Month 2, Day 4: The NYT Again…

A rec-listed post at Daily Kos led me to this article in the NYT. Here’s FishOutOfWater’s summary paragraph:

Democrats Jim Webb, Mary Landrieu, Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad, Byron Dorgan, Mark Pryor, and Blanche Lincoln have built an alliance, the dirty dozen, with Republicans Lisa Murkowski, Sam Brownback, Bob Corker, and Jeff Sessions, to remove carbon caps and to give away huge sudsidies to the coal, nuclear, oil and gas industries.

I posted a long action diary at Kos; please go check it out if you haven’t already. But in addition to sending 50-60 faxes of an angry slogan in very large type (tomorrow’s plan), I wanted to fill my quota of erudition, and I wanted to spread a meme. I’ll need all the help I can get; please try and make this one go viral.

Defeating strong energy legislation is a crime against our grandchildren.

Here’s what I sent to the Times:

When so-called “moderate Democrats” in the Senate join Republicans in favor of passing an energy-only bill that ignores carbon emissions, their action deserves blunt language: it’s a crime against our grandchildren. With climatologists’ worst-case scenarios becoming more likely by the day, our elected representatives have chosen to fiddle while the planet starts to burn. There is no doubt who’s calling the tune: Big Oil and Big Coal.

Because the lag time between climate action and climate effect is several times longer than the elected term of a U.S. Senator, these “public servants” cannot find the courage to confront the deep pockets of the energy lobby. Who will have to cope with the effects of these Senators’ ignorant cupidity? Our grandchildren and theirs, living in a world made all but uninhabitable by the effects of catastrophic climate change. Good luck, kids. You’ll need it.

Warren Senders