Far-fetched science fiction

First up, we have the planet Beta III, a civilization torn by war which thousands of years ago created an immense computer system to run everything, keeping the thoughts and emotions of all the population under direct control. To relieve the pressure, the computer periodically released the inhabitants for the "Red Hour" during which time they engaged in unbridled violence, returning to their controlled, placid state afterwards.

Next, we have Eminiar VII, a beautiful, high tech planet at war with its neighboring planet, Vendikar. For over 500 years the two planets warred using a system of computers to conduct simulated attacks. Victims of the attacks, selected by the computer, would voluntarily step into disintegration booths. This virtual war kept the planets' infrastructures intact, but the killing went on and on.



Our next location is "Miri's world" where the inhabitants, experimenting with ways to extend life, created a virus that killed all the adults, leaving only the children. Infected, the children aged slowly, living for hundreds of years, only to die when they reached puberty.

This is the planet Gamma Trianguli VI. At some time in the distant past, they put their society under the control of Vaal, a computer capable of maintaining the environment of the entire planet. They lived an idyllic but static life, with no progress or change for thousands of years.

And now, we have the planet Gideon, a planet so conducive to life that it's disease-free population swelled to take up nearly every square meter. With no room, and no birth control, life became a living nightmare of overpopulation.



And finally, we have the planet Ekos whose population was contaminated by an Earth historian who for some dipshit reason taught them to be Nazis. Enough said.

All of these worlds appeared in the original Star Trek series, of course. As I watched the show as a kid, I always wondered what kind of bone-headed people would be so stupid as to let their planets end up like those above. Obviously the show was using fiction to analogize about our own problems, but the problems seemed so extreme, I could never imagine that we humans would be stupid enough to let this sort of thing happen to us.

A new US government report delivers a dire warning about climate change and its devastating impacts, saying the economy could lose hundreds of billions of dollars -- or, in the worst-case scenario, more than 10% of its GDP -- by the end of the century.

. . .

"The global average temperature is much higher and is rising more rapidly than anything modern civilization has experienced, and this warming trend can only be explained by human activities," Easterling said.

Coming from the US Global Change Research Program, a team of 13 federal agencies, the Fourth National Climate Assessment was put together with the help of 1,000 people, including 300 leading scientists, roughly half from outside the government.  Link

The effects of climate change are already being felt in the United States; stronger hurricanes, fiercer wildfires, longer droughts, hotter summers. Over the next decades, entire species will become extinct, crops will die, diseases will spread, coastlines will flood, people will starve, and millions will be displaced. The economic and human toll will be staggering, not just here, but everywhere on the planet.

And what do our Republican leaders say? How are they reacting to this threat to our very existence?

“We know that our climate is changing. Our climate always changes and we see those ebb and flows through time,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), meanwhile, expressed concern about climate proposals that could “devastate” the U.S. economy. 

“I think if we’re going to move away from fossil fuels, it’s got to be done through innovation. And innovation can be choked out through excessive government regulation. We can’t let that happen,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” 

And finally, the denier in chief:

“I don’t believe it,” Trump said of his own government’s report warning that the economic impacts of climate change could be devastating.

“Right now we’re at the cleanest we’ve ever been and it’s very important to me,” Trump said.

Suddenly, the plights of all those fictional planets above no longer feel far-fetched.

This is literally the most important issue of our time and Republicans would rather fiddle while the world burns. It burns not just for us, but for our children and grandchildren.

History will judge these people as monsters.