All talk–little action–on climate change 03/13/14 06:51 AM—UPDATED 03/13/14 03:11 PM By Bill McKibben The last few weeks have been a rhetorical high-water mark for climate concern. The trouble is, they’ve also been a high-water mark for … water. Before you read the rest of this short essay, you might want to take 46 seconds to watch this video of a “king tide” path of destruction across the Marshall Islands in the Pacific last week. This is just the kind of thing starting to happen across the planet. Watching it helps you understand just how right Secretary of State John Kerry was when he called global warming “the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.” That’s the sharpest language any high-ranking official has ever used about climate. Not to be outdone, Kerry’s former Senate colleagues staged an all-night teach-in on the chamber floor Monday, with 30 Democrats one after another explaining the peril the planet faced. Harry Reid: “It’s a question of our survival.” Tim Kaine: “We need to take any action that gets us from dirty to less dirty.” Ed Markey, channeling one Dr Seuss: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” All of this counts as a pretty striking change of tone. President Obama campaigned across the heartland of America in 2012 without ever mentioning climate change—even though the year smashed the all-time high temperature record for the country, and the Midwest drought was the most severe since the Dust Bowl. Now even the president sometimes talks about climate change, and when he does it’s in stirring terms. In January’s State of the Union address, he said we’d have to account for our actions to “our children’s children.” Such rhetoric is part of the education our society has to go through before it’s ready to act. Read more: msnbc/msnbc/all-talk-little-action-climate-change Image: Dr Seuss
Posted on: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 22:14:57 +0000
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