100 Ways America Is Screwing Up the World

Chapter One

Altering the Earth's Climate

Some acts of a powerful nation affect people somewhere in the world very directly, like starting a war. Sometimes a lack of action has a deplorable effect, such as not stopping genocide. Slowly unfolding and irreversible impacts, often unintentional, are also devastating, as with the gradual loss of cultural diversity. And at times there's a head-in-the-sand ignorance or neglect of a visible problem, such as the first decade or so of responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Rarely do all four of these phenomena combine noticeably into one. But with climate change, the United States has managed almost single-handedly to be the cause, the obstacle to remedial action, a chronic ignoramus, and an aggressive denier of its monumental culpability.

No other issue on the global table today affects the well-being of everything on the planet as much as the dumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and, along with it, into the oceans. It will cause incalculable human suffering and economic costs. It will touch everyone and everythi ... read full excerpt from: 100 Ways America Is Screwing Up the World ebook