; industries are mass producing products and emitting greenhouse gases without let or hinderence. The "commons" that are being despoiled today are the gases that make up our habitable atmosphere, and the current emission taxations are simply not enough to deter those slick entrepreneurs from ravishing the atmosphere. Mankind has hunted numerous animals to extinction or destroyed the habitat of countless of species of insects, mammals, and reptiles so the extinction of our atmosphere should come as no surpirse to us if mankind continues to cruelly chomp and rip at the bosom that has nourished us so faithfully these past millenia.