Supreme Court has 'hamstrung' ability to tackle our greatest existential threat |Opinion
Robert Braine is a retired IBM programmer with a Master of Science in physics from Stevens Institute of Technology. He resides in Powell.
It is appalling that the majority of justices on the Supreme Court seem incapable of understanding the dangers facing humanity from global warming because of global overpopulation and fossil fuel consumption.
On June 24, the justices overturned Roe v Wade, followed on June 30 with a ruling that crippled the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to manage fossil fuel usage.
About 1700, our species began a global population explosion that has grown worse ever since. Also, the average person began burning more fossil fuel each year.
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By 1920, the carbon dioxide added to our atmosphere from fossil fuels started having a noticeable effect on Earth's surface temperature.
That was when the five-year average temperature of the Earth began its relentless rise. The Earth's atmosphere in 1920 already had more carbon dioxide emissions than our planet could handle each year.
Now our global population is 4.07 times what it was in 1920 and our global average per person consumption of fossil fuels is 2.44 times greater, or almost 10 times more carbon dioxide is dumped into the atmosphere than the amount dumped in 1920.
These catastrophic increases have led to the severe weather events we now experience, including droughts, huge fires, floods, powerful storms, etc., all due to excessive emissions of heat-trapping gasses, particularly carbon dioxide.
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The situation is dire.
Humans do not respond well to a lack of resources, and typically fight to the death to regain those resources. Such fighting could cause the loss of all major species on Earth.
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What is the solution?
Our only hope of avoiding climate-induced disasters is to both drastically cut fossil fuel usage by everyone and drastically reduce our population.
But how big a reduction?
We can try to return to carbon dioxide emission levels of 1920, excessive as they were. To do that we have to either cut our population by a factor of 10 or cut our carbon dioxide emissions by a factor of 10, or a combination of both by a factor of 10 (such as population by 50% and emissions per person by 80%).
Yet we now allow states to force women to give birth to unwanted children. This comes at a time when the world desperately needs to encourage woman to have as low a birth rate as possible, through every means available. Those methods not only must include access to free abortions, but free access to every form of birth control, and other incentives.
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The real irony is, if each person in the world burned as much fossil fuel as each person in the United States, our planet could only support a global population of 226 million people.
That's 97 million fewer people than the United States already had in 2016.
What is the Supreme Court's role?
Our founding fathers never intended to create a document that would prevent our nation from taking actions necessary to protect us and our world from the dangers of our own making. Yet the Supreme Court's foolish rulings have crippled the only two peaceful tools that exist to address these problems.
In short order, they have hamstrung our ability to deal with the greatest existential threat humankind has ever faced on this Earth.
The behavior of the U.S. Supreme Court is truly a "crime against humanity," not just against the American people, but against all the people of the world.
Robert Braine is a retired IBM programmer with a Master of Science in physics from Stevens Institute of Technology. He resides in Powell.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Opinion: What impact does Supreme Court's Roe, EPA rulings have on climate change
