The excitement of election night may wear off, but the new political alignments now create their own hustle and bustle. Republicans win the House; Democrats hold the Senate. House Speaker-presumptive John Boehner wipes tears of joy from his eyes and gets ready to plan the repeal of the “monstrous” health care law. The aides of ousted Congresspeople look for new jobs.
But there are forces more inexorable than the political powers of the U.S., and those forces have no regard for what happens at the polls or in the statehouses or in Washington. Climate change moves on, melting glaciers and ice caps, destabilizing temperatures, drying up soil and water. And not just in Africa. Most of the U.S. is in the grip of drought; in some parts of the South and West it’s become the new normal. Drought is making inroads even in normally water-rich New England, in Massachusetts, in the Valley.
On October 10, people of all ages all over the world celebrated actions they were taking to keep the global temperature from rising even faster; to see pictures of events from every continent, go to www.350.org. People with far less education and information than most Americans know that no task of governments or peoples is as urgent as slowing climate change. If we can.
At just this moment, the nation with the most potential to lead the effort gets a new wave of Congresspeople, and a new leader in the House, who don’t know what schoolchildren in Namibia know about the urgency of this matter. Last month Congressman Frank Lucas told a host on radio station KTOK in Oklahoma City that if Boehner had been Speaker of the House since 2008, “there would never have been a global warming bill passed in the House, Obamacare would never have been signed into law, we wouldn’t have the bank reregulation bill.” Newly elected Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) believes global warming is “just sunspot activity.” Freshly minted Pennsylvania Rep. Joe Toomey says there is “much debate in the scientific community as to the precise sources of global warming.”
The economy is the current crisis. But without water, arable land and a stable climate, in the long run there will be no economy. The real question about the election is not whether it brought Capitol Hill more Republicans or more Democrats, but whether it brought more people with farsightedness and imagination. The early indications are not encouraging.
