Year 4, Month 1, Day 15: Frankly, Gentlemen, I Wouldn’t Want Her To Marry ANY Of You Goyim.

The fiscal cliff is a tragic example of an all-too-common malady: managing by living crisis to crisis. In this case, it was almost entirely a self-created crisis, but the underlying financial problems, such as increasing healthcare costs and entitlement spending, have been building for some time. Waiting until things are really, really bad before acting not only does not to prevent crises, but makes them worse when they do happen (a truth my chiropractor has kindly but insistently pointed out to me when I wait until I can only hobble before getting care for my troublesome back).

But finances (and even to some degree, my bad back) can be repaired. We are in far more long-term danger for failing to address climate change.

Last year, temperatures in the continental United States were hotter than they had ever been in more than a century of record-keeping, government scientists found. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration described the results (temps last year were, on average, 3.2 degrees higher than the 20th century average) as part of a bigger and longer trend of hotter, drier and more extreme weather. Some of it is the result of weather patterns, but human activity—such as the burning of greenhouse gases—is also to blame, researchers found.

Everybody sucks, but some suck more than others. Sent January 10:

It’s easy to point out the myopia of our political class by contrasting their hair-on-fire handling of the “fiscal cliff” with their apathetic treatment of the far more genuine threat posed by runaway climate change. But this comparison, while accurate and convenient, overlooks a similarity between the two crises.

If Congressional Republicans really cared about fiscal rectitude, they wouldn’t have created a deficit crisis in the first place by running up two wars’ worth of debt at the behest of the Bush administration (despite liberal warnings that the bill would be enormous). While we all share responsibility for climate chaos, both lawmakers and media ignored, minimized, and misrepresented the problem during the decades when it could have been forestalled, thereby ensuring that we would ultimately face a crisis of civilizational significance. Both the fiscal cliff and the ongoing climate catastrophe are human-created disasters, exacerbated by human ideology, ignorance and irresponsibility.

Warren Senders