New Orleans may sink into the sea by 2100. Much of Florida may also be underwater by then. Drought will likely become the norm out West, meaning California could no longer provide the food we depend upon. Las Vegas may become downright inhabitable.
No, I'm not fabricating any of this. These will be the consequences of inaction if we continue to delay implementing the solutions we need to solve the coming climate crisis. But for some reason, may of our supposedly wise lawmakers in Capitol Hill are either willfully ignorant of the facts or downright lying about our future.
You might have heard last summer about Mitt Romney's strapping his dog to his roof on family vacations, which created a bit of a kerfuffle in the primary campaign last summer. But we haven't heard too much about Sarah Palin's cruel streak, which makes Romney's Irish Setter's unpleasant travel pale in comparison.
Of course, Palin's no animal lover. She's put extraordinary effort into undoing federal wildlife protections for polar bears, beluga whales, and pretty much any other animal that gets in the way of the oil industry's plans.
But her wolf bounty really takes the cake for animal cruelty. One of Palin's first acts in office was to put a $150 bounty on the heads of her state's wolves, allegedly with the goal of increasing the moose and caribou population. But this was no ordinary hunt: it was meant to incentivize the aerial killing of wolves, in which private hunters take a small plane and chase down wolf packs until they're exhausted and can't move any more, when they either shoot them from the air or land and execute them at point blank range. Then, they strap the wolf to a plane, cut off the wolf's left forearm, and bring it to the state Department of Fish and Game for their cash reward.
Here's a video from Defenders of Wildlife that shows what aerial wolf hunting is all about:
The climate crisis is huge. We know this. And we are at a critical juncture. Will we continue to corrode our environment until it cannot sustain us? Or will we look to the future and build communities that thrive on nature's abundance?
Right now, things don't look very promising. It isn't just that we've reached the tipping point, as James Hansen suggests. (warning - large PDF file) It isn't just that the first-ever climate bill is about to arrive DOA on the Senate floor--maybe not such a bad thing since Lieberman-Warner is built on the wrong ideas. The real problem is in the way we think about the problem and, therefore, the solutions.
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