The warnings have been sounded for decades to anyone who would listen, but few have been listening.

There’s the melting of the ice in the north, there are fewer fish in the sea for commercial fishing, the coral reefs are receding, the climate is warming and changing, there is an unprecedented rate of extinction of species that has not been seen since the dinosaurs, and people have untold quantities and varieties of toxins in their bodies.

They are being sickened by what’s in our environment - what we eat, drink, and breathe in - and, thus, we have a health care crisis. It’s a political argument played out at the national level, but Americans (or at least, their representatives) can’t seem to find the will to provide health care for everyone, as a right.

We have wide-ranging international discussions about the loss of rain forests in both the Western Hemisphere and in Asia. We have discussed what it means to have millions fewer acres of tropical forests to take the carbon dioxide out of the air we breathe and give us life-giving oxygen.

The oceans, as vast as they are, are being reduced to trash dumps. It has been reported that there is an area of “plastic soup” in the Pacific Ocean that is twice the area of the continental United States. Oceans are warming and said to be causing violent weather pattern disruptions, fiercer hurricanes and tornadoes, and crop-and-livestock killing droughts.

For the millennia, oceans have been a stabilizing force on the planet, just because of their sheer size and mass. There are scientific estimates that oceans provide 50-85 percent of the oxygen we breathe. Ocean-produced oxygen is in virtually every breath we take.

But, human beings have disrespected the part the oceans play in supporting all life on the planet, just as they have disrespected the part that rain forests and other forests play.

One example is happening in Papua New Guinea, where the tailings of nickel and cobalt mining are being allowed to be “…discharged into deep ocean canyons in the adjacent offshore area utilizing the deep sea tailings placement technique currently employed at the Lihir (in Papua New Guinea) and Batu Hijau (Indonesia) operations.”

The indigenous people of Papua New Guinea (PNG) went to court to try to stop the ocean dumping, because they use the waters for food and paddle their watercraft through the waters. They apparently don’t believe that there are canyons deep enough to keep the dangerous toxins from entering their lives and their bodies.

And what are the toxins? Ramu, the mining company that is at work in PNG and is nearly wholly owned by China, has said it will be producing, according to its own information, “3,350 tons per day of 98.5 percent pure sulfuric acid, part of the requirements for the acid leach, lime boil and solvent extraction.”

The sulfuric acid is just one ingredient that will be included in the tailings that will be dumped in the ocean, just as similar mine dumping has taken place elsewhere in PNG and in Indonesia.

Since the Ramu mine is expected to pull 31,500 tons of nickel and 3,300 tons of cobalt out of the earth annually for the next 20 years, the toxic tailings that will assault the ocean there will pile up and are not likely to stay in the “deep ocean canyons.” The tailings will assault the people there and it would be ridiculous to think that the toxins will stay deep or in that one spot.

The ocean and the people of Papua New Guinea are going to suffer for the next 20 years - and all of us will suffer the toxins that increase the background of poison in the biosphere.

What does this have to do with hydrofracking in New York? It simply illustrates the power of a corporation over the people. Ramu, with the deep pockets of the Chinese government will go to any lengths to get what it wants, and has overwhelmed the local PNG lawyers in the court case. Ramu won, and the mining and disposal are going forward.

The power of the “extraction industries” in New York is not so different. Hydrofracking, or fracking, is a method of natural gas extraction that pumps one million gallons of water, sand and some 8,000 gallons of a chemical soup under high pressure to break up the rock and release the gas. This is done in every well, to thousands of wells and, sometimes it is done two or three times to each well.

The powerful and the wealthy usually get what they want. The gas drilling companies are rich and they are sure they will win in the end. Though the people are against hydrofracking and its destructive methods and the potential damage to the ground and subsurface water, the companies are sure that the bureaucratic process will give them cover and, finally, give them permits to drill anywhere, except in the watersheds of New York City and the City of Syracuse.

