The Meltdown We Really Can't Afford

Hey, ho, where's the cash flow? Wasn't the bailout supposed to get those streams of credit flowing again? But while the titans of trickle-down and the free-reign rainmakers pray for new rivers of revenue to float their boats, some venerable bodies of water beyond the canyons of Wall Street are in danger of literally evaporating -- and all the money in the world won't bring them back once we pass that terrible tipping point.

London Bridge isn't falling down, but the river it spans may be drying up, according to the Guardian:

Britain's rivers could nearly run dry because long hot summers caused by climate change will not be sufficiently compensated by wetter winters ... the overall average trend is toward drastically reduced river flows across the country.

And, to get truly biblical, the BBC reports that years of drought have helped decimate the Sea of Galilee. Should Jesus decide to revisit his old stomping grounds any time soon (as Sarah Palin reportedly expects him to), the miracle worker who fed the multitudes will be hard-pressed to find even two fish in the dregs of this ancient sea, doggone it.

But while rivers and lakes all over the world are simply vanishing into the ether, something really insidious is bubbling up from the Arctic seabed. Scientists have just discovered that "massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats." This could speed up climate change to an unprecedented degree, as the Independent reports:

Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane.

Never mind the "negative feedback loop" that's strangling Wall Street. If we don't get a handle on this positive feedback loop -- which, let's be clear, is not a positive development -- it's going to hang us all, and the future of our financial markets won't matter one molecule.

Yes, it's awful that our nation's debt has ballooned so badly that, on Sept. 30, we passed the $10 trillion mark and the National Debt Clock ran out of room. The Durst Organization, which maintains the billboard, had to bump the dollar sign to accommodate all those zeroes.

But the figure we need to focus on now is not measured in trillions, or billions -- it's parts per million (ppm), the way we measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If we had a billboard tracking that figure (maybe the Durst Organization would care to donate one?), it would currently read "385 ppm." Unfortunately, James Hansen and his climatologist colleagues have concluded that if we hope to escape catastrophic climate change, we've got to get back to 350 ppm ASAP.

That's why Bill McKibben, the environmental activist and author, founded 350.org, a Web site devoted to getting the word out about how our collective goose is getting cooked. There's still time to pull ourselves out of the fryer -- but just barely. McKibben, who has been sounding the alarm on global warming for nearly two decades (see The End of Nature), told a group of bloggers the other day that the scientists he has been talking to for the past several decades about climate change are "just panicking" at this point. By the year 2012, these experts say, it will be too late to avoid the most dire consequences of global warming, at the rate we're going.

The carbon cabal that has held our country captive these past eight years has cost us precious time in the fight to reduce the world's greenhouse gases. It may have been a Freudian slip when John McCain addressed the crowd at a Pennsylvania rally on Wednesday as "my fellow prisoners," but he inadvertently evoked the feeling of helplessness so many of us have had as the Bush administration stubbornly refused, for years, to even admit that climate change was a problem, and then -- having grudgingly conceded that it was real -- made virtually no meaningful effort to address this crisis.