Day 533 Friday July 6, 2018 1,045 Days to Go
Scott Pruitt resigned. The head of the EPA is out. Here’s a quick quiz question, “Can you name anything that he did as head of the Environmental Protection Agency that protected the environment?” I can’t.
I can list things he did to destroy the agency, the environment, and to enrich himself, but do the actual job? No. Nahdah. Nothing.
He is being replaced by a crooked coal company executive. As they have been saying on the news, “the mission continues.” The mission to defang, obstruct, and ruin this agency. The one started by Nixon. Remember the reason the agency was started? A river in Ohio caught fire, and burned for days. Remember the pictures of the skylines of New York and Los Angeles? So obscured by the haze of pollution you couldn’t see them? Yeah, well let’s bring back the good old days. We’ve already started. We’ve told the power companies that they can push their sludge into our rivers. We’ve restricted employees in the agency from talking about climate change.
Will we survive? I think that is a very iffy proposition. Stephen Hawking had a show where he had volunteers guess how long they’d have to run given there was a series of Roman candles set to go off one after the other and each one represented 250,000 years of the Earth’s existence. (If you were of the fundamentalist Christian belief, like Mike Pense is, you’d need a very stubby candle, but if you are an informed person who takes the estimate of 4.5 billion years you’d need a lot more.) The candles were evenly spaced at four feet apart. The volunteers ran and ran and ran, none of their estimates came close. Exhausted they stopped running at 2.5 billion years or so.
It made me realize that when it comes to the Earth we as a race, as a species, are a mere sputter of the first Roman candle lit. I’ve heard that T-Rex is closer in time to us than it is to the Stegosaurus. When we are talking about this sort of time we aren’t even talking deep time. For radioactive elements to decompose it takes 10,000 years; for some it’s longer. We’ve created enough of that sort of garbage sitting around the world that any one of those places could destroy some or all of our environment. Will the Earth care? Naw.
Will Scott Pruitt and his cronies? Naw.
What about the rest of us?
1,045 Days to Go
PS My brother and The Crazy Canuck. Can you tell which is which?
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