In the last week or two we've seen diary after diary here about how the climate is pretty much screwed. Wearing shorts in the midwest, it's basically Spring here in AZ, no rain for much of the midwest where, you know, the food grows, etc etc etc.
It's too late to stop it folks, now we need to prepare for the "new normal" and try to mitigate what damage will incur.
Some ideas below the squiggle ...
Pres Obama : Since you don't have to worry about keeping your job 4 years from now it's time to seriously act on this. Your kids will have to deal with food and water shortages so best start trying to figure out ways to create a survivable future for them.
The problem politicians have had with helping the climate (ignoring corporate interference and interests at the moment ) is this, no one has EVER EVER EVER marketed it to the American people in a way that would actually make them care. Well thanks to Sandy and droughts you can use the one tool that Americans ( the uninformed ones) respond to: Fear. Let's start by straight out stating that getting us off oil will stop funding those other countries (you know the ones where we have one or two jacked up wars at). Point out that our great country is held hostage by the greed and power of a few countries that control most of the oil in the world and then appeal to nationalism and jobs. Cutting the defense budget by about 10% and investing ALL of that in alternative energy, bullet trains and let's face it folks the coasts are going to need trains that do NOT run through tunnels, some elevated trains would do nicely. I think 92 BILLION DOLLARS should get quite a few things done. The current military defense budget is $925.5 billion or so. Point out how all this will make America strong, get us competitive and give everyone jobs and lots of them. Plus by just switching funding from one thing to another, we won't even go more in debt so take that Republicans.
Then let's figure out ways to capture and clean water from the increasing storm activity and send it to the midwest along with backing vertical farms, which yield more crops, take less space and are easier to manage and can be built in major cities. Hell we could even recover inner city land which is going to waste, build vertical farms, reduce transporting things from farm to market and make them cheaper. We could build new irrigation system to pull water from the coast which will just get wetter and wetter inland. (another vertical farm link
All this needs to be put out there as some grand goal that America must achieve before anyone else, hey it worked for Kennedy and the moon, why not this. If we declare the ongoing droughts and continuing storms as a national emergency we may even be able to ram all this through without even consulting the idiot republicans.
America CAN DO THIS!! We could easily become the most energy efficient country in the world, we have enough unemployed people to build bullet trains, install solar and wind everywhere we can and build irrigation if the government is willing to put money and effort behind a massive push.
It's too late to stop climate change but it is not too soon to start reshaping our world to deal with it.
I am sure, just like the last 30-40 years all this will fall on deaf ears, but one can hope anyway.
Chaos