re: #68 teleskiguy

My best friend, dude I’ve known since the second grade, is a geologist for the U.S. Department of Interior. We started as ski buddies.

Well I was a working geologist for thirty years: oil and gas exploration, environmental clean-ups, emergency response. I know the dirt, and it’s not our friend. Fukushima in Japan was not an *accident*, it wasn’t an *event*, it was an eventuality that finally came to pass. The facility was not engineered to survive what was always a real possibility. They never imagined that it would happen.

That is climate change. It is a self-inflicted wound. It has been building since we started burning coal and oil and is now sitting in our laps, licking us like a leopard just before it rips our faces off. We can do what we can stop it, to mitigate it, and reverse it, or we can just say lah-di-da and wreck the only home we have.

Ten years, people, ten years. That’s all we’ve got to enact real plans until we start reaching tipping points, and the world goes gonzo.