Here on my local scene in the South Bay of Los Angeles our local elected officials are doing their homework, understand the tipping point we now stand upon and are acting to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by completing their carbon inventories and creating Climate Action Plans to get us to the safe zone of 350 ppm of CO2. Here in California we know that we have t0 end business as usual and burning of fossil fuels if anyone 35 or younger is going to have a viable future with anywhere near the good life the baby boomers have enjoyed.
But if you care about our children and our childrens’ children, then do not count on the members of today’s United States Senate to do the ethical, moral or honest thing when it comes to global warming because they will not. They’ve proven it time and time again by continually folding like a cheap umbrella whenever the time came for them to lead us to a better climate and energy future. That’s what happens when you’ve been bought out and completely co-opted by business interests who place a higher value on the money they rake in then the lives of the people who pay them.
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And I’m talking about the Democrats and the Republicans. My own legacy Democratic Senator, the ancient Diane Feinstein, who I have supported and voted for, along with gun-ho Virgina Senator Webb, who I helped get elected, are just as ready to roll over and sell out your kids as Republican nutcase Senator Inhofe and the corrupt and immoral Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski. They’re not willing to put a price on carbon today because they don’t have the courage and they don’t have the conviction to lead us out of the disaster we’ve scheduled for the rest of this century. In fact, they’re leading us straight into catastrophe, content to have enjoyed the good life on the gravy train while they leave our country far worse off then they found it.
If you leave the fate of our children and our young adults to the members of today’s US Senate then you will have sentenced them to hell and high water and you will be as guilty of selling out our younger generations as the oil, coal and gas industry who will gladly exchange their lives and futures for more cash in their corporate pockets now. So don’t blame anyone but yourself if you allow that to happen.
The current bill in the Senate is half-assed and filled with blatant giveaways to the very people who are lying and cheating while they pollute our air and water and melt the glaciers and ice caps. But this half-assed step is world’s better than no step, or more delay while the climate reaches the point of no return.
It is the dream of the carbon collaborators to make the bill stink so badly that nothing gets past and that the business as usual road with no price on carbon is the one we stay on.
And if that dream doesn’t come true for them, they’ll settle for Diane Feinstein’s “we’ve got all the time in world” approach. My Senator thinks she’s a true environmentalist and that she’ll be remembered for her protection of the wilderness but she’s dead wrong about both of those. She’s going to be remembered as the California Senator that thinks a wildfire can be fought “incrementally” and that you can pick your time to do so.
Here’s what she said in the New York Times this week:
“I tend to be an incrementalist. I say do what you can do, when you can do it. Because everything is opportunity and timing. If you have both, you can get it done. If you have only one, it’s very difficult to get it done.”
That would be a swell approach if our nation’s leading climatologist, James Hansen hadn’t told Senator Feinstein back in June of 2008:
Senator Feinstein – what part of that didn’t you understand? What should I tell my ten year old friends about how much good your “incremental” approach is going to do in avoiding the worst impacts of climate change? I guess you’re lucky you’re too old to be around to pay the price for your failure to act soon enough.
What Senator Feinstein and her collegues in the Senate know, but are too cowardly to tell you, is that today’s unemployment and depressed economy are just the common cold compared to the cancer we’ve already been diagnosed with.
We need the chemo of climate action to start right now if we want to have any chance of stopping its spread to “terminal without recourse.” Pretending to know more than the cancer doctors or that you can live with the cancer’s impacts and delay starting treatment is exactly what the US Senate is doing. There can be no remission following that course of irresponsible inaction.
It’s time for you to set them straight while you still have the chance.
If you choose not to, then do us all a favor and stop pretending that you love your kids and are working to give them the future they deserve – because that’s just a lie. And that lie is going to be the legacy your children – and the rest of us – remember you by.
Creative Greenius 