Big Oil’s Katrina and the coal industry’s tragedies are eye-opening. However, there is a bigger problem.

Together, [coal and oil] account for the main reason the Earth’s climate is gradually changing.

The oil volcano’s devastating effect on fishing and tourism, and the workers’ deaths are horrific. However, compared to the deaths and financial catastrophe  that global warming will cause, what’s happening now is, well, less catastrophic.

You can read the rest in the L.A. Times editorial that includes this:

Climate change is a little like weight loss: When you’re on a diet, it’s hard to see the fat melting away day to day, but compare photos of yourself before and after losing 20 pounds and the difference is dramatic. Our political system functions well when it’s reacting to a discrete disaster such as a mine explosion, but a slow-motion catastrophe such as climate change doesn’t spur the same outrage because most people don’t see it happening until long after the damage is done. [...]

Lawmakers today aren’t seeing the forest for the trees; that will change when the forest has burned or been destroyed by bark beetles, but by then it will be too late.

Slo-mo simply won’t cut it. Too little too late won’t work. Meanwhile, a climate bill is stalled, because it’s an election year, lawmakers are “busy”, and then next year, there will be fewer Democrats in Congress.  While they’re dragging their feet, Mother Earth is getting sicker.

Of course, Al Gore is the go-to hero when it comes to the subject of  WMD otherwise known as pollution:

Just as the oil companies told us that deep-water drilling was safe, they tell us that it’s perfectly all right to dump 90 million tons of CO2 into the air of the world every 24 hours. Even as the oil spill continues to grow—even as BP warns that the flow could increase multi-fold, to 60,000 barrels per day, and that it may continue for months—the head of the American Petroleum Institute, Jack Gerard, says, “Nothing has changed. When we get back to the politics of energy, oil and natural gas are essential to the economy and our way of life.” His reaction reminds me of the day Elvis Presley died. Upon hearing the tragic news, Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, said, “This changes nothing.”

And that is one of the important points of this post. This changes nothing.

The article I just linked to is a must-read, and has too much information to post here. Please take a look, because it is detailed and jaw-dropping. Here is another excerpt:

Scientists are always careful in the way they describe the cause-and-effect relationship between global warming and such events: It is a mistake, they say, to attribute any single extreme weather event only to global warming, because there is large natural variability in weather—but the odds of extremely large downpours, scientists repeatedly insist, are steadily increasing with global warming, and such events are predicted to become far more common with each passing decade because when water evaporates from the warmer oceans, warmer air holds more of it. [...]

It is understandable that the administration will be focused on the immediate crisis in the Gulf of Mexico. But this is a consciousness-shifting event. [...]  Unless we change our present course soon, the future of human civilization will be in dire jeopardy. Just as we feel a sense of urgency in demanding that this ongoing oil spill be stopped, we should feel an even greater sense of urgency in demanding that the much larger and more dangerous ongoing emissions of global warming pollution must also be stopped to make the world safe from the climate crisis that is building all around us.

And finally, via L.A. Times letters to the editor:

Re “Oil drilling outpaces regulation,” May 9

The Times reports that over the last decade, “as [oil drilling] operations have expanded, federal watchdogs haven’t adjusted accordingly.”

Wasn’t that the whole point of the George W. Bush era? Decrease regulation to get government off the back of business and allow companies to regulate themselves?

Isn’t this the reason for the mining disaster in West Virginia? Isn’t this the same argument the big banks are making now in Congress in opposition to proposed safeguards?

The watchdogs couldn’t adjust because they work at the behest of big business.

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Re “Spill could take crippling economic toll,” May 7

It’s not enough to raise the corporate economic liability limit from $75million to $10 billion, as Congress is proposing. BP would fork over the cash to pay for damages and then immediately go back to drilling.

After this incident, why should we let BP return to this risky business? If it proved to have been negligent, I say revoke its corporate charter and shut down BP for good.

Permanently neutralizing a corporation is not done often nowadays, but why not? We do it all the time with human criminals, by locking them away for life. And since corporations are people under the law, why not give BP the same treatment that would be given to me or you?

A lot of us are angry, but wheels are still spinning, and our planet is still sick. We can’t afford to wait to treat it any longer, and not just the symptoms. We must treat the cause.