Gambling’s a kick for some of us. Even small bets make the track more exciting. But parents must protect their children from serious risks to their lives, health and safety. We’ve no right to gamble with other’s lives. Legally, that’s a tort. Law makes us pay for the harm we do when we take our eyes off the road. Ignoring risks may be fun, but we don’t have that right.
Since ALL our problems are aggravated by global warming, it’s a risk we’ve no right to ignore, and can only avoid having our loved ones baked, broiled or BBQ’d by global warming by doing everything we can to deal with it.
The ocean temperature recently reached 101 degrees off the coast of Florida, the temperature of a hot tub. That will sound nice to some of you but it will kill coral reefs at the base of the food chain, and with them a lot of what we eat and the oxygen we breathe. They’re reefs and they’re far away but the effect on us is fundamental.
A warming world affects our health by sapping our energy, stressing our bodies, killing us with heat stroke and sending swarms of unfamiliar bugs at us. At some point it’s just too hot for human life.
A warming world drives inflation, by shifting where we can grow or get food and water, disrupting how, what and where we eat and forcing us to build new machinery to withstand the heat.
A warming world disrupts our jobs, leaving many unemployed, destroying industries, flooding or burning houses, offices and towns, destroying roads, bridges and supply lines, or just making it harder to work. Global warming threatens pensions and retirement accounts that guess wrong on investments. Republicans don’t want brokers to examine which businesses take the environment into account. But since businesses aren’t immune to global warming, that threatens the safety net for those of us who didn’t think we needed one.
A warming world will disrupt where we live, aggravating the housing, refugee, and homelessness crises as coastlines flood, wooded areas burn, and deserts expand. Fire, floods, drought and heat make us refugees in our own country, our houses suddenly worthless.
A warming world will force us to change housing codes. We’ve stopped locating and designing buildings to lessen heat naturally and now depend on air conditioning instead. That made the modern industrial south possible, but warms the world even more, threatening everything we depend on.
A warming world will force us to change zoning codes. We’ve been wasting land and water and need to start protecting trees, green space and wetlands to tamp the temperature down. That means building higher and closer, and learning to live together, keeping our teachers, nurses, craftsmen, mechanics and “essential workers” closer, as they do in many of the world’s older cities.
Food, air, health, jobs, housing and stability are all threatened by global warming, and, ultimately, it will make the earth uninhabitable. We’ve no right to ignore those consequences.
We must stop climate change before it makes life more lawless, dangerous, miserable, and extinct, and do it fast. We can stop the warming from getting worse if we do it now. We just have to want to do it enough – and make it an imperative in what we demand from our politicians.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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