Do you have young children? Do you know what they are going to have to face in their lives? This is a crime, pure and simple. Boehner, Inhofe, and his climate-crank friends like to talk about the immorality of the debt, but what about the climate? This is a crime, and we need to hold the criminals responsible. “My daughter and the rest of her generation have been given a life sentence for a crime they did not committ, and it is time to go get the people who did commit it.”

Here comes some wisdom from investigative reporter Mark Hertsgaard, environmental correspondent for The Nation magazine and author of the new book Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth. Mark has worked for more than 20 years on climate change:

• Interview on Democracy Now!: “[Senator Inhofe] knows his lines pretty well. And he’s going to stick with them. And that’s really the problem. They are climate cranks. They like to be called ‘climate skeptics.’ And the media, I’m very sorry to say—the mainstream media, at least—calls them climate skeptics. They are not skeptics. Genuine skeptics are invaluable to science. That’s how science progresses, is with skepticism. But a true skeptic can be persuaded by evidence. They cannot. They have made up their minds for economic reasons or ideological reasons that they’re not going to believe in this. And because our country has allowed them to dominate the debate for 20 years, we’re now stuck with 50 more years of rising temperatures. We’re not locked in. My daughter, the rest of Generation Hot, are locked in to living under the hottest, most volatile climate our civilization has ever known. And that is a crime.” (The interview also touches on problems with supposedly carbon-neutral nuclear power.)
• Article in The Nation, confronting the climate cranks. “It is outrageous that these climate cranks have the upper hand in Washington. The plain truth is that they have no more scientific credibility than the Flat Earth Society, and that should discredit them from exercising any influence over our climate policy, much less holding it hostage to their ideological and economic agendas. But someone has to stand up and point out that the emperor has no clothes.”
• Author of Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.