Dang, seems a little too warm here, looking out at the beautiful Rivertree. But knock on wood, considerably better than last year — at least so far. Man, ice storms and tornadoes, then too wet and too dry. Almost seems like God's trying to tell us something. And everywhere: catastrophic floods, droughts, and wildfires. Everybody's insurance rates are going through the roof — if you can even get insurance. Wonder what the heck's going on?
Couldn't possibly be that "woke" stuff about climate change, could it? Won't they ever quit with that? Didn't those pointy-headed liberals just make that up to get us to buy their little bitty electric cars and solar panels, destroy the coal and oil industries, and take more of our hard-earned tax dollars?
Well, as a certain woolly-headed folk singer wailed a number of decades ago, you don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. It's getting hotter: Weather patterns around the world are getting progressively more volatile. Glaciers everywhere are melting at an ever-faster rate, and the ice at our polar regions is melting. But isn't that just what the world does? Maybe it ain't pretty, but isn't what's going on just cyclical climate change?
Well, nope — sorry. Long-term cyclical changes in the past have been due almost entirely to changes in volcanic activity and have almost always taken place over tens of thousands of years. These current changes are taking place over mere decades, and they're taking place because of us. We're putting a whole mess of CO2 into the atmosphere, which is very rapidly warming this Earth of ours.
And hey, just to be clear, it's true that a little bit of it is coming from our bovine friends, as our climate deniers are wont to laughingly note. But almost all of it comes from gas engines and polluting power plants around the globe. Just one globe. Sorry — no borders in the delicate, fragile film of atmosphere above us, or across our oceans, or dividing our rivers. Just one planet to save or destroy. So just one solution, for all of us.
And that solution is every one of us working together to rapidly convert to alternate power supplies, electric vehicles, and efficient mass transit. China, Japan, and, to a lesser extent, much of Europe are already working on it. Most have been diligently at it for years, and China — though a very latecomer, primarily because they're suffering from the tremendous pollution of their only recent industrial development — has doubled down on its efforts.
What about here? Come on — is the old codger the only one who's traveled I-5 from San Diego to Los Angeles and Portland to Seattle; I-95 from Boston to New York to Philadelphia to Jacksonville; 1-35 from San Antonio to Austin to Dallas; or I-25 from Colorado Springs to Denver to Fort Collins lately? Good golly Miss Molly. Is this any way to run a railroad — or a country?
Endless masses of us, more and more literally bumper to bumper, almost entirely one to two per gas-guzzling, depreciating, two-ton, corroding, preced-together piles of chrome, plastic, and metal, crawling at 20 miles an hour over multiple-trillion-dollar masses of constantly newly poured, over-paved, ever-deteriorating concrete — with the unintended but predictable purpose of creating what will soon inevitably become a true living hell on our Earth, for us, our children, and our grandchildren.
Will it take a massive amount of work, cooperation, investment — and yep, commitment to changing our worldview and habits — to get us off this hamster wheel to oblivion?
Well, as Gabby Hayes used to say as he combed his beard and adjusted his chaw: you durned-tootin', Hoppy! But there's no time better than right now, partner.
We've got just one home, folks. And it's getting pretty warm in here.
