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The end need not be nigh
The Taxman is hereby declaring war.
War on the man-made, anthropogenic, warming of our climate by the burning of fossil fuels known to cause the greenhouse effect.
It took billions of years of planetary evolution to remove these fossil fuels from the atmosphere and bury them under the Earth's surface.
The layers of carbon laid down by generation after generation of living matter has allowed today's atmospheric composition to provide suitable meteorological conditions for our own species, homo sapiens, to comfortably inhabit. Ice caps and glaciers have formed, the sea level has fallen, life is abundant. There are but just a few small regions on Earth that remain lifeless.
And while the discovery and subsequent excavation and combustion of buried carbon has allowed our civilisation to grow and enjoy many pleasures we otherwise would not have done, we must now curb and ultimately stop this excavation altogether. There are now more than six billion of us on this planet. We are continuing to burn these fossil fuels at such a rate that not only might the underground stores of coal and oil run out later this century, but now millions of years' worth of atmospheric cleansing has been reversed.
Approximately 1,800 billion tonnes of buried carbon has been converted into its gaseos form - a known contributor to global warming - in just 250 years. Thus it is the case that we are directly influencing the Earth's climate, to our civilisation's own detriment.
Yet, with this knowledge, with the temperature rising, with atmospheric carbon levels up by one third since pre-industrial times, we have still not stopped digging and burning. On the contrary, we have continued to accelerate our carbon consumption.
This fact demonstrates a systematic failure in the ability of our political structures, societal platforms and cultural values in reacting to and solving a global problem that we have created.
In light of this ongoing anomaly, and the upcoming opportunity at Copenhagen in December to alter our present course away from ecological collapse and mass extinction, we, here at The Taxman, are declaring war on man-made climate change.
Unlike other wars that have raged throughout our species' violent history, the goal here is not to destroy, but to avoid destruction. Like every war, if it is not fought and won within a given time period, defeat will be faced. Defeat is imaginable only to those who have seen hell for themselves.
And so, we must go forth and fight. Take your weapons, stand tall, be strong, and hold hope that your efforts will be richly rewarded. To do otherwise, to do anything else, to be anything less than this; will be to surrender 50,000 years of human discovery, development and endeavour. It will be lost forever. And so will we.
