Piles of It

I'm not really a nature lover. I've lived in one city or another my whole life, and to be quite honest, I feel a bit uneasy around animals that are not domesticated enough to use a litter box. I only recently learned to garden, because for most of my adult life, I lived in Chicago where it was so cold and windy that nothing would grow. Still, when I think about the environment and the challenges that we face, I feel a sense of hopelessness and a profound feeling of dread. It's a complicated problem, since the world as we know it runs on oil, and to stop the engine that turns the world economy would surely bring about terrible hardships and catastrophic situations to many people. On the other hand, if we continue as we are now and ignore the issue, at some time in the future, we will reach a point where the damage that we have done to the environment will become irreversible. Some scientists believe that we're already past the point of no return.

Yikes. This is depressing. I need a donut.

It's easy to place blame on the current Administration, but I truly believe that all Americans should share this guilt. I don't think Clinton did enough to limit greenhouse gasses, and he had eight years to do it. There are plenty of Americans who could have given up the comfort of the mini-vans, but who wants to sit so close to the kids on a road trip? I wouldn't, that's why I don't have kids. At least Clinton supported the Kyoto Treaty, which wouldn't have gone far enough to alleviate the dangers, but it would have been a start. Now here we are, a nation that causes more harmful emissions that any country on the planet, but we rejected the opportunity to stop the damage when we pulled out of the Kyoto Treaty.
Why didn't we sign the treaty with the rest of the industrialized world?

Why indeed?

According to the Guardian, briefing papers given to Paula Dobriansky then Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs, the Administration is found thanking Exxon Mobile executives for the company's active involvement in helping to determine climate change policy, and also asks what climate change policy the company might find acceptable.
Wow. So those secret energy meetings way back when still remain secret, but GreenPeace found a way dig up some of that nasty stuff anyway. I wonder how much Exxon Mobile paid for the opportunity to weigh in about environmental policy.

It's amazing what you can discover when you read foreign newspapers. Of course the resignation of Phillip Cooney was reported in the American press, but with it a quote from the White House that said his abrupt resignation had nothing to do with the doctoring of official US policy papers on global warming. The nasty stuff just gets deeper and deeper. Not only did Phillip Cooney (not a scientist, by the way, he was a lawyer for the American Petroleum Institute, a lobbying group for oil firms) resign, but just one week later, it turns out that he took a job with...can you guess?come on I'll give you a hint...if you said Exxon Mobile, you would be correct!

How deep is this pile of s--t we're standing in? If climate change weren't such a serious issue, it might merely be a case of isolated corruption, a man and a corporation willing to put profits before the welfare of the rest of the planet, and elected officials willing to sell the very future of these unborn children they care so much about for some unknown sum of money. But when we toss this nasty stuff into the places that we live, and we endanger the very air that keeps us living, before you know it, the pile is up to our chin, it permeates everything, the water, the food chain, those nice clean picnic places by the side of the highway, there is no escaping it.

This Administration has got to stop dumping on us.

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