Monday, June 2, 2014

IMHO: In Regard to The Climate

In regard to the climate, we should spend another couple of decades debating and discussing and pointing fingers. We should figure out what each specific President did or didn’t do and send them to bed without supper. We should discredit the scientists and astrophysicists, biologists, anthropologists and computer scientists who predicted what’s happening because it’s all just a silly unproven theory.

As I see it, this scenario is more like “On the Beach” than “Leaves of Grass”.

Believe it or not, the earth is in real trouble. Some countries get it and are harnessing wind and solar as fast as they can. They support mass transit and their cars get better mileage—they have to because they charge the real cost of gas. At the same time, other countries like the US are still talking about the problem—even denying there’s anything wrong as the water splashes at our ankles on Wall Street. At the same time, other (very) serious polluters upwind from the US are facilitated by American businesses. They’re planning to ship these global polluters our coal and fracked oil because it’s too dirty to burn here. Don’t they get it? The smoke ends up here, in our lungs—in our kid’s lungs.

IMHO, the day of fossil fuels has been over for some time, but is nuclear power a viable alternative? Excuse me? Have we learned nothing from Fukushima, Chernobyl, or Three Mile Island? What about the mess we have yet to clean up at Hanford? And what about the used fuel from the safest plants? Yes, there are other alternatives, but give up meat? Seriously? We need to take real steps toward real long-term, sustainable solutions. Will we have to give up electricity? Why? There are many other ways to generate electricity. And yes, it’s obscene that states are passing laws to make adoption of solar or wind or alternative energy sources more expensive or even illegal.

The time to discuss whether there is a problem or not has long since past. The ship has hit the iceberg. Deciding what’s going to be served in the Windjammer dining room for dinner is a waste of time.

As a country, we should be ashamed of ourselves. We have permitted all three branches of government at the local state and federal level to be taken over by forces whose profits depend on the status quo. These corporations (and individuals) will no-doubt continue to deny, delay and block solutions as long as the financial markets focus on next quarter’s profits, not realizing that the very existence of their corporations is in jeopardy in the long-term. Frankly, they don’t care. As long as their fourth home in the mountains in Montana is above the high-water mark, they’re happy.

Our children’s tears and anger will be directed at us for generations to come. They will curse the day we were born for doing nothing, for despoiling their only world, for leaving them with a dead sea and an uninhabitable planet. The loss of life, property and security of our nation and our very existence depended on what men and women did twenty and fifty and a hundred years ago—but more importantly what we do now to correct their mistakes and our own.

Bill