Year 4, Month 2, Day 23: Helplessly Hoping…

Another group of socialist hippie treehuggers heard from:

As climate change leads to more frequent and destructive natural disasters and threatens crop yields, bridges and other infrastructure, the federal government faces big financial risks that it is poorly positioned to address, auditors said Thursday.

These risks, along with the threat of gaps in critical weather forecasting satellites that could last years, topped a biennial list released Thursday of federal programs at high risk of waste, fraud, abuse or financial loss.

“The federal government is terribly exposed to this change,” Gene L. Dodaro, comptroller general and director of the Government Accountability Office, said in announcing why climate change made his agency’s high-risk list. “The government needs a much more strategic and centralized approach.”

Not that we’re gonna get one, of course. Feb 15:

If we needed yet another demonstration of how Congressional inaction is causing grave harm to our nation, we need look no further than the GAO report confirming that climate change is a financial disaster in progress. Damage to government infrastructure is only one part of the picture, but it’s a big part — and failure to address the problem in a timely fashion is going to cost taxpayers untold billions of dollars.

In fact, addressing climate change in a “timely fashion” would have required us to get started three decades ago, and the cold equations of a warming atmosphere now leave us no wiggle room. The irresponsible delay-and-deny tactics of conservative legislators beholden to the fossil fuel industry are pushing the price of governmental gridlock ever higher. If Congress can’t lead, they’ll have to follow; if they can’t do either, they’ll have to simply get out of the way. Immediately.

Warren Senders