It may be hard to believe that having a potential traitor in the Oval Office is only the second-most important story right now in the world. And I'll get to that story, in due course. But, sadly, that is absolutely the case. Because the nature of the person in the Oval Office may not matter so much when there's a planet at stake.
Yes, I know, I write about this a great deal. But, since we don't have anyplace other than Earth on which to live at the moment, it might be worthwhile to stop from time to time, look around us, and see what's happening.
And it ain't pretty.
Resource depletion at a record rate, and increasing exponentially from year to year.
Coastal regions slowly sinking into the ocean, and likely never to return.
And if you don't live on the coast? No consolation there at all, folks. Chances are that, like Great Britain, you're burning up. Literally.
Go ahead and call me a creeping socialist for pointing out these articles to you. Two of them come from the New York Post, nobody's idea of a creeping-socialist newspaper. Yes, the third one comes from the New York Times, and you can flog the Times as much as you want. But when both papers are basically telling the same story about the world around us, I think that it has a lot more to do with the reality they're both seeing, and that their respective ideologies can't let them ignore.
Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no climate deniers anywhere the effects of climate change--there, I've said it--can be seen or felt. And, increasingly, those effects have no boundaries.
And just as those effects are crossing geographic lines, the response to them--the only response based on the facts, that is--is doing the same thing with political lines. Great Britain, of course, has (barely) a government led by the Conservative Party, a party whose members generally see eye-to-eye with their counterparts in the U.S., the Republicans. Here, from the Times article, is a single-sentence summation of that government's current take on climate: "The British government announced Thursday that adapting to a warming climate was now a matter of 'life and death.'” (Emphasis added, as if it needed to be.)
On the other hand, perhaps it does.
Because while this country was making some--some--real progress on this issue during the Obama administration, Obama's successor (who loves hearing his name, so I won't use it) has been going full-speed in the other direction, discouraging the development of renewable sources of energy, and wedding the country to resources that cannot be reproduced or duplicated, only replaced.
In so doing, he is preying on the fears of two groups: the owners of fossil-fuel industries, who fear that they will not be able to profitably adapt to an age of solar, wind, and geothermal power, and the employees of those industries (especially coal miners), who fear the loss of familiar jobs and doubt their own ability to adapt to employment in a world of renewables.
It should seem obvious that there are ways by which government at all levels could provide incentives in various forms to enable both investors and workers to successfully and painlessly make the transition from the extraction world of energy to the renewable one. Obama, of course, translated a number of these ideas into public policy when he was President. Hillary Clinton, the person who should be sitting in the Oval Office right now, was ready and willing to do the same and more.
But the current President does not actually care about solving problems. He only cares about political issues at all to the extent that they can be manipulated to promote his personal interests, both in his businesses and in his ability to reach a second term in office. And he always takes the divide-and-conquer approach to that manipulation. Thus, problems are never actually solved. They continue to fester, so that they can remain available for future misuse.
In short, he illustrates the difference between holding an office, and serving the people who have "elected" him to it. (I'll have more to say about the "election" part of the equation in a subsequent post.)
So, even though public opinion in the U.S. is--admittedly, very slowly--moving in the direction of accepting the reality and the danger of climate change, the reality and danger are growing at a faster rate than is the acceptance of its existence.
What can you do? Rather, what should you do, for everyone's sake?
Stop pretending the problem isn't real, if that's where you are. And stop pretending there is nothing we can do about the problem, if that's where you are. There are many things we can do to not only solve the problem but also, in the process, achieve a level of economic growth that could benefit more than just a handful of investors. I have said it before, and will continue saying it until either I or the temperature drops: it's possible to have an environment without an economy, but not an economy without an environment.
And, once you have stopped all of that pretending, one more thing remains: find out which candidates support policies that address the need to adapt to and overcome the effects of climate change, and only vote for those candidates.
It's our only planet. It's up to us to save it.
Get started doing that right now. Before we burn--or sink--together.
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