By Scott Deshefy

The most poignant image of 2018, if not the century, was a Kenyan man, cheek resting tenderly on the head of a northern white rhino, comforting his dying friend, the last living male of an endangered subspecies. Those of us who've held or slept beside a dying cat or dog can empathize. No greater bond exists than when we ferry those we love back into darkness. It shatters us do so, but builds a better person from the reassembled parts, however many pieces of ourselves we lose. The best expressions of our species always were, and still remain, preserving life and giving comfort to the dying. That's why, in 1992, when Bill Clinton's handlers suggested "it's the economy, stupid," a great and dangerous fraud was perpetrated on the American people. As with all cons, success depended on the selfish and unscrupulous behavior of its victims. At a time when climate change and global warming were already understood and ameliorative actions opportune, both major parties pushed for profligate consumerism. Then, as now, the overriding issue of the day was Earth's ecology. For every life form on the planet, it's always been ecology. Last year too, mega-storms, floods and record-breaking wildfires, intensified by rising temps, remained the biggest story. We’ve radically changed the future of the biosphere and have but tens of years to halt the damage or else.

If you're a Boomer, you may recall a series of science films from Bell Laboratories made in the 1950s which featured Dr. Frank C. Baxter. Wherever Bell & Howell projectors were available, they made the rounds from school to school and were wonderfully instructive. After all, Frank Capra produced them. Capra himself had a Cal Tech degree in chemical engineering and understood what consensus science meant. In The Unchained Goddess (1958) he featured climatology. Towards the end of the film, industrial air pollutants were addressed and the possible consequences of unchecked greenhouse gas emissions, including glacier melt and rising seas. Even in 1958, researchers like Callendar, Revelle and Keeling had made it reasonably clear how human atmospheric pollutants were changing the Earth's climate, what is now, and has been for decades, indisputable fact. Global warming is real and anthropogenic. At a time in its natural cycles when the Earth should be cooling, it's warming instead, and that temperature increase correlates with atmospheric carbon pollution caused by us.

With carbon emissions reaching record highs in 2018 and rising temperatures fueling more destructive hurricanes and wildfires, 72 percent of us accept the reality of global warming and 60 percent realize we're the cause. Those numbers reflect a less than scholarly American public, but at least they're huge majorities. Still, Republicans and Democrats inadequately address the crisis, as they have for decades, and the Green Party, for which global warming is a raison d'etre, gets marginalized. That makes our dysfunctional, two-party American politic and the profligate, consumerist style of capitalism it represents existential threats to the country and biosphere. The difference between curbing greenhouse gas emissions enough to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees versus 2.0 degrees Celsius by 2100 are stark. To avert the worst disasters, we must cut emissions by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, achieve "net zero" by 2050, and start voting Green.

Scott Deshefy is two-time Green Party congressional candidate.