While the toxic political atmosphere is seemingly as dangerous as the one humans have seriously altered enveloping the planet, the time for diplomatically mincing words as Rome burns, so to speak, must end.
Gov. John Hickenlooper has boldly gestured that he might go around Republican obstructionists in the Colorado state Senate and push power-providers in the state to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about one-third.
In short, if a handful of GOP state lawmakers are too stupid or corrupt to do the right thing, Hickenlooper and others will grab the wheel before these ignorant legislators drive Colorado and the planet over the cliff.
We are 100 percent behind him, and unless you think real science is just a fad and open to interpretation much in the same way everyone looks at a Jackson Pollock painting, then you should be, too.
First off, the science and the consensus behind the fact — which for some people must these days be explained as the one and only irrefutable reality — unequivocally has revealed that humans have altered the atmosphere of this planet, and that it bodes grave ill for Colorado and the rest of the world. Think no snow for ski resorts. Endless forest fires. No water for farms and ranchers, here and across the world.
For decades, some people and their leaders, for a long list of reasons, have refused to believe this. They don’t understand it. They stupidly see it as a political point of contrarianism. And, even worse, they just don’t give a damn and would rather endanger themselves and all of us because they are greedy and corrupt. What not one signal climate-change denier is, however, is right.
In Colorado, these dead-wrong deniers use myriad and tedious arguments as to why Colorado and the United States shouldn’t alter its energy systems to try and slow dangerous climate change and find a way to reverse it. They are right in saying that Colorado alone can’t fix this. They are right in the same way that a kindergartener complains that forcing them to take a nap while the rest of the class plays isn’t fair and won’t make the room quiet.
Their sophomoric simpering isn’t about tax policy or wine and beer in grocery stores vs liquor shops. This is about a catastrophic climate change that will not only destroy Colorado’s recreation, tourism and agricultural economy, but it threatens our very wellbeing. And not just here, but around the world. It’s not just about rich people losing their summer homes as oceans rise and swallow the coasts, it’s about massive famines, unemployment and weather disasters that will rip through human civilization like nothing has before.
Because there are so many ignorant, naive or outright corrupt lawmakers in Colorado, other state legislatures and in Congress — all obstructing what must be done for the good of the planet — our only hope to break the impasse is with leaders like Hickenlooper, willing to do the right thing at what is certain to be serious political cost. Not Hickenlooper, not us, not anyone is asking Colorado or the country to send the nation into an economic abyss in an effort to try and turn the global-climate change around by Christmas. But what Hickenlooper is proposing is a small step, and an achievable one. And it sends the sign across the world that we can and must act.
There is no doubt there will be economic casualties as Colorado and the world makes changes, but only the stupid and corrupt don’t see that these problems pale in comparison to the unprecedented calamity that will envelope us all if we don’t act.
It will be easy for the United States to begin imposing graduated tariffs on countries who do not reduce their own emissions. Together we can compel or coerce the world the act on this global threat.
So the time to listen to the driveling nonsense of science deniers at the State Capitol has ended. We back this move by Hickenlooper and his allies. We insist that you ask your legislative and congressional candidates whether they’re on the bus to solve the reality of global-climate change, or whether we have to throw them off to save them from themselves.