(From the Times of India)
Climate change far worse than thought before
3 January 2010, 12:09pm IST
NEW DELHI: Global alarm over climate change and its effects has risen manifold after the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Since then, many of the 2,500-odd IPCC scientists have found climate change is progressing faster than the worst-case scenario they had predicted... .
Even the Indians with their unimaginable population and poverty pressures will come to their senses about global pollution before greedy, self-centered, and wholly hedonistic Americans do.
Of course the global pollution crisis is worse than business-as-usual capitalists and their sycophantic bureaucratic followers in Congress will admit.
I, personally, have learned that there is nowhere left to run in North America to escape choking, killing air pollution. I've tried every quadrant.
We are all screwed now for following the siren songs of the business community that told us for the last 50 years that more and bigger was always better.
How many times was I told in my youth, "well, you can't stop progress and that building, (or strip mall or paper mill or coal plant or whatever) represents progress."? Far too many times.
And far too many times did I accept the lie of open-ended economic growth and industrial prosperity as a panacea when I should have, rather, sought to do something to save my planetary home while I was still young and while there was still time.
I should have possessed the cajones to become a radical activist who devoted his life, however short or long, to an attempt to stop the "progress" that I knew, even then, was poisoning the future home of my unborn children and grandchildren.
Such a course of action would have been more honorable, by far, than the teaching career I chose--one in which I whiled away my years seeking to please unimportant little pissant public school principals and superintendents while keeping my actual interests and sentiments to myself lest I fail to see a teaching contract renewed the next spring. What do those contracts mean to me today?
D. Grant Haynes
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