Green Or Else

Let me give you a hypothetical.

Let's say 98 doctors tell you that your child is sick. Very sick, in fact. And these 98 doctors also tell you that there are some very specific medicines that you need to give your child right now, or your choice will be whether your child's health becomes grave, or catastrophic.

Now let's say there are two doctors who tell you that your child isn't sick at all, that what she's going through is just a phase. These doctors tell you there is really no need to change anything in your child's life, and that pretty soon she'll be just fine.

Now, I probably don't need to ask, but I'm going to: which group of doctors would you be inclined to believe?

Duh.

So, let's bring the hypothetical into the real world. It's not your child that's sick. It's your planet. And the days of anybody making a serious argument against the reality of global climate change is over. No serious scientist in the world denies that global warming - and the potentially disastrous consequences for all of us - is real, is bad, and is accelerating in large part because of human activity.

Michael Mandelbaum, a professor of foreign policy at Johns Hopkins Univerisity has said, "People do not change because you tell them there is a better option. They change only after they themselves realize that there is no other option." Whether you like it or not, it's time to jump off the denial train. Global climate change is no longer a left-leaning, tree-hugging, Birkenstocks-wearing conversation over free- trade coffee. It's a national security issue. It's going to affect our energy future, our foreign policy future, and most definitely our economic future.

If you're really interested in how climate change, the energy crisis, and bio-diversity loss are all interconnected (and if, like me, you don't have a PhD in anything), let me recommend Hot, Flat, and Crowded, by Pulitzer-winning author Tom Friedman. He does a very decent job of outlining the issues, how we got to where we are, what we need to do about it, and explaining the science that backs it all up.

Or, for you more nerdish, geek-out science types, zip on over to the website for the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change. This is the actual science, and it's worth looking over.

I saw this t-shirt the other day, a plain white job with three little words on the front:

green or else.

Those are pretty much the options.

Really?

On Monday, President Bush said, “Americans are watching to see if Democrats and Republicans, the Congress and the White House, can come together to solve this problem with the urgency it warrants. The whole world is watching to see if we can act quickly to shore up our markets.” He was referring to a proposed plan to use 700 billion dollars of taxpayer's money to attempt to bail out the imploding financial sector of the nation's economy.

And yes. I said 700 billion. With a b. And I said taxpayer's money. As in, yours and mine.

Really? Really?

There is no question that Congress and the White House need to come up with some kind of plan to, at the very least, staunch the massive bleeding that is happening right this minute in the financial sector. But to "act quickly" on an untested plan that involves so much of American's tax dollars could, from a domestic standpoint, land us in the kind of mess America is currently in on the foreign front. I am referring, of course, to Iraq - another of the President's untested plans that was acted quickly upon, with no regard to the future, that has cost Americans billions more of their tax dollars.

For the last eight years, this president has demonstrated his leadership style by acting quickly - instead of acting wisely. Though it is now common knowledge that President Bush was looking for a reason to invade Iraq as early as January 2000, the plan for the actual invasion was hastily concocted, with virtually no strategy for how to handle the power vacuum that would inevitably be left by Saddam Hussein's removal. And there was certainly no thought to the consequences of removing the lid off decades of sectarian discontent that had always been boiling just beneath the surface in Iraq. And while the addition of thousands more American troops did succeed in reducing the near-anarchy of the last two years (all the while increasing the amount that we are paying for the war), no real progress has been made by the Iraqis to create a sustainable government. And why should they, as long as America continues to foot the bill?

Now the administration is using the bully pulpit to tell Americans that they need to demand that Congress "act quickly" to bail out a financial sector that has been left to write its own rules (and change them, when they want to) since the days of Ronald Reagan. They want to apply a tourniquet, when what may be needed is a radical surgery - followed by a slow, painful recovery.

Moving The Goal Posts

So, evidently, what I meant by posting every week was, "posting every other year."

Did I actually say in my very first post of my very first blog that I have a lot to say? Because evidently, I'm not saying it here. There's been an Olympiad since my last post. A whole Olympiad.

Alright, I'm going to try and get better. Really. There's a lot going on right now. Two wars, a financial crisis, an energy crisis, a presidential election - and my 42nd birthday right around the corner. If I can't find something to say about all of that, then it's time to cut my losses and start a lavender farm.

I have no idea why I just said that last bit.