A Hot, Wet Disaster

The United Nations' Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change released a report this past week saying that unless the world acts in the next decade, there is no way we can escape the worst effects of climate change - longer heat waves, rising sea levels, persistent droughts, stronger hurricanes and nor'easters, and Florida falling into the sea.  Unless we do anything, the worst, most irreversible  effects would be felt as soon as 2040, a date no farther in the future than 1996 - the year of Bill Clinton's re-election to the Presidency, the Macarena, and Muhammad Ali lighting the torch at the Atlanta Olympics - is in the past.

See goodbye to Miami.  We ain't gonna do nothin' to stop climate change.

We Americans - a rather amoral, selfish confederacy of imbeciles, idiots, morons and circus pinheads - have made it clear that we have no interest in combating, or even believing in the existence of, climate change.  Well, okay, not all of us, but a majority of us.  And one of those climate-change deniers, a guy so stupid that he flunked recess in grade school, is President of the United States.

A sizable number of voters continue to reject presidential candidates who put climate change front and center among the policies they espouse.  Nowhere was that more obvious than when Al Gore was ridiculed for his climate crusade during the 2000 presidential campaign despite his strong credentials on the issue as a U.S. Senator and as Vice President. More recently, Martin O'Malley (if you're sick and tired of hearing about him, well, kiss my posterior!) made climate change a centerpiece of his 2016 presidential campaign, proposing initiatives such as having the Environmental Protection Agency adopt a zero-tolerance policy for methane leaks from fossil-fuel production, canceling Keystone XL pipeline, prohibiting further offshore drilling and drill leases in Alaska, ending fossil-fuel subsidies (which would make gasoline more expensive and force people to drive smaller cars), and setting the United States on course to be powered by 100% clean energy by 2050.

We all know what happened.  Just look at all of those SUVs with "Ready For Hillary" bumper stickers still on them.  

Right now the White House is controlled by greedy polluters who were all too happy to put the American pledge to honor the Paris Agreement through the shredder, and we have an entire political party that is so convinced that climate change isn't real that it disbanded a climate-change subcommittee in the House of Representatives when they regained their House majority.  If they acknowledge climate change at all, they think of it as what happens every three months with the equinoxes and solstices.  So, no, I see no future for getting serious about climate change . . . or the planet.