By Dave Lindorff
Warnings from climate scientists and climate monitoring organizations are growing progressively more dire, frightening and depressing. There is new evidence that the melt rate of Greenland’s mile-thick ice cover is starting to happen at a “runaway” pace — one that could end up raising sea levels by some 23 feet. New evidence too that Western Antarctica, with enough ice to raise sea levels by 65 feet or more is starting to melt, joining Eastern Antarctica which has already been melting rapidly. There are also increasing fear among scientists that massive deposits of methane clathrates, a kind of ice composed of methane and water ice, lying just beneath the bottom of the shallow Arctic Ocean off the coast of Siberia and North America, are starting to boil up through the warming sea bottom, threatening to burst in a series of gigantic methane “burps” into the atmosphere, which would add immeasurably to greenhouse gasses (methane is anywhere from 26 – 80 times as potent a greenhouse gas as is CO2).
Meanwhile, as this crisis grows, we in the US, the second largest contributor of CO2 in the world, are confronted with the criminal negligence and deliberate climate action sabotage of the Trump administration and the Republican majority in Congress (aided by a few key Democrats), who still insist that global heating is a fraud and a conspiracy.
I think it is time that we as a people, we as human beings watching this insane effort to hasten our and much of the whole global biosphere’s extinction, begin contemplating the kind of punishment that would be appropriate to mete out to the criminal class in Washington, DC, beginning at the top with the execrable Donald Trump, whose own flatulence, courtesy of a diet of deep-fried fast food is probably a significant contributor to global atmospheric methane (and would deem him a threat to homeland security if he ever allowed smokers into the enclosed space of the Oval Office with him).
I’m not a supporter of capital punishment, so I can’t call for a guillotine or a hangman’s noose, gas chamber or electric chair. But I think a creative punishment that would likely lead to Trump’s premature demise would be acceptable, as long as it was slow and in some way attributable to the disaster that he himself has helped to bring on us all.
With that in mind, I propose that, once Trump is out of office, and once the evidence of the role his criminal promotion of increased burning of carbon-based fuels has played in accelerating the process of global heating becomes clear to all but the most ignorant and besotted of his backers, he be tried and then transported with all haste up to the North Pole, where he would, following an ancient Inuit tradition applied in times of existential crisis to those deemed a burden on society, be set on a smallish Iceberg, and left to freeze to death…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively-run, online alternative news site please go to:https://thiscantbehappening.net/making-trump-and-other-climate-criminals-pay/