The Climate Changes, Politics Stay the Same

Originally this was a screed against the complacent US political class with “Politicians” in the place of “Politics” in the title.  My editor sent the heavily redacted piece with the comment “your time at the Nation is certainly showing. I reined you in a bit.”

Really, it wasn’t The Nation or any magazine in particular.  The vitriol was the cumulative result of watching supposedly progressive politicians negotiate the cap-and-trade bill into near uselessness while everyone wrings their hands over health care reform.  Global warming is the main event, health care is the undercard regardless of what the media or any opinion polls suggest.

For more of that (with a dash of New York news), see blow:

On June 18^th New York inaugurated the latest signpost on the road to our demise: Deutsche Bank’s massive Carbon Counter. Like the ever-escalating National Debt Clock, it is a macabre monument to our collective failure to address a serious problem.

Across the street from Madison Square Garden, the carbon clock is a 70-foot-tall real-time digital tally of the greenhouse gases (GHGs) that are altering the earth’s average surface temperatures. For calculation purposes, potent GHGs, such as methane, nitrous dioxide and halocarbons—all of which are would be comprehensively regulated for the first time by the enfeebled Waxman-Markey bill—are converted into their equivalent metric tonnage of carbon dioxide (CO2), the most common GHG. The science behind the numbers came from mathematicians at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Deutsche Bank is offsetting the emissions from the counter’s energy-efficient LED technology.

To read the rest of the blog post or to vent your own rage, click here.

Picture credits: Roberto Rizzato, _Massimo_ (via Flickr)