5 Things To Expect Dick Cheney To Do As Global Warming Intensifies Eugene Linden : endangered animals, rapid climate change, global deforestation, fragging
THE HAMMER OF THOR… AND LIZ AND BARBRA AND GEORGE AND KAMALA
Lately, I’ve returned to my roots in investigative journalism. I’m trying to get to the bottom to a recurrent episode of collective madness where every four years a marauding posse of celebrities, media figures, and supreme court justices go rampaging through the political landscape w...
5 Things To Expect Dick Cheney To Do As Global Warming Intensifies
Monday April 10, 2006
[Adapted from my contribution to Duck!, a new humorous anthology of advice for Dick Cheney] If climate turns out to be the weapon of mass destruction Vice President Cheney should have been worrying about, he has a problem. Let’s say in the near future hurricanes, nor'easters, dust bowls, floods, crop failures, ice storms and tornadoes are ruining the economy, and the voters are blaming Cheney because he and President Bush dismissed the science behind the threat, ridiculed conservation (one of the easiest ways to immediately lessen greenhouse gas emissions) as a “civic virtue,” and were champions of the fossil fuel industry. Cheney may think he has big business on his side, but even before Katrina, many CEOs began joining the tree huggers. Even the evangelicals, whose leaders went enviro and called for action. So when the weather changes, what will Cheney do? 1. Blame the Democrats. This is easy, it's what he always does, and they usually don't fight back. Cheney will say that he and Bush inherited the problem from the Clinton administration (not mentioning that it was a Republican- controlled Congress that torpedoed action) and that the Bush Administration actually cut oil use by the end of its second term, while it steadily went up during the Clinton years (expect him to gloss over the fact that supply disruptions due to civil war in the Middle East and a worldwide depression caused the decline). 2. He will claim that no one could have seen it coming. That strategy worked for a bit after Katrina--until those irritating videotape and emails started surfacing. And the truth is, it's entirely possible that Cheney didn't see it coming: it's unlikely that any of the “experts” his administration consulted, ranging from science fiction writer Michael Crichton to the paid lackeys of the coal industry, mentioned that it might be a problem. (Don't expect him to acknowledge that the entire scientific establishment had been warning of the threat for fifteen years.) 3. He will argue that the Kyoto Treaty would not have helped, and that he and Bush were engaged in a search for the real way to deal with the problem, one that includes India and China. This one is tricky-smart. It's true that Kyoto is vastly inadequate to the scale of the threat, but it could be made stronger. On the other hand, he will have to finesse that India and China are never going to join an effort on climate change unless the U.S., with 25 percent of world emissions, shows leadership on the issue. 4) He will say the crazy weather is natural. Why not? That's what the naysayers have been saying whenever an ice shelf collapses. It's unlikely that Cheney will mention that CO2, which has tracked temperature for millions of years, is now at higher levels than its been since homo sapiens evolved (better for him to avoid evolution anyway). 5) Expect him to move to Canada. Washington will have a climate like Khartoum, and Vancouver will be the new San Diego.
The American Meteorological Society names Fire and Flood its book of the year for 2023, awarding it the Louis J Batton Author's Award.
"Eugene Linden wrote his first story on climate change, for Time magazine, in 1988; it was just the beginning of his investigative work, exploring all ramifications of this impending disaster. Fire and Flood represents his definitive case for the prosecution as to how and why we have arrived at our current dire pass, closing with his argument that the same forces that have confused the public’s mind and slowed the policy response are poised to pivot with astonishing speed, as long-term risks have become present-day realities and the cliff’s edge is now within view.
Starting with the 1980s, Linden tells the story, decade by decade, by looking at four clocks that move at different speeds: the reality of climate change itself; the scientific consensus about it, which always lags reality; public opinion and political will, which lag farther still; and, arguably, most importantly, business and finance. Reality marches on at its own pace, but the public will and even the science are downstream from the money, and Fire and Flood shows how devilishly effective monied climate-change deniers have been at slowing and even reversing the progress of our collective awakening. When a threat means certain but future disaster, but addressing it means losing present-tense profit, capitalism's response has been sadly predictable.
Now, however, the seasons of fire and flood have crossed the threshold into plain view. Linden focuses on the insurance industry as one loud canary in the coal mine: fire and flood zones in Florida and California, among other regions, are now seeing what many call climate redlining. The whole system is teetering on the brink, and the odds of another housing collapse, for starters, are much higher than most people understand. There is a path back from the cliff, but we must pick up the pace. Fire and Flood shows us why, and how." From Catalog Copy
