PunkAssBlog.com

We’re all going to die. Eventually, the sun will burn out and everything in the universe will disintegrate into a uniform haze of cold, dark, particles. I can’t fucking wait.

But we won’t be around to see it, because we are determined to shoot ourselves in the fucking face, first.

The truth is that climate change has affected people’s ability to grow crops, rear livestock and find water to drink. Even malaria has become more and more life threatening in many places as it spreads to warming regions.

Many of the rural Ethiopians I meet do not directly associate the worst effects of climate change with human activities in richer countries. Yet it is precisely those Western activities which are principally behind the climate change they now experience in their daily lives.

Why we gotta be such a bitch about this? Humans are fucking up the planet something awful, as we have done since we learned how to get together in big groups and build things and kill things. But it doesn’t have to be like that this time. We probably can’t undo all of the damage, but we can stop making new damage, and talk about ways to mitigate the effects of what has already been done.

Most of us touchy-feely progressives are only slightly better than those assholes in thier hummers, but that’s because there is little you can do, as an individual American, to avoid sucking up more than your fair share of the world’s resources. Got a Honda and some energy saving lightbulbs? Good for you, Captain Planet. Do you use chemical fertilizer on your lawn? Eat meat you bought in a grocery store? Eat corn? Wear synthetic fabrics? Well, you’ve just lost some Planet Karma points, far more than if you’d just used the cheaper lightbulbs and skipped the steak.

But Kyso, you say, who are you to be lecturing me? You’re blogging right now, sucking up the electricity. You drive five miles to work instead of biking down the narrow industrial highway. You just had pepper steak -cheap pepper steak!- for dinner. Where exactly do you get the fuck off on lecturing me?

The answer is, I am a flaming hypocrite. It’s better than the alternative, which is willful ignorance. But the more you learn about where your clothes come from, where your food comes from, where your books come from, the angrier you get about how much you’re fucking the enviornment, and how pitiful your attempts to do something about it are.

I come from the land of McMansions. How much good does it do for me to heat my apartment to less than 65 degrees in the winter if the energy I save is just going to let my mom’s dumbfuck freind heat her foyer with 20-foot ceilings to 74? What are my options for living responsibly when even the responsible choice burns more gas than it saves?

There is only a small subsection of America who can pat themselves on the back for their earth-friendly ways, and they are not reading this blog, because they are too busy tending their gardens and making clothes out of wool they sheared from thier own sheep-and even then, they could just be doing damage to the enviornment on a local, not global scale. Still, it’s a start.

So what do the rest of us do? Those of us who can not opt out completely, but wish to leave as little destruction behind us as we go? I wish I had a goddamn clue. I’m a blogger, not a miracle worker. Surely we should not stop buying energy-effecient lightbulbs or carpooling just because the neighbor’s H2 or factory farming turns our individual efforts into largely symbolic gestures. But the time is long past when you could switch from an American steel car to a Japanese plastic car and act like you just did the planet a huge damn favor.

We’re reaching a critical point, where only massive changes at a state or national levels will really do anything worth a damn. So I guess our job, besides composting and sorting our trash, is to find politicians who are willing to be scared shitless about climate change and willing to enact policies that will make America a little more Earth-friendly. We’ll probably need massive federal funding for public transit projects, a complete re-appraisal of how we grow our food, research in ways to clean up the damage that has already been done, and probably even less popular shit like holding corporations accountable for polluting or taxing people with SUVs-god, I want to tax the fuck out of those SUVs.