As most of you know, I live in Manhattan so I’ve been living Hurricane Sandy for four days now. Not surprisingly, the whole thing has elevated my already active bitchy tendencies. I’ve been watching wet reporters feeding me bullshit about homes burning down, roller coasters falling into the ocean, cars floating down Church Street, basically everything but what they should be talking about; climate change.
This is the second year in a row, when a hurricane has become a problem that the North East has to deal with. And everyone seems to be acting like this is normal. It’s not fucking normal! These giant, 550 mile wide storms working their way up the east coast are not normal. Well, they didn’t used to be. They’re the “new” normal. YAY for me!
And while I’m embracing the new normal, I’m having to endure an election year where for the first time in thirty years, neither presidential candidate was asked a single question about climate change in any of the debates. Are we really pretending like this isn’t fucking happening?
Apparently we are. That shit needs to stop. We need to be talking about climate change all the time. I don’t know why liberals and democrats have given up on it, but let me tell you that it hasn’t given up on us. Actually, I do know why we’re not talking about it; because our liberal bastion of a democratic president isn’t talking about it. We need to make him talk about it.
But as long as we’re going to ignore climate change, I need to set some ground rules;
There will be absolutely no talk about cutting the budget for FEMA. Obama wants to cut funding to FEMA by 3%, Romney wants to privatize it completely, which to me means that Obama must be bitch slapped (yes, I’m volunteering) and Romney needs to be put down. Future conversations regarding budgeting for FEMA must echo the conversations about defense spending. Since we’re going to ignore climate change, we must embrace the idea that FEMA is the biggest growth area in our economy and budget accordingly.
There will be no insane winger rhetoric about the privatization of emergency services. This is crazy bullshit that can be dismantled with a little recent history. Trent Lott, the douchebag republican senator from Mississippi, learned how well the private sector works for people after Katrina. He had to sue State Farm because they refused to pay for the damage to his home. Ever heard of FEMA insurance? It’s government funded homeowners insurance that exists because the private sector doesn’t want to deal with you, if they think they will have to pay out a high dollar claim. So if you live in Florida or Texas, you have some of that socialist FEMA hurricane insurance because State Farm would rather you go fuck yourself, than submit a claim for hurricane damage to your house. I’m guessing that we’re going to start seeing FEMA hurricane coverage here in New York because of the new normal and all.
There will be no talk of cutting the budget for any technology that will help us detect hurricanes before they fuck me. Does anybody have any idea how fucked New York City would be right now if the subway system hadn’t been shut down before the hurricane hit? Or how fucked our electrical grid would be if the power company didn’t know to shut parts of the grid down preemptively? No, early detection is not something we can do without. NOAA and NASA get as many goodies as they need to keep a Metro North train from blowing off the track and landing on top of my house.
I hope I’ve been clear on my rules on how to proceed in this climate science era we seem to be living in. You may now proceed to laugh any politician that doesn’t adhere to my rules, out of the room.
