Year 4, Month 3, Day 5: And Yet It Moves!

The Newark Star-Ledger throws down the gantlet:

PSE&G wants to spend a staggering $4 billion over the next decade to harden its electric and gas systems against the impact of severe storms like Sandy and Irene, a sum that works out to about $500 per person in New Jersey.

“This is a cost of climate change, pure and simple,” says Jeanne Fox, a commissioner on the Board of Public Utilities, which oversees the utilities.

It’s a pity we cannot send the entire bill to the flat-earthers who are willfully deaf to the chorus of warnings from the world’s most respected scientists. By blocking political action on climate change, even now, they are driving up the costs of coping.

Flat-earthers. Heh. Sent Feb. 23:

In some ways, climate-change denialists are even more regressive than “flat-Earthers.” After all, the Earth’s curvature is imperceptible until the parochial and uninformed eye graduates to an understanding of vaster distances and the evidence of science. Climate change, by contrast, is sharply evident everywhere around the planet. When flowers bloom a month earlier, agriculture is devastated by drought, superstorm after superstorm clobbers coastlines, and heatwaves make cities almost uninhabitable, these transformations can be recognized by anyone with the wit to look around.

The institutions rejecting the scientific evidence of rapidly warming planet are not driven purely by ignorance, but a far less forgivable motive. The fossil-fuel corporations whose products contribute the most to the burgeoning greenhouse effect will see their quarterly returns affected by a societal move away from carbon-based energy. It is surely a pity that our tax dollars should subsidize such a toxic mix of cupidity and stupidity.

Warren Senders