Things take longer to happen than you think they will, but then they happen much faster than you thought they could……..

The accumulation of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases – some of which will envelop the planet for hundreds and possibly thousands of years – is now trapping as much extra energy daily as 500,000 Hiroshima class atomic bombs would release every 24 hours.

—- excerpt, It’s Not Too Late For the Climate by Al Gore, N.Y Times, Sunday September 22, 2019

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It was a long article in the opinion section of the Sunday edition of the New York Times.  The writer was Al Gore.  Climate change or perhaps more accurately atmospheric warming is no longer questionable to anyone who does not have a cause for denial.  When I say “denial” I am thinking of allegiance to a political party or a President, in which case believing what one’s eyes are telling you, would be considered betrayal.  Extreme weather events are happening all over the world, more often, and with increasing violence.  Houston, the Bahamas, and Puerto Rico are among the latest.

I feel like the main character in a play or a novel, who is no hero.  It feels more like waking up to the possibility that I am the perpetrator of a great atrocity.  The villain of the story would be me.  In the past I have unwittingly played a script of greed, of unlimited pursuit of “happiness” at the expense of the earth to the demise of my fellow humans.  “We are killing the earth,” my conscience insists more loudly week by week, as the news reports accumulate.

What is to be done?  Nothing is what we are now doing, business-as-usual even if it means building a long, high wall at our southern border to keep hungry and heat stressed immigrants out.  “We’re just enforcing the law” some of us like to say to justify this policy of cruelty.

We cannot panic.  We must start by attacking the tap root, the ultimate cause of the enormous problem.  We must remove from public office anyone who puts maximizing profit before every other consideration.

If we can.