America, Absent

A GLOBAL GATHERING of government officials and scientists is underway in Brazil, and, of all the approximately two hundred countries on Earth, guess which one is not formally, offically represented there. The topic the gathering is intended to address is climate change, and what, precisely, we the human species intends to do about it. Alarmingly, it is now agreed by nearly all climate scientists that the traditional goal of keeping global warming to less than one point five degrees Celsius by mid century is no longer feasible. In that, we have already lost. Mitigating global warming, climate change, is the most urgent necessity facing humanity, argubaly, no other human concern, including war, poverty, or disease, is as great an urgent threat to continued huuman existence as climate change. If we humans don't change our ways, drastically and soon, our species will cease o exist, essentially committing suicide by environmental destruction. If you guessed that the United States is the important country not represented there, you guessed correctly. The United States is not officially represented there because, as everyone knows, the official policy of the United States of America under the Trump administration is that cliamte change does not exist, at least none of it, if it does exist, is caused by human behavior. To whaever extent the climate is changing, it is always changeing naturally, and this is no different. Climate change caused by human activity, the United States officially asserts under Trump, is a hoax. This is certainly among the most idiotic,ludicrous assertions ever made by ay government in teh history of governments,if not the absolute most fatuous. But, it is, after all, our America...under Trump...The "in spirit" president of the United States,California governor Gavin Newsome, is in attendance, his assertion being that somebody, anybody, can and must represent our America at the world's great convention on climate change. He's doing it, because,as they say, somebody has to. It seems embarrassing, as an American, that we, the most economically and militarily powerful nation in the world, are absent from the most important gathering of nations, arguably, in history. Claiming that climate change is a hoax is no less silly than claiming that human evolution by natural selection is a hoax, or that the Earth is six thousand years old. About as silly as rejecting people and nations because they embrace a different religion than you and yours. What Gavin Newsom eis doing is important, as an example of what stated and local governments and officials, as well as the private sector, cand do and is doing with or without the support fo the federal government, People and communities are planting trees, in the U.S., and all over the world, as the gloval environmental movement grows. The harm that the Trump movement, the current Republican party, and conservative America in general has done to the country, in refusing to address economic inequality, racism, political corruption, and a host of vital issues, is insignifigant compared to the harm being done by denying the existence of climate change, and leading the country down the path of self destruction by refusing to embrace replacing fossil fuels with sustainable energy sources. Election denial was and is bad enough. Denial of their leader's pervasive criminality is equally bad. But when every scientist in the world, when every current weather pattern points to increasing, cascading climate change, to refuse to acknowedge the very existence of what the American military long ago identified as teh greatest single threat to American national security, the collapsing climate, is, in a nutshell, traitorous.