What Climate Change?

Unprecedented typhoons, earthquakes and volcanoes disrupting people’s lives and some people are still asking what climate change?

America has to lose its appetite and dependence on oil. Some states in the U.S. create more carbon emissions than several developing countries put together. The U.S. Senate cannot be allowed to again hold up legislation mandating the reduction of carbon emissions, as it did with the Kyoto accord. At the time, the Senate would not approve the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol unless it contained binding targets and timetables for developing countries as well as developed nations. The excuse given at the time was that signing Kyoto “would result in serious harm to the economy of the U.S.” It was the only developed country not to climb aboard.

America’s hot-air empty-suit career politicians, especially those from America’s most polluting states, have to acknowledge the urgency for them to act now. There is hope.

America and China must get their scientists to not only address all the ramifications of global warming at the dawn of this new century, but how the two countries can put aside their respective radical notions of how to achieve progress. It’s time that science and the corporate world (sorry Big Oil), regardless of whether they follow the capitalist or Confucian model, begin thinking and acting in ways that can pay huge dividends for the people of the world, not to mention themselves and their shareholders. Otherwise, they will lose it all. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is a 21st-century wake-up call.

An extensive study on a breed of wild sheep in Scotland shows that global warming has caused the animals to shrink in size by up to 5 percent, a finding that has frightening implications. Evolutionary theory says wild sheep should “gradually get bigger, as the stronger, larger animals survive into adulthood and reproduce.” But the study shows the “local environment has had a stronger effect on the sheep than the evolutionary pressure to grow larger.” If global warming can do this to sheep, I’m mortified to think what it might be doing to grains, vegetables, fruits, and of course, We Human Citizens. Humanity and the future of the world’s climate rests on the ability of the governments of the U.S. and China to work together as partners, shepherds, leading their flocks.

Rising global temperatures must be jointly arrested by the U.S. and China. Only they have the resources, scientific know how, and combined global number of local and interlocal citizens clamoring for more government intervention and economic stimulus support to ensure their personal and economic survival. China can’t handle this alone, notwithstanding what many countries are asking it to do. It knows its only trusted partner can be America. But the U.S. must meet China half-way.

There Is Only One America

America is losing its perch of global supremacy. In 2000, U.S. stock exchanges accounted for about half the value of global stock markets; at the beginning of 2008, they accounted for just 33 percent ─and shrinking. The Chinese economy has been doubling in size every 10 years since 1978. In contrast, it takes the U.S. economy about two decades to double in size.

Not all is lost. America is still the head chef, but must now learn to share the kitchen with China if it wants to protect and preserve its considerable global stake holding for not only the country, but for all of its citizens, individual and corporate.

America’s resilience, its fighting pioneer spirit, will-power and determination to win is engraved in the fabric of the country’s inherent makeup and culture ─ the Constitution and Bill of Rights. America’s founding ideals of openness, tolerance, diversity, equality and freedom will allow it to remain the head chef planning future geopolitical menus. No one should count it out because of its current hopeless decline, especially when no one, including China, is willing so far to step up to the plate to replace America. Questioning and challenging America is a far cry from taking over or replacing it. America can still come out of the current crisis on top of the ongoing geopolitical cook-off. The menu of geopolitical issues on the table is extensive and must be addressed honestly and harmoniously.

America’s long-term spirit of determination to win, especially when it comes to dealing with China and its business and political culture, is represented by the National Football League. Despite dropping the China Bowl between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks in 2007 and again in 2009, the NFL ─ which dwarfs other professional American sports leagues in revenues and viewership ─ is still chomping at the bit for the hearts and minds of Chinese sports fans. It is now planning a preseason game in either Beijing or Shanghai in the summer of 2011.

America, like the NFL, can take serious economic, political, military and terrorist body blows and bounce back, thanks to its founding cornerstones. A contemporary reminder is the reopening of the Statue of Liberty to the public on July 4, 2009, eight years after the 9/11 attacks.

Another reaffirming moment for America came when President Barack Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

“Let me be clear,” Obama said when he learned of his controversial selection. “I do not view it as recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations.

“I will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the challenges of the 21st century.”

American power and determination is rooted in the ideals and principles laid down by the Founding Fathers, and that determination is still alive today.

The American Divide

The final House vote of 220 Democrats to 207 Republicans, and the Senate vote of 56 democrats to 43 republicans, with the Republicans unanimously opposed in both chambers to Obama’s health care bill, highlighted how divided partisan America is.

The vitriolic language of the Republican opponents angered by the procedural tactics deployed to pass the legislation, tactics used by Republicans themselves in the past, was reprehensible. John McCain said that Democrats had "poisoned the well" and they could expect "no co-operation for the rest of the year" from his party. The spectacle of Republican congressmen egging on protestors who shouted vile abuse at black and gay Democratic representatives who supported the legislation and the threats and vandalism to property of relatives that voted in favor of the legislation that played out across America after the bills passage is shocking.

John Boehner, the House minority leader, declared that the passage of health care reform was "Armageddon." The Republican National Committee put out a fund-raising appeal that included a picture of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, surrounded by flames, while the committee’s chairman declared that it was time to put Ms. Pelosi on "the firing line." And Sarah Palin put out a map literally putting Democratic lawmakers in the cross hairs of a rifle sight.

The stepped up security to protect some congressmen who voted in favor of the bill because of death threats is reminiscent of what happens in fascist states. Is this what America has become? Democracy in America has been undermined, actually sabotaged, by the health care debate and its passage.

"I think people have to realize what it means to say in a Democracy that ‘I will kill your children if you don’t vote a certain way’," said Tom Perriello, a first-term Democratic congressman representing southern Virginia. He is a graduate of Yale Law School who worked on national security issues and conflict resolution in areas like Afghanistan, Darfur, Kosovo and Liberia before he was elected to Congress. "What is at stake here is the sanctity of our democracy."

Obamacare, unlike Medicare, Medicaid and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s that were passed with overwhelming Republican support, was strictly a partisan Democratic piece of legislation. What happened to bipartisanship? How did extremists manage to hijack the American political parties? Can freedom loving democratic America survive with such a political divide? I for one think not. The divide must be bridged.