the bed is too short to begin with; we've added pillows; my feet hang off the end. my dislike for people who won't protect the environment "just in case" is growing. it's like Pascal's wager with God's existence. Logically it may or may not be true but believing it saves you from making the wrong choice. It's the argument of ultimate cynical thinking but it does work out. if you'd like, take the iriquois maxim that you must consider how your actions will affect the seventh generation to follow you.
who cares if we have to pay the extra money now if it will ensure that future generations will inherit a cleaner, and ideally still habitable, earth? i'm dead ass broke and i could still part with $100 every year to secure that future. why not require that some foreign aid be put into protecting the environment from global warming in developing countries, too?
hell, we make wars to prevent bad events in the future but refuse to make even a tiny effort to stop the death of every major seaport in america and the world. that's the thing that's going to hurt the world more in the shorter term. global climate change will desertify great areas eventually but it will displace the populations of london, brussels, new york, bombay, shanghai, tokyo, large portions of rome (including the vatican staff and pontiff), st. petersburg, alexandria and the nile delta until almost 1/4 of the way through egyptian territory and way too many others to list. when you think about the numbers of people in the orient alone it is staggering. over 30 million people would be displaced by the evacuation of tokyo, bombay and shanghai alone. and don't forget those are some of the richest farming areas in the world! so now you've got to find a way to farm the gobi desert (a dramatization to be sure but only slightly off the mark) with decreased rainfall in a lot of areas and increasingly harsh weather in general.
so why aren't we even TRYING to solve this problem here? we're the leading polluter for at least the next few years. what the fuck kind of good reason is there not to TRY?!? just try. don't bury your head in the fucking sand!!!
i'll give you a hint about why we refuse to spend any federal money to combat a possibly life-ending problem, it involves one of two things: making sure we can still go thermonuclear anytime we want or the fact that we've taken it upon ourselves to kill everybody else first.