People find it difficult to face reality. This is particularly true when the trouble comes from a manmade phenomenon like global warming. Instead of governments negotiating the phaseout of fossil fuels (petroleum, natural gas and coal) responsible for the existential climate crisis of a warmer and warmer Earth, they fight wars and fiddle with peripheral measures unlikely to diminish the fury of hot and rising temperatures.
In fact, petroleum companies keep drilling and fracking the land for oil -- even in the Arctic.
Each country deals with global warming like individuals. Some are taking steps towards wind and solar power. Others ignore it completely. War and other calamities obscure the expanding warming of the planet. But the excuse of inactivity among industrialized nations is usually a smoke and mirrors ignorance and deception funded by the fossil fuels industry.
Let's look at a small European country like Greece. Can Greece do anything of value towards a worldwide disaster like climate change?
Greece is a nation fearful for its survival -- not because of global warming but because of another human-induced tragedy, debt. Indeed, the debt crisis is so severe that, for all intends and purposes, Greece is not thinking of global warming. She should.
Helios (the Sun), now that humans are polluting the heavens, is threatening massive hunger and destruction -- even the abolition of winter. However, Helios was an important god among the Greeks for millennia. Greece has been blessed with sunlight. And solar technology is quite advanced today.
I have had solar panels on the roof of my house in southern California for six years. These panels make free electricity for me. I would like to see the same technology over the roof of every house in Greece.
That's a reasonable goal achieved with local material and local talent. Greece has more than enough scientists and engineers for the design, manufacture and installation of solar panels on the roof of every single house and apartment building in the country.
Should the Greeks do that, I bet they would have excess electricity to sell to northern Europe. The money from this trade might be enough to repay their debt.
Rather than negotiating natural gas pipelines with Russia, Greeks should be building solar panels, becoming in the process high tech experts in Europe.
Even in the developing age of emergency, solar power would help Greece find her place in the world. Building a solar infrastructure would be building an infrastructure of industrialization with non-polluting technologies. Greece would benefit for doing good to her society and doing good for the world. The result would be an independent Greece -- a country without debt and leader in livable technologies.
Siding with Helios would also make the country more resilient in the rising storms of higher temperatures.
The history of Greece after the Roman conquest of the empire of Alexander the Great in late antiquity has been a bitter struggle for survival. The Romans crushed her freedom and political independence in 146 BCE. The Christians went further. They tortured the country to a palimpsest. Which is to say, they scraped the country's Hellenic heritage of science, philosophy, architecture, art, and literature and wrote Christian hymns on its place.
But even after the forced Christianization of Greece, the country fell victim to foreign plunder, invasions, and dismemberment by Christians and Muslims.
The current "debt" crisis is part of this consistent foreign hostility towards Greece.
Foreigners, of course, need Greek collaborators. Starting in the 1980s, Greek politicians borrowed and mismanaged money in unprecedented manner. They used borrowed money to buy votes and enrich themselves and the Greek political class. The result has been a country with a ruined industrial base, perpetual imports, high unemployment and brain drain.
The American 2008 economic "recession" blasted Greece into a permanent U.S.-1930s-style "depression." Instead of the European Union coming to the aid of Greece, the EU turned against Greece. It joined forces with America's International Monetary Fund and together imposed on the Greeks a regime of economic impoverishment and political domination that violated Greek and international law.
So what can one say about this EU-American condominium violating Greek sovereignty for the benefit of banks? What happened to the rule of law and democracy?
Many Greeks equal the illegal occupation of their country to the destitution they faced under German and Italian occupation during WWII.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian-Russian conflict reignited the cold war. The U.S. has been arming the Ukrainians while making irresponsible threats against nuclear-bomb armed Russia. The U.S. and its NATO allies are also imposing sanctions on the Russian economy, treating Russia like Iran.
Greece is a member of NATO through which America runs Europe. The Greek "socialist-communist" government of prime minister Alexis Tsipras is going along with this anti-Russia policy of NATO despite the fact that same NATO looks the other way while a NATO member, Turkey, is sending its navy deep into the Aegean. Despite such offensive insults and violations of her national sovereignty, Greece gave the Aegean island of Karpathos for a NATO base.
These dangerous and irrational geo-strategic shock and awe games raise tensions all over Europe and Russia. They foreclose thoughts and actions of dealing with the grave dangers of global warming. And, of course, they victimize Greece no less than the Christian crusading armies and occupation of 1204 or the German and Italian occupation of the 1940s.
Time has come to face the fact this is an extremely vulnerable planet to ruthless human overlords. Humans have become the new dinosaurs.
Americans should denounce their country's shameful war games in Europe affecting world security and intensifying austerity violence in Greece, the country that gave us science and civilization.
Help Greece get out of the web of starving debt and deception. Greek Americans and philhellenes from the world over would do well to invest their money on Greece, taking the steps to solar and political independence.