I don’t know, I could have put this one under “Stupidity,” since it really requires all Americans for this to work — or not work, as the case may be — but since it is an outgrowth of the unilateral decisions of the Bush Administration and the oil executives with whom they work, it’s another Bush Regime post.

One of the first acts of the Bush Administration — possibly even before their first official meeting with oil executives to set the nation’s energy policy that has resulted in record gasoline prices — was to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol. That protocol had been negotiated during the Clinton Administration. The goal was to work towards the reduction of greenhouse gases so as to avoid the destruction of large parts of the world through global warming.

Summer polar cap boundaries have shrunk
more than 20 percent since 1979

Nearly all scientists — except those hired by the Bush Administration to plant phony stories in newspapers — agree that global warming is a significant problem. Polar ice caps are melting. As the image to the right here shows, the summer polar cap has shrunk by more than 20 percent since 1979.

Yet the United States, until recently the largest consumer nation in the world — and thus arguably the nation most responsible for damaging the Earth — has decided that the rest of the world can worry about it alone. We’re not interested.

Such a move, I guess, makes sense if you don’t have children or grandchildren, don’t plan to have children or grandchilren and don’t give a flying F what happens to the world after you’re gone. Living in the here and now without a care for what you leave to the next generation works fine under those conditions. (For the record, I’m in that group. To some extent, I can’t figure out why I keep trying to talk the rest of you into making sure the Earth you leave behind is a decent place for your kids. I guess I just like the planet.) People who have descendants, but don’t give a hoot about the world they leave to them make no sense to me.

Problems like this require the cooperation of the entire world. What good will it do if Great Britain and the other civilized nations of the world decide to do what they can about global warming, while the United States (and China) stand around with giant hair-dryers pointed at the North Pole?

Americans have long been thought by people living in other countries to be arrogant. But there’s a moral aspect to refusing to cooperate with the rest of the world on such an important issue that goes beyond arrogance. We invaded Iraq — and some Americans think that was right even though we were lied to about Weapons of Mass Destruction — because Saddam Hussein was supposedly a threat to the nations around him. How much more of a threat is a nation that wilfully refuses to work to save a planet, particularly when it’s the only planet on which we have any hope of living? It’s not like we can all just pick up and move to Mars or Pluto when we’re finished trashing Earth.

One African leader said:

It’s such a pity the United States is still very much unwilling to join the international community…. “U.S. Abandons Future Climate Talks” (December 10, 2005) CBS News.

But it’s more than a pity. Moral people everywhere should consider it an outrage.

And as I said when I started this post, it takes all of us for this to happen, or not happen. If you don’t tell your congressional representatives how you feel about this, it doesn’t matter if you oppose the idea of trashing the world — you are part of the problem.

Shouldn’t we?