It makes me feel hopeless to have a Senator like Chuck Grassley, stuck in the mud of ignorance for decades.
His recent editorial in The Solon Economist is just one example, writing that those of us who accept the fact that a warming planet is largely due to human activity are “Climate Alarmists.”
Does Senator Grassley not know that the world’s glaciers are melting, causing sea levels to rise, causing flooding and human displacement? Does he not know that human and animal migration is in some part due to no longer being able to live where unbearable heat and lack of water make it impossible to survive? Is he unaware of the debilitating effects climate change is having on the decline of species around the globe or causing insects to move north and destroy huge swaths of forest? Has he not read of the weeks of 110 degree temperatures in the Southwest, causing Saguaro cactus to collapse and die? Has he not read about the warming ocean temperatures and how it contributes to intensifying hurricanes and similar weather events? Is Grassley not tuned in to the fact that in some places people can’t insure their properties because insurance companies know what he apparently does not: a warming planet is making wildfires and flooding more frequent and putting people in a direct path of losing their homes?
On another note, does Grassley really believe that the agricultural practices that farmers have practiced for decades are not responsible for our reality: rotten rivers, smelly air, the Gulf of Mexico turned into a cesspool and rising cancer rates? Does Grassley actually believe that it’s okay to blindly deny that there is overwhelming evidence that Iowa has mountains of animal manure, consumes too much meat, exports too much meat, and guts so many animals each day that thousands of gallons of blood need to go somewhere? That corporate farming must change its practices?
Senator Grassley will never see the problems that the problems we face are in large part due to human activity because he is ignorant and therefore incapable of believing things need to change.
I am a climate alarmist and wish that he were as well.