How to Die of Dumb
By William Rivers Pitt
March 09, 2015 "ICH"
- "Truthout"
- Sen. James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma
since 1994, took to the floor of the Senate
the other day
with a snowball in a bag. Because it was
cold in Washington DC, he said, because
there was snow on the ground, that proves
climate change is a hoax. "In case we had
forgotten," he said, pulling the snowball
from the sack, "because we keep hearing that
2014 has been the warmest year on record, I
ask the chair, do you know what this is?
It's a snowball, just from outside here.
It's very, very cold out." He went on to
denounce what he called the "hysteria on
global warming," and then threw the snowball
at the presiding officer.
James Inhofe - who believes
snow in DC disproves climate change - is the
chairman of the Senate Environment and
Public Works committee, because of course he
is. He won with 57 percent of the vote in
his last re-election campaign, because of
course he did.
Sen. Mitch McConnell,
Republican of Kentucky since 1984, has been
urging state officials all across the US
to refuse to comply with the new EPA rule on
carbon emissions that was championed by the
Obama administration. The rule requires
existing power plants to cut their carbon
emissions by 30 percent, based on the 2005
requirements, by the year 2030. Senator
McConnell is having none of it. "Think
twice," he said, "before submitting a state
plan, which could lock you in to federal
enforcement and expose you to lawsuits, when
the administration is standing on shaky
legal ground and when, without your support,
it won't be able to demonstrate the capacity
to carry out such political extremism."
Mitch McConnell, as Senate
Majority Leader, has the power to keep any
bills he dislikes from coming to a vote.
Until January of 2017 at least, that means
any legislation seeking to address the issue
of climate change will never see the light
of day, because McConnell thinks giving
attention to the threat of carbon emissions
- what is eventually going to kill us all -
amounts to "political extremism." Because of
course he does.
Meanwhile, in Alaska,
there is no snow. Wasilla, long the home of
the re-start of the annual Iditarod race
(which comes after the ceremonial start in
Anchorage), has lost the privilege, because
you can't run dog sleds without snow. The
race was required to move the re-start 300
miles north to Fairbanks, but even that is
becoming chancy. The Chena River, where they
wanted to hold the re-start because it has,
since time out of mind, been locked in
reliably thick ice at this time of year,
does not have reliable ice anymore. The
islands in the Beaufort Sea near Prudhoe Bay
are swarming with polar bears, because the
ice floes they once used to hunt seals are
gone. According to the locals, this is
unprecedented.
Sounds pretty warm to me.
San Francisco, Sacramento,
Las Vegas, Seattle, Salt Lake City, along
with more than twenty other cities out West
are experiencing the
warmest winters they've ever recorded.
Meanwhile, back East, cities like Boston and
Buffalo are trying to dig out from one of
the most fearsome winters in memory. People
in New England and California have been
joking about building a pipeline to ship all
the frozen water blanketing the East out to
the parched West. If they can build the
massive Keystone XL funnel from Alberta to
the Gulf in order to ship poison to the
world, why not build one to ship vital water
to people who desperately need it. It's a
joke...for now, anyway. Someday - if the
West continues to dry out and the East
continues to be buried and paralyzed by
storms - it might be an idea whose time has
come.
Speaking of warm and
water, most of California has no water to
speak of, and what they do have in the
aquifers has been tainted by fracking waste.
In the mountains, there is virtually no
snowpack, which not only means their drought
will broaden and deepen in the months to
come, but also means their fire season this
year looks to be positively terrifying.
Australia
can tell them all about it; vast swaths
of the continent are engulfed in flames.
Fires during the Australian summers are not
uncommon, but their size and severity have
been dramatically increasing, and pretty
much everyone there with knowledge on the
subject chalks it up to climate change.
Don't try telling that to
Messrs. Inhofe and McConnell, however.
There's snow on the ground in DC, which
means it's all a bunch of paranoid crap.
I don't have an easy
answer for how to deal with this. How to
explain people like Inhofe and McConnell,
how to explain people who have voluntarily
returned them to Congress for a combined
total of 52 years, would require a
political, economic and sociological
treatise that I have neither the space nor
the time to compile at this juncture. The
short version, however, is that our
cannibalistic economic model, indifferent
news media, sagging voter turnout, general
cynicism, religious derangement and
fundamental addiction to a cognitive
dissonance that motivates so very many to
slap aside stone-carved facts staring them
in the face, is going to put this whole
human experiment into a shallow, unmarked
grave.
People talk about
"Destroying the planet," which is a hoot.
The planet isn't going anywhere. Even the
environment may recover in one form or
another. The equation we are busily erasing
from the blackboard - for profit while
encased in a suffocating bag of ignorance -
is ourselves.
This is how you die of
Dumb.