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The environmental wages of dictatorship

Bill Mckibben, distinguished climate activist and founder of 350.org and Third Act, wrote, in The Crucial Years, that the recently concluded UN international climate summit in Dubai, may have handed activists “a new tool,” because the agreement included one sentence calling for “‘transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.’"

I understand his instinct to encourage activists. But I draw a different lesson – that we need to stop the dictators before they take our lives – dictators from Russia, the Near East and other oil producing countries who want to increase their sale of fossil fuels that release carbon when they burn and destroy the environment.  We and their subjects will choke, gasp for air, be dehydrated from inside and desiccated from outside, burned by fires, or carried away by storms, so that the dictators can make money. That, as I suggested last week, are the wages of dictatorship – cruel and unmerciful deaths for ourselves and our families.

With a presidential election shaping up in the US and one of the candidates vying, promising, to be a dictator so that his people can rape the climate to their hearts’ content, I don’t feel relaxed like we have time to smell the roses. I’m in a hurry. Public enemy number 1 is trying to be president of the United States where he can destroy the world for the benefit of his pocket book.

Yes there are many issues we care about, many issues of foreign and domestic policy, but if we let Mr. Trump rape the environment, none of those will matter for ourselves or our families.

It must have been nice to be a one-issue voter like the people who only cared about stopping abortions. They got what they wanted but how are you doing? Did they increase your income, decrease your expenses, help you cope with storms, floods, or shift to electric power? What did the abortion decision do for you as opposed to making life miserable for someone else?

But screwing up the environment will ruin, embitter and destroy our lives. These dictators get their money from the oil producers who also fund Republicans and conservatives in America and they are spending it to make your lives miserable. Congratulations. And in Congress they still can’t manage to deal with anything that would improve the quality of your lives, houses you can live in, let alone air you can breathe, water you can drink and weather you can walk in.

Poor Joe Biben doesn’t want to be a dictator so he has to share power, he has to negotiate, he has to deal with multiple problems – how democratic of him! Is he wrong to seek an agreement that could make everybody feel good and to try to solve some of our problems – with storms, floods, electrification of the transportation fleet, it goes on and on.

It’s easy to say that there are things that you or I would have done differently. But if you or I were in the White House and lost to Trump and his Republican blast furnace of selfish nonsense, we’d all be blown away. Cheers.

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.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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