The Mind of James Donahue Our Dying Planet |
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The decision by the Bush Administration last week to "fess-up" to the reality of global warming
might have been big news among worried environmental groups, but it isn't going to change anything.
Sad, however, that Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Whitman felt so strongly about
the problem she may have put her job on the line just to get the message out. The president has expressed his displeasure
about the report, indicating that Whitman slipped it past him without his approval.
Obviously our president either continues to roam "clueless" about the state of our environment,
or he is so entrenched in the pockets of the big business interests that bought his place in the White House, he refuses to
do anything about what is fast becoming a life-or-death issue for everybody.
The EPA climate report sent to the United Nations detailing the effects greenhouse gas emissions
will have on the environment was obviously a change in administrative direction, but the report was still disappointing. It
seems to soft-pedal the damage and even suggests that Americans can live with the looming changes that include a warmer climate,
changes in weather patterns, and rising sea levels.
The story makes it sound as if we might actually be better off if we just let it happen.
Whitman may have had the courage to sneak an environmental report past the president, but she lacked
the strength to lay out the facts. The truth is that this world is in serious trouble. The looming changes may kill us all
if we don't make drastic changes in our attitude toward environmental stewardship.
The new EPA report recommends adapting to the changes rather than making reductions in greenhouse
gases to slow down the warming trend.
The document, titled "U.S. Climate Action Report 2002," concludes that no matter what is done to cut gas emissions, we can't erase the consequences of decades of damage
already caused by all of the carbon dioxide and other heat trapping gases now in the atmosphere.
This probably is a true statement. We have already caused so much damage, at least one Russian scientist,
Viktor Danilov-Danilyan, leader of the Russian Ecological Union believes it is already to late to stop the death of the planet.
Danilov-Danilyan said in an interview with Pravda that he believes the Earth is heading for a warm-up that will make life as we know it uninhabitable. He said
that all we can do at this point is work to "diminish climatic changes caused by civilization's negative effect.
"It is too late to speak of preventing antropogenic climatic changes," Danilov-Danilyan said during
a press conference held in Moscow.
He urged the world to work to reduce the human effect on climate-forming factors and especially:
stop the destruction of ecological systems and cut the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
"Man has unbalanced the climatic system; it is looking for a new balance, and the system's characteristics
during a transition period are always much wider than in the state of balance," Danilov-Danilyan told reporters.
President Bush is obviously a tool of big business interests. He has used executive orders and may
even have persuaded legislators to help in reversing nearly all of the government restrictions on automobile and smokestack
emissions and other forms of industrial waste disposal.
America's coal burning power plants and gas-guzzling four-wheel-drive vehicles are pumping more
greenhouse gas into the atmosphere now than ever before. Not only that, but under the Bush Administration, the emphasis seems
to be on opening the gates for new oil and gas exploration, rather than searching for alternative fuel systems.
With Bush, it is business as usual, even though thousands of children are starting to drop all over
the country from emphysema and other troubling lung disorders, brought on by breathing polluted air. The air pollution is
so bad in the New England states, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Atlanta and other major cities that on certain days, the children
are advised to remain indoors rather than breathe the air outside.
It is business as usual even though the strange weather patterns are threatening the nation's crops,
forcing the price of certain foods through the roof, and raising the specter of radical food shortages in future years. That
we have storms so severe that floods occur where there has never been flooding before, and straight-line winds of 100 miles
an hour or more are becoming common.
The fact that someone in the Bush Administration was prompted to admit that global warming exists,
suggests that the situation has become so severe it can no longer be hidden by the government controlled media.
My personal concern is that Danilov-Danilyan may be correct, and that our planet is dying. It is
happening right before our eyes and our leadership in the United States is too interested in backing the big money machine
to want to try to do anything about it.
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