Doing it all

With due respect for Warren Buffett and other financial leaders, my wife and I adamendtly disagree with the single focus theory. Yes, it would be quicker and maybe safer to send in the troops, fully nationalize the banks, clean them up and ship them out again...but Barrack isn't doing that. He's tried something smarter first. And yes, FDR was more cautious about stabilizing the banks and building trust and support for his major reforms, but Barrack and the American people don't have that option. In ways we may not understand until much later, it is all or nothing, right now.

I can only vouch for his actions countering climate change, an area of expertise I have been following closely. I must leave it to others who know health care, education, and the financial system to vouch for Barrack taking on long overdue challenges in those areas. Even if Barrack's most ambitious climate change goals are met, there is no guarantee at this late time that we will be able to undo the damage already done earlier this century and the last.

I am no defeatist, but we must see through the entire package of Obama's reforms, or we may as well let everything collapse in a heap of smoking rubble right now. Congress can expect to be presented with meaningful greenhouse gas legislation by Memorial Day, according to my Washington sources at http://www.1sky.org/. Not a moment too soon, certainly, but perhaps quite a bit too late. Let me explain.

From a climate change perspective, at the most basic level, I would heed the words of warning of those who saw the danger from afar. In 1959, the global oil industry gathered in NYC to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Col. Drake's first petroleum well. Four illustrious speakers made presentations to the assembled elect, presumably the who's who of global oil at that time. All four are well worth reading in Energy and Man: A Symposium (1960, Appleton-Century-Crofts: NY), but I admit even I was aghast to stumble across three pages (56-58) of the most erudite explanation of danger posed by global warming. Who knew that the global warming threat had been placed front and center before the energy industry as a reason to move beyond fossil fuels as early as 1959??

And by no less a hero than Dr. Edward Teller of thermonuclear bomb fame, a scientific rock star at that time, who wanted peaceful nuclear energy research to procede more than anything else in the world in 1959. Dr. Teller named the Scripps Institute by name in his speech, pointing out early results of the outstanding work carried out by Dr. Keeling on Mauna Loa. Before he died, Dr. Keeling was awarded the nation's highest science medal by then-President G. W. Bush for the way his dedication to precise measurement of carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere every four hours for a lifetime had changed the world's understanding of greenhouse gasses and the potential for climate change.

Dr. Teller rightly projected that if nothing is done to curb the use of fossil fuels by around 1990, then we risk melting the icecaps. He was straightforward about this in his speech, telling the oil execs of 1959 in so many words, "we know how big the icecaps look on our world maps, and they average 5000 feet in depth...if they were to melt, you do the math." In all the science study and money that has gone into the related fields of climate change and earth systems research, nothing has emerged to change this basic analysis of Dr. Teller (and other leading scientists of that day). I suspect this is why the issue met with such worldwide intensity around 1988, leading to the international framework, IPCC and Kyoto, and so furiously obstructed and diffused by top oil and coal interests for twenty years thereafter.

The Earth is a giant 8-ball now. No one can say with certainty how long life as we know it will continue. The best we can do is START the alternative path toward delaying climate change. This is a late start, but start we must! All indicators so far acknowledge that it is impossible to avoid. Indeed evidence is becoming palpable to our human senses that something great is happening to the weather norms, and moreso the closer to the poles one checks. My wife and I plan to cruise the inner passage of Alaska aboard the Zuiderdam this summer, economic crisis or not, because we want to remember with our own eyes what the great northern glaciers were like before they receded further and faster.

So go ahead President Obama, keep reaching for the stars. The American people will continue to support your vigorous actions. We know that maintenance has been deferred too long. These issues are entangled in an interlocking system of subsurban land use and lifestyle and life's labors that must be replaced wholesale or not at all. The stakes are already thinning that American action will be heeded as the benchmark by the rest of the world. Let's not shrink from trying, folks, just because our government apparatus has calcified and our economic lifeblood is running a little cold. It's all or nothing. Let's at least attempt to do it all. Go Barrack!