OPINION: The world is on fire, as Trump pours fossil fuels onto the blaze | Will Bunch
"We kids would always talk about what it would be like if one of them died and the other was still alive," their 71-year-old son, Mike, told the New York Times as he sifted through the bleak pile of gray ash that had been their home, all that remained of a century of memories. "They just couldn't be without each other. The fact that they went together is probably what they would have wanted."
The Rippeys' poignant end was just one of many stories in an apocalyptic American tragedy of hellfire and smoke that has devastated
The ecological nightmare has riveted the nation -- except, perhaps, in that tiny pocket of
But actually, the Trump administration's "response" to the lethal
This week's devastation is a kind of perfect storm of what climate scientists have been predicting for years. In Trump's
It wasn't a shock that Pruitt announced the administration's intention to roll back the Clean Power Plan, announced in 2015 by President
But the moral implication is clear: The world is on fire right now, and the
Really? That's kind of like saying the government's auto-safety rules discriminate in favor of seat belts and against lifeless corpses strewn on the side of the road, or that the Clean Water Act is unfairly biased in favor of potable drinking water over guzzling dioxin (unless Pruitt scrapped that, too -- I haven't checked in a while). The government plays favorites when it comes to our safety; that's why the people elect them. Look, we all know we can't simply stop using fossil fuels tomorrow, but if we don't accelerate our efforts to phase them out with all deliberate speed, we will wake up like the citizens of
Global warming doesn't cause hurricanes, floods, or wildfires -- but scientists have long warned that a hotter planet will make them worse. That is exactly what has happened in 2017 in
It would be naive, even foolish, to think there is anything that could be written or said, or any natural disaster, that could change the backward thinking of Trump (who signed a 2009 newspaper ad praising Obama for reducing carbon emissions, before hatred for his predecessor got the better of him) or the
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