Via Climate Progress, a transcript from Marketplace that is just riveting. It’s about the bark beetle infestation and forest die-offs around Helena, Montana. Here’s an excerpt:
JIM ROBBINS: This was all forest here. And now it’s a lot of smashed pieces of wood here and pine needles and occasional patches of weed that we’ll have to spray next year.
SAM: So Robbins says when people are faced with these kinds of images daily, in their own backyards, it becomes a lot harder not to believe in climate change.
ROBBINS: There’s a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. I think there’s something along that line happening here. I mean, there are still some people who refuse to believe it. But I think there’s been an erosion of that disbelief and it’s changed pretty dramatically.
SAM: And a lot of people don’t want to call it global warming simply because it’s such a politically charged term. They basically equate it with Democrats like Al Gore. People they’d never vote for.
Helena’s Mayor Jim Smith definitely falls into that category. But Sarah, he told me something I’d never heard before. He said when your community is threatened, the political debate over climate change no longer matters.
SMITH: Whether this climate change is man caused or just the natural order of things, I don’t know and I don’t have a lot of time to ponder that important question. We just got to deal with the situation on the ground here regardless of what the cause is. So we’re doing that.
As you might expect, Joe Romm has much more to say, connecting the dots between climate change, bark beetles, and threatened forests in the West. And needless to say, this sort of thing stands to worsen if carbon emissions go unchecked.
As the US Senate begins to consider comprehensive climate policy, let’s hope that certain powerful western senators—cough, Max Baucus, cough — are paying close attention to their home states. Turn your attention away from the airless hyperpolitics of DC lawmaking and you can see that there are serious dangers in failing to reduce emissions very soon.
Matt the Engineer
I heard this Marketplace, and was amazed that there wasn’t more reaction by local residents. There seems to be concern over fire danger, which is a real and immediate danger. But imagine looking around at once beautiful green forests surrounding your town that are now brown and will soon be gone completely – perhaps forever. I just can’t believe this isn’t an entire town instantly converted to environmentallists. But then I’ve never understood how anyone that lives in the woods isn’t an environmentallist.
Bill the Mountain Man
Yes indeed, many insects love the warmer temperatures brought to us byindustrial emissions. 3.6 million acres of lodgepole in Colorado, a half-million acres in S. CA., they’re even invading Mt. Rushmore now inthe Black Hills of S. Dakota. The bugs are gobbling up lodgepole, spruce, ponderosa, and pinyon pine throughout the American West and allthe way into B.C., Canada. In fact, over 25 million acres in B.C. lodgepole has been destroyed. It’s because of the warmer temperatures;we’re now crossing a ecological threshold where we stand to lose evenmore of our Western forest through what the scientists call abrupt, nonlinear, surprise climate change. This has all happened in the last10-20 years; can you imagine what it’ll look like in 20 more years of unregulated emissions pushing up our temperatures in the West?