Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [56]
And yet consider: if SUVs had been forced by Clinton to meet the same gas mileage standards my minivan meets (an improvement of only a few miles per gallon), Bush would have no justification for drilling in Alaska.
With all these SUVs on the road, I can no longer see over the vehicle in front of me. They’re so big and intimidating, they’re like a midget 18-wheeler on crack. What exactly is the point of an SUV? Initially they were developed to give one the ability to drive in the middle of nowhere where there are no roads. I understand how that might make sense in Montana, but what the hell are all these yuppies doing inside them charging down a crowded street in Manhattan?
In June of 2001, a panel of top American scientists reported that global warming was a real problem, and it was getting worse. In their study, requested by the Bush 11 White House, the group of eleven leading atmospheric scientists (including several who were previously skeptical about the scope of the problem) concluded that human activity is largely responsible for the warming of the earth’s atmosphere—and that we’re in serious trouble as a result.
The release of the study put George “I Sleep Just Fine” Bush in a tough spot. He and other members of his administration had pointedly avoided using the phrase “global warming” and had. repeatedly expressed doubts about the idea that air pollution was heating the atmosphere in dangerous ways. Bush also outraged international leaders in July of 2001 when he rejected the Kyoto Protocol, a pact originally negotiated by more than 160 nations (including the United States) and designed to reduce global warming.
But now Bush’s own scientists were saying the Earth was on its way to a major catastrophe.
Well, I dunno: Maybe Young George has a point on this one. After all, I like it warm. Coming from Michigan, land of brutal winters and the three-week summer, I kind of enjoy this more “temperate” climate. Ask people if they’d rather have a nice scorchin’ hot day at the beach or a bitter, frigid Alberta Clipper that makes their tongues stick to their teeth, and I’ll bet you 9 out of 10 Americans already have their shades on and the portable Weber in the trunk. So what if you need sunscreen that says 125 SPF?
Last summer, though, something happened that I found slightly shocking. The New York Times reported that for the first time in recorded history the North Pole had ... melted. A shipload of scientists boated right up to the top of the world—and the ice was gone! The news induced such panic that within days the Times ran a correction, trying to reassure us: it wasn’t really melted, just a little squishy. Right. I remember the last time they tried to quiet things down—back in the 1990s, when they told us about the big asteroid that was heading for a collision with Earth sometime in the next twenty years. Again they took it back immediately, but they should know we can see right through that kind of withdrawal. The powers that be are never going to tell us when the end is nigh, given the risk of mass pandemonium and subscription cancellations it would cause.
The last Ice Age was the result of a global temperature change of only 9 degrees. Right now, we’re halfway there. Some experts are predicting a rise in temperature of 10.4 degrees just in the next century. In Venezuela, four of the country’s six glaciers have melted since 1972. The fabled snows of Kilimanjaro are almost gone. When the lighthouse at Cape Hatteras was built in 1870, it was 1,500 feet from the shore; by now the tide has risen to within 160 feet of it, and the lighthouse has had to be moved farther inland.
A melting of the polar ice caps could cause the oceans to rise by up to 30 feet, in effect wiping out every coastal city there is and taking out the entire state of Florida (voting booths