ViRedd
05-28-2006, 06:34 AM
The End Of Civilization As We Know It
by Bill Press (former California Democratic Party Chairman)
May 25, 2006
I know it’s futile to dwell in the land of what-might-have-been. But these days we just can’t help it.
If only they’d counted all the votes in Florida in 2000. . . . If only we lived in a country where the person who got the most votes won the election. . . . If only the Supreme Court still respected states’ rights. . . . If only the man who deserves to be president were in the Oval Office, how much different — how much better — things would be.
We wouldn’t be locked in an endless, unwinnable war in Iraq; under President Al Gore, we wouldn’t have gone there in the first place. We wouldn’t be held hostage by big oil companies, with no alternative energy options on the table, when the price of oil topped $70 a barrel. We wouldn’t be saddled with a massive budget deficit. And, most of all, we wouldn’t be sitting on our hands and doing nothing about the most serious environmental crisis ever faced by humankind.
George W. Bush will go down in history as the worst American president ever. For things he’s done, yes: launching a pre-emptive war; presiding over the biggest spending and worst budget deficits ever; widening the gap between the rich and poor; destroying America’s standing in the world. But the most serious strike against Bush 43 will be what he hasn’t done: his total failure to act on global warming.
Failure to act? Actually, it’s worse than that. George W. Bush won’t even acknowledge that global warming exists — certainly not warming caused by human activity. How the leader of the Free World could remain so ignorant on so critical an issue boggles the mind. But then again, we are talking about Incurious George.
Actually, Bush wouldn’t have to travel far if he really wanted to become informed. He could begin by watching Al Gore’s new movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which dramatically illustrates that global warming is real, is manmade, and — without a major shift in public policy and private behavior — will soon develop into a planetary threat of biblical proportions. Gore has said he hopes his documentary will prove to “an action movie in the truest sense”: motivating people to get off their butts. But Bush has already told reporters he doubts he’ll have time to catch Gore’s film. He’s too busy riding his bike.
Instead, Bush could read the excellent “Field Notes from a Catastrophe” by Elizabeth Kolbert, who traveled around the world to document evidence of global warming. As she reports, January 2006 was the warmest January in recorded history; April 2006, the warmest April. The world’s glaciers are disappearing. The Arctic and Antarctic ice caps are melting. Polar bears are falling through the ice and drowning. In Micronesia, islands are being abandoned because of rising sea levels. In Russia, entire cities are sinking through the permafrost. In Costa Rica, several species offrogs, unable to adapt to climate change, have become extinct. In Alaska, native Inuit villages are being relocated inland because the shoreline is eroding. And her book is only 164 pages long.But of course expecting George W. Bush to read any book at all is asking a lot.
OK, then all Bush has to do is chat with some of his fellow born-again Christians. Many leading conservative Christians, led by Pastor Rick Warren of the Saddleback mega-church in Lake Forest, Calif., have organized to demand individual and government action on global warming. The need to act, they argue, is a moral imperative: “Millions of people will die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors.”Failure to act, they agree, is immoral.
If he doesn’t trust preachers on scientific matters, Bush need only talk with his one friend in the world, Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has consulted the world’s leading scientists, and warns that the threat posed by climate change is even greater than previously thought. We must act within seven years to reverse the trend, Blair argues, or face global catastrophe: rising sea levels, loss of fisheries and crops, spread of tropical diseases, coastal cities underwater, and more severe weather patterns like we saw last year with Hurricane Katrina.
In brief, Bush has no excuse for his ignorance or indifference. The evidence of global warming is so overwhelming, only a fool would fail to recognize the threat.
by Bill Press (former California Democratic Party Chairman)
May 25, 2006
I know it’s futile to dwell in the land of what-might-have-been. But these days we just can’t help it.
If only they’d counted all the votes in Florida in 2000. . . . If only we lived in a country where the person who got the most votes won the election. . . . If only the Supreme Court still respected states’ rights. . . . If only the man who deserves to be president were in the Oval Office, how much different — how much better — things would be.
We wouldn’t be locked in an endless, unwinnable war in Iraq; under President Al Gore, we wouldn’t have gone there in the first place. We wouldn’t be held hostage by big oil companies, with no alternative energy options on the table, when the price of oil topped $70 a barrel. We wouldn’t be saddled with a massive budget deficit. And, most of all, we wouldn’t be sitting on our hands and doing nothing about the most serious environmental crisis ever faced by humankind.
George W. Bush will go down in history as the worst American president ever. For things he’s done, yes: launching a pre-emptive war; presiding over the biggest spending and worst budget deficits ever; widening the gap between the rich and poor; destroying America’s standing in the world. But the most serious strike against Bush 43 will be what he hasn’t done: his total failure to act on global warming.
Failure to act? Actually, it’s worse than that. George W. Bush won’t even acknowledge that global warming exists — certainly not warming caused by human activity. How the leader of the Free World could remain so ignorant on so critical an issue boggles the mind. But then again, we are talking about Incurious George.
Actually, Bush wouldn’t have to travel far if he really wanted to become informed. He could begin by watching Al Gore’s new movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which dramatically illustrates that global warming is real, is manmade, and — without a major shift in public policy and private behavior — will soon develop into a planetary threat of biblical proportions. Gore has said he hopes his documentary will prove to “an action movie in the truest sense”: motivating people to get off their butts. But Bush has already told reporters he doubts he’ll have time to catch Gore’s film. He’s too busy riding his bike.
Instead, Bush could read the excellent “Field Notes from a Catastrophe” by Elizabeth Kolbert, who traveled around the world to document evidence of global warming. As she reports, January 2006 was the warmest January in recorded history; April 2006, the warmest April. The world’s glaciers are disappearing. The Arctic and Antarctic ice caps are melting. Polar bears are falling through the ice and drowning. In Micronesia, islands are being abandoned because of rising sea levels. In Russia, entire cities are sinking through the permafrost. In Costa Rica, several species offrogs, unable to adapt to climate change, have become extinct. In Alaska, native Inuit villages are being relocated inland because the shoreline is eroding. And her book is only 164 pages long.But of course expecting George W. Bush to read any book at all is asking a lot.
OK, then all Bush has to do is chat with some of his fellow born-again Christians. Many leading conservative Christians, led by Pastor Rick Warren of the Saddleback mega-church in Lake Forest, Calif., have organized to demand individual and government action on global warming. The need to act, they argue, is a moral imperative: “Millions of people will die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors.”Failure to act, they agree, is immoral.
If he doesn’t trust preachers on scientific matters, Bush need only talk with his one friend in the world, Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has consulted the world’s leading scientists, and warns that the threat posed by climate change is even greater than previously thought. We must act within seven years to reverse the trend, Blair argues, or face global catastrophe: rising sea levels, loss of fisheries and crops, spread of tropical diseases, coastal cities underwater, and more severe weather patterns like we saw last year with Hurricane Katrina.
In brief, Bush has no excuse for his ignorance or indifference. The evidence of global warming is so overwhelming, only a fool would fail to recognize the threat.