It’s that time of year again. With Halloween, Dia de los Muertos, and the Midterm Elections coming up there’s lots of things that might be haunting you. To get in the mood, and for personal coping reasons, I’ve decided to make a list of everything we should be afraid of this Halloween.

• 1. Climate Change- A major climate report described a strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040, with a prediction of the atmosphere warming 1.5 C above pre-industral levels.

 

I’m sure you’ve seen the kid playing with a skeleton in the New York Times, but did you know that the world is on track to lose 2/3rds of wild animals by 2020? That’s less than two years away! And what about the fact that just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global green house gas emissions since 1988?

The actual technical report: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/oct/27/world-on-track-to-lose-two-thirds-of-wild-animals-by-2020-major-report-warns

technical report: http://www.livingplanetindex.org/home/index

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change

• 2. The fact that Donald Trump meets all factors for signs of an autocratic demagogue and potential dictator, according to Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt professors from Havard Univerisity and writers of How Democracies Die.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2018/jan/21/this-is-how-democracies-die

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/trump-comey-fbi-firing-becoming-a-dictator-a7728031.html

http://www2.philly.com/philly/columnists/will_bunch/trump-is-becoming-a-dictator-pardons-lies-obstruction-of-justice-20180603.html

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-trump-putin-dictators-democray-20170508-story.html

https://freedomhouse.org/blog/global-democracy-declines-trump-embraces-dictators

• 3.  Potential Russian interference in the Midterm Elections

Second time around? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/us/politics/russia-interference-midterm-elections.html

• 4.  Germmmss!!! and Antibiotic Resistance

and the fact that it is not commercially viable for pharmaceutical companies to invest in research, and therefore hardly any new antibiotics have been discovered  in the past 30 years… yay capitalism

https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/89/2/11-030211/en/

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/14/first-new-antibiotic-in-30-years-discovered-in-major-breakthroug/

• 5. The Post-Science Anarchy Movement

https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/jul/24/year-anarchy-science

From Ruffalo and the Young Turks, Resident A, the professor who compared science to a white man’s phallus we’ve seen our share of people who advocate for “alternative facts” in this class.

 

• 6. Unethical Scientists, Engineers,  Professionals and Experts who give the post-science movement fuel.

Talk about Dr. McElmurry and academically impersonating a PhD student who’s committee you served on, or Jan Hendrik Schon from Plastic Fantastic who fabricated data. Not to mention Rick Rogers, Lynette Stokes, Mary Jean Brown and the whole bunch of worms from CDC and the rest of the DC lead crisis perps.

All of these fears boil down to trust. Can we trust that our climate will be livable? Can we trust our government? Our elections? Our medicines to save us? And can we trust our, experts, scientists, and engineers themselves? Can we trust the people who’s professionalism, integrity and knowledge we depend on for our society to function? How much room is there for corruption, and denial of facts and threatening situations (climate change, Antibiotic Resistance) in a healthy democracy, or a functioning government? What happens when the public can’t trust the experts, their elected officials, medicines, scientists and engineers? Where does a post-modern society lead us? To real anarchy or disaster? To a revolution? Or to fixing our mistakes? And how do we as a society begin to trust again when the very companies that drive the world economy and the same people and voters responsible for these policy decisions are what got us here in the first place? How can we trust while we are still busy trying to get entities to claim responsibility or step up to solving problems?

 

Did I miss anything else we should be afraid of besides the normal fears of death, zombies, old age, vampires, taxes, people with chainsaws, growing up, having your house toilet papered, living in a dystopia and being complacent? 

You know you love me. xoxo Ethics Girl

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