I was asked a question the other night. I didn’t write it down, so, this is how my interpretive dance of memory has preserved it to date:

“If the most devastating consequence of climate change, rising seas that will likely, and relatively soon, claim low-lying coastal lands, like Holland and Cambodia and Florida, and regulating personal and industrial carbon emissions will not reverse this inevitability, is it economically sane to pursue global, regulatory solutions?”

The questioner is a moderately conservative, deeply caring seeker of wisdom and fairness, who often makes me take a breath before jumping in with my knee jerk reaction.  That would have been…is…that we have chosen, (probably naively at the initial thrust of the Industrial Revolution), a fundamentally wasteful, destructive and callous regard for our health and the health of our planet.  The most avid West Virginia coal-digging-burning advocate, will tell you, through pflegmy coughs from his black lungs, that the practice is unhealthy, but, without reservation, preferable to the economic alternative without it.  There are others, many others, who choose, with no basis for their choice, that there simply is no problem.  And then there are the politicians posturing for air time and waving their flags of righteousness and indignation while they organize conferences and symposiums and other useless chit-chat in swank hotels around the world, resulting in half-hearted, nonbinding mandates to lower something or other by some insignificant amount by some date so off in the future that the cockroaches, that will have become Earth’s dominant species, will overturn anyway.  Then, of course, there’s the Chinese who just lie, (by more than half), about the amount of their carbon pollution or…fucking Volkswagen!

So, here’s my unexpected answer.  We should stop, now, doing anything, (like belching poison into the air we breathe), that we know is wrong; I’m happy to make a list for the ostriches among us.  Putting any price tag on extinctive suicide is, even by less stringent demagoguery than the Vulcan Manifesto, illogical.  But, we are a global society routed deep in the imaginary value of currency, judging its worth above all others, making us incapable of the hard, intelligent choices to demand an unabridged version of our better nature.  The Keystone Pipeline went down, not because of environmental outrage, as Obama eluded to, but simply because it is no longer economically solid.  Oh, yeah, my answer…NO!  Why waste money chasing policies that are way too little and way too late and won’t be adhered to anyway?  To paraphrase my proctologist…bend over…hold your breath!