One need not go to Texas or Wyoming or Colorado to see the devastating effects of hydrofracking. It’s happening in Pennsylvania, within a hundred miles of New York’s Marcellus Shale and within 200 miles of the Utica Shale formations. Some local officials traveled to the Keystone State to view the drilling and talk with local leaders and people who have been affected by the drilling. “I’m a believer (now),” said one Schoharie County highway superintendent. He went with an “open mind” and said he was shocked at what he saw.

The people of Pennsylvania are alarmed at the disruption of their way of life and at what has happened to their water and air. They have said that New Yorkers are lucky that they have time to fight to stop the drilling. Pennsylvanians are still fighting, but they are not as organized and bankrolled as the gas companies are. It is unlikely that New Yorkers will be as well bankrolled as the gas companies, but they continue to fight.

When Andrew Cuomo, as New York attorney general, began to mull a race for governor, what was happening on the national scene was a bevy of Republican presidential candidates that prayed the mantra, “drill, baby, drill.” It was an in-your-face repudiation of any opposition to drilling for oil or “energy” anywhere on American soil, even including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Tea Partiers took up the call and it became a matter of patriotism on the far right - and then, in the GOP, in general - to demand that the U.S. find every source of energy and exploit it, no matter the value or sacredness of place.

It’s a lesson a politician would not forget easily. If Cuomo wants to run for president as a Democrat, he would want to take any issues from Republicans he could, and that includes an all-out effort to drill for oil and gas, reduction or elimination of so-called entitlements like Social Security, and dealing with problem of workers in unions.

So far, he has dealt with the unions and he is busy cutting public services and school funds to reduce the budget. He has the example before him of Bill Clinton, who took two major GOP issues out from under them: “free trade” agreements and “ending welfare as we know it.”

Now the question is: As fossil fuels run out, do the leaders level with the people and tell them that, in the absence of full-bore alternative energy research and development, the lifestyle Americans are used to is not sustainable (5 percent of the world’s population using 25 percent of its resources)? Or, are polluting methods of extraction going to be pushed at the expense of the land, air, water, wildlife, and people? This is not just an economic decision, but more of a political decision.

Cuomo is in favor of fracking, except for two watersheds. The New York City watershed and the Syracuse watershed, which combined, serve some nine million residents. A recent statistical study determined that America’s rural areas are home to just 16 percent of the people, so much of the country would appear to be sparsely populated and that is true of New York State.

A candidate seeking a successful rerun for governor - or even a run for the presidency - would not want to run afoul of the vast majority of the people, who are in the cities and suburbs. If he supports the drill-baby-drill attitude of the country’s right wing, Cuomo has constructed the three-legged stool of their philosophy: diminish the unions, slash budgets, and reduce dependence on foreign oil by exploiting domestic sources (and let’s not forget, along the way, do nothing that would require the rich to pay their fair share).

Where will he try to drill? It’s not hard to figure. The people who live in the Marcellus Shale region do not speak with the volume of nine million New Yorkers, so it will be their families and communities that will suffer the pounding of heavy industry.

For most New Yorkers, the drilling activity will be out of sight and out of mind. Under those circumstances, natural gas fracking can even be sold as “clean,” just as our use of the metals nickel and cobalt from PNG can be considered clean, even though the dumping of the corrosive toxins will destroy those who try to live near them.

America is running out of many things and one of those is fertile farmland. Because the Marcellus Shale covers such a large area of the state - and most of it is some of the best farmland remaining - we could be facing a future in which a majority of our food is imported. Think for a moment of the indigenous people of PNG who will lose their ability to get food from the sea, because of the tons of sulfuric acid and other components of smelting tailings being dumped into the ocean every day for 20 years.

Then, think of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers in the broad Marcellus Shale belt who will find their water not potable and their farms unusable for livestock and who will be looking to sell short and move somewhere else.

It’s a story of two groups of people who are facing the giants of power and money and, in New York, where the people are supposed to be the highest authority, they are being treated like the Papua New Guineans who have little to no power in their own land.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.