Taking Climate Change Into Consideration

From the Associated Press: A judge blocked oil and gas drilling across almost 500 square miles in Wyoming and said the U.S. government must consider climate change impacts more broadly as it leases huge swaths of public land for energy exploration.

Conversely, a judge found it unacceptable to ignore the effects of climate change, simply because we want to, we can profit by doing so, or because a political party and its news network has made it its mission to write the entire phenomenon off as a socialist hoax.

This is 2019, a full 40 years after Exxon’s own scientists informed the company’s executives that the consumption of fossil fuels would warm the planet’s atmosphere and oceans to the point that extreme levels of damage would be wreaked upon our Earth’s ecosystem, and we need a judge’s order to force us to consider science when we submit environmental impact statements surrounding our projects.

As a civilization, we have an entire set of problems.  Climate change is among them, but our blithely ignoring the pleas of our scientists may be an even greater one.