by Denis Campbell

“First Dude” Todd Palin busily made the party rounds as did many A list celebrities in Washington. Hollywood and Politics came together for one star-studded night at the annual White House Correspondent’s dinner. Sarah Palin though was forced to remain in Alaska and actually govern her way through a page-11 below the fold disaster becoming all-to-familiar to northern climes. She was coordinating rescue and evacuation efforts during this year’s ice–melt water floe of almost biblical proportions affecting most of Northern Alaska, Canada, Russia, Scandinavia and Greenland.

While the powerful fiddled, the planet continues to burn and missed in the run-up to the gala was this Al Gore climate update 7-minute video that quietly appeared three days before on the website TED.

There is a political and lobbying battle with deep pockets and enormous self-interest preventing the USA, the world’s biggest contributor of greenhouse gases and CO2 from acknowledging and acting upon this threat to our survival.

Living on the world’s second largest tidal floe change at 10 metres means even high above the cliffs, we would soon have ocean front property as sea level rises precipitously. The most frightening slides were

• the spike in natural disasters (storms, fires, floods, etc.)
• the loss of oxygen creating ocean dead zones
• the number of fires increasing around the world and
• the very real possibility that half the world will run out of water as glacier supplies dry up.

And then there is clean coal, the quarter of a billion dollar programme to woo us into believing there is such a thing and Al comparing their Christmas carol singing and cool, clean antics to those of Joe Camel and cigarettes.

We have long established there is no character in business and corporations will do whatever they need to do to get their way in the world, what staggers the imagination is how we allow them to do it without as much as a whimper of real protest.

It’s now or never.