Hopes And Fears

Hopes And Fears MP3

Cm / C#m / D#m7 / F#m7

lyrics

And, after some thought i realized that i was looking too closely,
too finely...

In the broad picture of the future, it does not really matter
if you can specifically attribute this tragic event, or that one,
to anthropogenic global warming.

It's pathetic what we've done to matter... it really does matter.

Everybody sing --
   My, my, my

Just look at the world, in the large. the news is writ in the sky
and on the land and in the water, most of all in the water, for the
oceans are voting now, and they are not voting for mankind.

Yet, no one wants to claim they're in charge
No, not a bit
Rather sit by and watch 'em die
Everybody sing --
   My, my, my
Here's the thing
Hard to understand why we continue to falter
We've made the motions for eliminating "somehow"
We've elected history to writ this script:
     "No man kind.
      No mankind."

ps. Once the world twirled with the dance of romance
Do you think we have a second chance?  Ouch! Your
answer really does sting.  Everybody sing a sigh --
   My, my, my

-------------------------------------------------------

Hopes and Fears


'Western Civilization' has done much indeed over the last century and
a half. Millions died in colonies shortly after the West arrived
of famine; millions more elsewhere. The deaths were sometimes
regretted and always justified in the name of progress for the
children of tomorrow.

And now it has come to this, perhaps the last throw in a losing game.
We know now that the carbon released in the last one hundred and fifty
years of industrialization has raised the temperature by a degree Fahrenheit,
and will, in spite of our best possible efforts, raise it by another degree
in the next few decades. We know that sea levels will continue to rise
for centuries, no matter what we do, as quickly as a foot every generation.

So this is the glorious future that the West leaves to the unborn of the East
and the South; indeed to their own as well ?  A watery death for billions in
the lowlands by the ocean ? An emaciated and short life for the rest of the
poor as their monoculture crops, created by the best science of the West,
shrivel and die in climes outside their design? Why then should they curb
their carbon emissions if they are doomed in any case ? Why not reach and
grasp and use fossil fuels in exactly the same manner as the West, in hope
that their peoples have perhaps some small chance of survival as the
world warms ? For if we are all to hang, from a rope spun from the carbon
history of the West, why, let us all hang together. The West has has its
centuries in the sun, and before the noose snaps tight, why begrudge
the wretched of the world some little hydrocarbon happiness ?

Both our hopes and our fears may be belied.
For our hope is that the West cease polluting the world with carbon
and our fear is that the East and South will do the same.

I have little hope that the great and the powerful of the West will change;
they have not done so in the past, and their behaviour does not augur well.
But the East and the South hold the future in their hands. They may yet turn
away from the black gold, and reach instead for the sun and the wind, and the
heart of the atom. Indeed, they are doing so already; their efforts are
fumbling and slow, but they are a beginning.  If we are to have any chance
at all of saving some of the future, these efforts must prevail.

And perhaps not the least, in turning away from fossil fuels, they may show
the West that in the end, the poor of the earth can forgive and save their
overlords, indeed perhaps it is only the poor that might do so. For those in
power have much to lose in abandoning their ways of life, and the poor have
naught to lose and a world to gain. In the end, it may be that the hearts of
the small and powerless are larger than those of their tyrants.

But we knew that already.

sidd

Human Induced Climate Change Experiment

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