Out of Africa, Part II

Tell these young African men that their odds of getting to Europe are tiny and they will tell you, as one did me, that when you don’t have enough money to buy even an aspirin for your sick mother, you don’t calculate the odds. You just go.

.. After a series of on/off droughts in the 1970s and 1980s, the weather patterns stabilized a bit, “until about 10 years ago,” the chief added. Then, the weather got really weird.

The rainy season used to always begin in June and run to October. Now the first rains might not start until August, then they stop for a while, leaving fields to dry out, and then they begin again. But they come back as torrential downpours that create floods. “So whatever you plant, the crops get spoiled,” the chief said. “You reap no profits.”

.. The father started to tear up. These people live so close to the edge. One reason they have so many children is that the offspring are a safety net for aging parents. But the boys are all leaving and the edge is getting even closer.

.. Which means they are losing the only thing they were rich in: a deep sense of community.

..  Lake Chad alone has lost 90 percent of its water

.. Gardens or walls? It’s really not a choice. We have to help them fix their gardens because no walls will keep them home.

Bringing Republicans to the Climate Change Table

Yet even Senator McCain has now walked away from his previous self,mocking President Obama for “saying that the biggest problem we have is climate change.”

“McCain was a champ,” said Gene Karpinski, head of the League of Conservation Voters, which tracks Congress members’ stance on environmental issues. “He would go around the country and talk about climate change. Even when he was the nominee, he didn’t walk away. But when a member of the Tea Party ran against him in the 2010 primary, he went south and never came back.”

 

.. Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell of Kentucky are wedded to defending a declining coal industry and advancing the interests of oil companies, most clearly in their support for the Keystone pipeline. Many of the party’s lawmakers and presidential candidates get a lot of money from people like the Koch brothers, who have multimillion-dollar contributions for anybody who will stand against efforts to curb the use of fossil fuels.

.. For the angry supporters of the Tea Party, opposed to government spending in almost any form, the prescription is anathema. “If you decide climate change is real, there must be a role for government to combat it. So the only way out is to deny it exists,” Mr. Karpinski said.

.. And China’s efforts to cut emissions have defanged the argument that it is pointless for the United States to act alone.

.. “People are afraid this is an excuse to raise taxes and expand government generally,” Professor Mankiw said. “We need to convince them this not a tax increase but a tax shift,” using revenue from a carbon tax to reduce, say, the Social Security payroll tax, while keeping the overall tax burden roughly the same.

 

 

An Epidemic of Reason?

Rick Santorum, a devout Catholic and possibly the most avid opponent of abortion among the many Republican candidates, often invokes the moral power of the Pope’s position on the issue. But when it comes to climate change the former senator from Pennsylvania says this: “The climate does indeed change over time,’’ but it’s crazy to think that man is “somehow the tip of that tail that wags the whole dog.”

.. If it took the AIDS epidemic to help alter American attitudes toward gay men and lesbians, and a measles outbreak earlier this year at Disneyland to make legislators see the power of vaccines, maybe it’s not too much to hope that one day soon even the most hidebound among us will begin to acknowledge how climate change will affect us all.