Convenient Concrete Mindset

Heh.  David Horsey's recent column on climate change brought plenty of GOP trolls to the comment section, thereby making his point even stronger.  Smart man, him.  I don't normally read the comments, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading these, as I'm sure he did.

Horsey's message is a powerful one because it strikes at the heart of why little if anything is being done to halt the serious damage humans are wreaking on the planet.  He begins by detailing some of the steps that the Dutch have been taking:  the construction of windmill farms to lessen that small country's dependence on carbon based energy and the gearing up for rising sea levels.  He acknowledges that those moves aren't nearly enough, but they're all that Holland can do on its own.  That's the problem.

...Rather than finding ways to cope with global warming, many environmentalists argue, the world should be fighting harder to turn it back.

Certainly, it would be nice if that could happen, but it will not, unless the big countries, such as the United States, China, Brazil and Russia, start building their own ranks of windmills, curbing industrial pollution and preserving the ecology of the Siberian steppes and the Amazonian rain forest. If the Dutch waited for these major powers to act, though, they would soon be underwater.

In the U.S., some states have begun to prepare for the inevitable. In California, plans are being made for the decades ahead when coastal highways are swamped, Yosemite waterfalls run dry, agricultural areas turn to dust, the San Francisco airport floods and the famous beaches near Los Angeles are reclaimed by the Pacific. But states cannot do it alone; the federal government needs to become fully engaged.

And that will not happen as long as the Republican Party stands in the way. Partly to do the bidding of the industrialists who are their benefactors and partly because they seem to have abandoned belief in science, Republicans have become climate change deniers. Even in a year when the West is aflame in wildfires and extreme weather batters the East, Republicans continue to insist there is nothing unusual going on – just a little blip in the weather.

If we lived in a rational society, any Republican who insisted climate change is not real would be as shamed and ostracized as the backwoods snake-handlers in the GOP congressional caucus who say a woman cannot be impregnated if she is raped. As a country, we should all be embarrassed. Americans, not the Dutch, should be leading the world in dealing with the imminent calamities being brought on by the rise in global temperatures. But we will not be able to take the lead until one of our two major political parties stops shilling for the big energy companies and abandons its medieval scorn of science.   [Emphasis added]

Amen!

And that other political party needs to stop shilling for the ExxonMobils and to stop authorizing drilling in sensitive areas as well.