Global Warming, Trees, and Environmental Racism

By Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh —— Bio and Archives July 20, 2021

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The global warming crowd could not get ordinary Americans to buy into their arrogant narrative that the globe is warming due to human activity such as industry, travel, car use, agriculture, breathing, flying, artificial lakes; so, they turned the Armageddon narrative into a profitable leftist climate change industry that has many allies among academics, public school teachers, the mainstream media, and crony corporatism. Who can deny that the climate changes and has done so for thousands of years? It is not just the environmental justice the Paris accord and its previous U.N. Agenda 2030 goals, versions of controlling how people live and make a living, every aspect, no matter how insignificantly small. The narrative is now tied, like everything else the left says and does, to one's skin color. Apparently, the climate and how temperatures affect Mother Earth due to solar flares, water currents around the earth, and volcanic oceanic eruptions above and below earth are now caused by environmental racism>.

Shade, the existence or non-existence of trees becomes "environmental racism", a measure of "privilege" is hard to understand without impossible mental gymnastics

The left is quite poetic with its definitions, creatively pulling out of the proverbial magician hat amazingly artistic constructs that do not exist. They contort themselves verbally into impossible pretzeled scenarios that bear no resemblance to reality or common sense.  Stating that "science tells us unequivocally that the world is getting hotter: the past six years have been the warmest on record," National Geographic devoted its July 2021 cover to "Beating the heat." The cover claims that "wealthy areas are shady and cool," but "the tree canopy decreases, and temperatures rise as you drive south," at least in Los Angeles. (One Nation, Under Heat and Shade>) The conclusion on the cover is, "on a warming planet, this divides between rich and poor leaves many at risk." There is no denying that shade lowers temperatures, but how shade and the existence or non-existence of trees becomes "environmental racism", and a measure of "privilege" is hard to understand without impossible mental gymnastics. The climate change alarmist narrative is that poor neighborhoods have less trees and are five degrees hotter than rich neighborhoods. I have seen areas in western cities quite devoid of trees and extremely hot, yet the residents did not seem to be poor at all.  All inhabitants, rich or poor, white, or black, suffered the same in the summertime heat. It is nobody's fault that vast flat prairies have fewer trees or that urban neighborhoods did not bother to plant any. "For most of the past 10,000 years, global average temperature has remained relatively stable and low compared to earlier hothouse conditions in our planet's history." What's the hottest Earth has been "lately"? | NOAA Climate.gov National Geographic tells us in its July issue that "ultimately, to solve global warming, we must drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions." This is an interesting statement because CO2 is the gas of plant life. If you reduce CO2 drastically, you are also drastically reducing plant life. There is more CO2 in the Amazon area, as seen from satellite photos, where there is an abundance of trees in the rainforest. Planting more trees is good for the environment: they provide shade as well as convert CO2 into oxygen.  Excess CO2 is pumped into greenhouses to help plants grow faster. Would it not be logical to say that we need more CO2 for plant life, not less?

Urban ecologists, who study "urban forest equity"

Urban ecologists, who study "urban forest equity," claim that "redlined" areas do not have a lot of "green," due to a lack of public investment in trees. In richer communities, residents can use their own funds to care for trees.  The solution is to have the government step in and plant trees "equitably in all neighborhoods." Urban canopies can cool a town, but trees must be watered and cared for to thrive. And some adult trees are unnecessarily cut down to make room for more urban development. And the nagging question remains, how is it racist if urban residents do not care for their own green spaces or the climate is such that rainfall is insignificant, and water is hard to come by and thus expensive? Then there are landscapes such as mountain-prairies and the vast deserts around the globe that are devoid of trees. Is that environmental racism as well? Trees are certainly an excellent way to absorb the excess CO2 the environmental armageddonists whine about. Can the U.S. plant the trillion trees it has pledged by 2030? If so, would they survive pests, disease, fire, and drought?