Which, um, isn't drag shows. Nor is it where we go potty or whether some people insist on occasionally frustratingly nonstandard pronouns.
The issue is climate. It's the primary threat to our well-being as a people, a threat that only grows deeper every day we choose to ignore it. As I argued in my book OUR ANGRY EDEN, it's not a far-off threat, confined to an imaginary future. It's right now.
We've reached the point in the crisis where towns and cities are being devastated. Remember Boone? Remember Asheville? Los Angeles, right now, is still smoldering. One flutter of a butterfly's wings, and the city of Tampa Bay might not exist this year.
But still, it wasn't talked about, because as far as the "republican" party is concerned, it's all imaginary, and gets in the way of the wealthy getting wealthier. So distractions must be manufactured. Look! Queer people are strange! And brown people! So scary!
At the same time, poll-obsessed Democratic apparatchiks were fretting about votes in Pennsylvania. That's coal country! Can't risk speaking the truth about something that threatens all of us, because then we'll lose those necessary electoral votes!
Well. How'd that work out?
It was an act of malicious and willful falsehood, magnified by shortsighted cowardice. The Mammonists were allowed to define the terms of the exchange, and when you let an opponent choose their ground, you lose.
And so now, we're back to drill, baby, drill.
But that phrase has taken on a different connotation since it was first uttered during the election of 2008, back when some folks still fretted about the coming of peak oil. This isn't the 1970s or 1980s. We're no longer looking at an America that has a perilously limited supply of projected crude oil reserves.
It is, now, the precise opposite. Our drilling is horizontal, or to facilitate hydraulic fracturing. We have a perilously large supply of projected shale oil reserves, the largest in the world. Two point one seven trillion barrels are estimated, which places the United States in a position to continue to burn fossil fuels at an unabated rate for the next century or so. We are fossil fuel self-sufficient, through all of our lifetimes. And there's money to be made, so very much money to be made.
It is, of course, a Faustian bargain, as are all sacrifices made to the Golden Calf.
The teratons of carbon released from American reserves alone will be sufficient to raise global temperatures by three to five degrees, which would in turn raise ocean levels enough to drown New Orleans and Miami and most American coastal cities. The current climate-change induced mass extinction event will be accelerated, as the living creatures who share our ecosystem struggle to adapt. Agriculture will also struggle, and may collapse elsewhere.
None of this is good. Those are the known knowns.
But with Mammon as our Lord and Savior, why would we care?
Because there's money to be made right now, so very much money to be made.