I wonder what it is that has each of us assuming that the environmental degradation pitching our poor planet into perhaps eternal destruction is someone else’s fault?

Why should we do anything about our contribution when China is worst of all and does nothing?

What about the United States where President Bush says Kyoto would be too expensive?

It’s all so familiar – those who oppose smoking bans in public places say why should we be inconvenienced when the real problem is exhaust from cars – as if they didn’t drive themselves … or use a cab … or a gas bus?

The stories now making the headlines talk of a quickly unfolding world wide catastrophe. The BBC report yesterday spoke in terms of thousands of billions of dollars - 1/5^th of all the money earned in the world.

Yet we still have people like Patrick Moore and others – there’s one like him wherever you live - running around calling these predictions too much like Old Testament rantings to be true. (I gather that Moore is referring to the Book of Revelation which, of course, is in the New Testament.) But there is another aspect to this laissez-faire attitude that’s frightening – it’s not that we don’t have to do too much  … it’s that we don’t have to do anything.

The trouble is that the solutions must be sought starting at the lowest level of cost and if we shirk those issues because we think that we’ll never tackle the major ones then we are doomed.

Let’s not just blame the politicians. They won’t move until we demand it and as long as there are people like Patrick Moore saying if things are as bad as many experts say, we might as well all say to hell with it and have a party, the politicians will ignore the problem until its too late … and it’s close to too late now.

 I suppose in the end it gets down to this – do we gamble that people like Moore are right and just say the hell with it either because the problem doesn’t exist or it’s too big to handle anyway?

Or do we decide that it’s not going to be our generation that wipes the planet out?

If it’s to be the latter – we’d better get to work fast and from the smallest problem to the biggest.