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Blah, Blah, Blah, the Climate Blame Game
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves.
— Cassius
For the first Earth Day in 1970, the famed illustrator Walt Kelly paraphrased Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry when his Pogo character looked across a field of debris and uttered the now iconic phrase. We have met the enemy, and he is us.
Pogo’s words ring as true today as they did fifty years ago. Pardon my French, but — why?
How is it when the scientific evidence is clear, and the technologies needed to respond to global warming are in hand that the US and every other nation on Earth are in the same pickle as Pogo and Porkypine 51 years later?
More to the point — who’s responsible for this and what can be done about it? Spoiler alert — you may not like the answer.
The United Nations Climate Change Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa has framed climate activists’ dilemma in a few sentences. At a recent gathering of energy and environment ministers from G-20 nations. she rhetorically asked —
What more can numbers show us that we cannot already see? What more can statistics say about the flooding, the wildfires, the droughts and hurricanes, and other deadly events?
