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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Asymmetric who wrote (347973)	9/2/2017 2:57:01 AM
From: Asymmetric	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 540735

The Week the Earth Stood Still Timothy Egan / New York Times / SEPT. 1, 2017 nytimes.com ..."I’ve seen a volcano explode — the Mount St. Helens eruption of 1980, with 500 times the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. I ran in fear ahead of the flames consuming Yellowstone National Park in 1988. And I spent months talking to the last survivors of the worst environmental disaster in our history, the 1930s Dust Bowl. None of it compares with what we’ve experienced this past week in Texas. When normally sober and stoic scientists start draining the barrel of awful superlatives to describe a summer day off the Gulf Coast, it’s time to pay attention. The question is: Will this be our shared moment, when raging nature makes all of us feel small, vulnerable and petty? Can there be a humbling, a dent in our hubris, in The Week the Earth Stood Still? And lest we view everything through our own national lens, more than 1,000 people have died thus far in catastrophic flooding in South Asia, with rain volumes 10 times the usual monsoon.... ...the eclipse came and went. And what many people will remember about it is that the world’s most powerful climate-change denier, President Trump, ignored the advice of scientists and stared up at the half-blocked sun. It was the most emblematic Trumpian moment — I’m bigger than the eclipse. His government is following his character. So just two weeks ago, Trump revoked President Obama’s edict that federal agencies account for rising seas and raging storms in assessing infrastructure projects in places that flood repeatedly. I can build anywhere I want! Now we have Harvey, the third 500-year flood in the Houston area in the past three years, dumping enough water in southeastern Texas to equal almost 20 times the daily discharge of the Mississippi. And the vow from some quarters is to pave over more of the dwindling sponge of the Houston metro area, to defy physics and nature and set the stage for more tragedy when the next 500-year flood hits, very soon. <more at link>