Liberal CO2

Certain events in your life, like the last of your parents to die, bring home inevitable feelings of fatalism. You're reminded that no matter what happens, this is all temporary anyway. We're a temporary species on a temporary planet. If Ernst Mayr was right about the usual survival period for a species, we're already on borrowed time. The Earth, no matter what we do, is going to be consumed along with the rest of the solar system when the sun goes red giant in 4 or 5 billion years. If the human race were still on the surface of the Earth when that amazing convulsion begins to be felt (we won't be), all talk of "global warming" would seem like pretty tame stuff. The oceans will boil and Earth will be consumed in heat death, along with all planetary co-passengers. That will happen with or without, or despite, human contribution.

In this pleasant suburban enclave where I live, where the air is redolent of California laurel and redwood trees, and the usually cool marine air is never too heavy with humidity, everyone carries on their lives much as they do everywhere in this country. On a political map, this region is deep blue. Liberal, concerned, progressive. Because the county is relatively affluent, the houses are big and often sparsely occupied. In the parking lot of the overpriced but charming grocery store a short distance from here, it's difficult sometimes to maneuver your car down the lanes between cars, not because the lot attempts to allocate too many spaces in too small a space (if anything, every space is larger than normal), but because of the size of the suburban transport machines used by the shoppers. Row upon row of Range Rovers, Land Rovers, Toyota Land Cruisers, BMW SUVs, GMC Yukons, Lincoln Navigators and all the rest of the elephantine class of internal combustion vehicles. I suppose on a given day the "fleet average" for the parking lot, if full, might be around 15 mpg. Most of the "cars" are driven by one woman weighing on average (this is a muscle-toned enclave) 130 pounds and traveling a distance of less than 5 miles, round trip. This is unscientific, somewhat anecdotal, yet perhaps telling. Many of these cars display progressive bumper stickers. There are, of course, Priuses and high-mileage compacts hidden in among the Brobdinagian land-crawlers with their high performance AWD for negotiating those tricky dry, suburban streets. But overall...

One reads that the world is beginning to take seriously the issue of CO2 concentrations in the troposphere. Nancy Pelosi, parka encircling her concerned face, has been to Greenland, flying by jet of course, "to see for herself" what was going on, perhaps not trusting the world's finest climatologists to figure it out without her presence. Although in so doing she laid down another gasp of CO2 directly at that level of the troposphere where it does the most harm. La Diva saw that Greenland's glaciers are now running into the sea at the rate of 75 feet per year, about a 12-fold increase over about six years ago. She was, naturally, worried. She is a progressive, however, and her concern is more concerned than the norm. By the same token, I think liberals in general, when they drive their behemoths and heat their oversized houses, believe that their CO2 emissions are entitled to a different regard from that of the unaware. One cap-and-trade system that Nancy might suggest is a greater allocation to rich liberals, who form such an important part of her constituency, under a "Liberal CO2" program. The idea being that Liberal CO2 is different from the CO2 of the unaware and unenlightened. As a reward for their concern, liberals should be allowed twice the amount per capita as opposed to those who do not take the idea of global warming seriously.

The scientists may argue that the real issue is how much fucking CO2 is in the troposphere capturing infrared radiation and heating the Earth's atmosphere. They might go on to point out that while all this palaver among the political class has been occurring over the last few years, since global warming was "discovered," the actual, gross amount of CO2 released worldwide has continued to increase over previous levels. But perhaps this additional CO2 is entitled to a special dispensation; after all, it was released to do its devilish work after we became aware of its deadly potential. So maybe, just like Liberal CO2, it doesn't count.

Actually, we better hope so.