Shifting from fossil-fuel energy sources to renewables will slow down both the way we're altering the atmosphere and cut the trillions of tons of poison we're pouring into our biosphere every year.
It will also reduce the wealth and power of the petrobillionaires distorting American politics and the oligarchic petrostates driving conflict and crushing democracy movements from the Middle East to Ukraine to Venezuela.
We must practice the respect for non-human life and the environment that indigenous people around the world have been trying to tell us about for thousands of years. Our religions and culture must adapt, as theirs did thousands of years ago when they encountered their own biological and environmental limits.
We must work fiercely to protect what is left of the natural world now, and mobilize the world to stop the trade in wild animals, the fourth-most-trafficked product on earth behind drugs, weapons and people.
And we must empower women; gender equality is another dimension of advanced democracies like we see in Europe and, particularly, Scandinavia, that petrobillionaires funding anti-woman laws in America and repressive petro-oligarchies like Saudi Arabia and Putin's Russia currently abhor.
In societies where women have equal political and economic power with men, populations stabilize and, over time, tend to slowly reduce to levels in balance with their immediate ecosystems.
But in societies where women are treated as men's property, populations explode. Widely available birth control technology is essential, but without cultural and religious shifts, become relatively meaningless.
Most important, we must reform our politics to incorporate notions of sustainability and compatibility with the ecosystems from which we evolved. Policy can become our most potent tool.
Covid is just the last in a long line of diseases that were warning signals to humanity that we've pushed beyond our natural limits, just like the war against Ukraine is the most recent outrage provoked by a petro-oligarch, showing us the insanity of a world dependent on burning fossils.
We now have the technology to imitate plants and take energy directly from the sun, eliminating most of the need for fossil fuels. Sustainable energy sources are now less expensive than fossil fuels in almost every part of the world.
Our energy and political systems must go all "Marshall Plan," dedicating wartime-levels of money and resources to end our addiction to ancient sunlight.
If we don't start listening and acting immediately, the loss of insects, Covid and the war in Ukraine may soon be the least of our worries.
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