Why vote for a progressive Presidential candidate in 2008? Do it for the 11 million people living in cities in the Andes that are drying up because of global warming. Climate change droughts aren’t limited to the southern United States.
Cities like La Paz, Bogota, El Alto, and Quito get significant amounts of their drinking water from water that melts from Andean glaciers. Those glaciers are shrinking, and will be gone by the middle of this century. When that happens, people in those cities won’t have enough to drink.
Where will they go when they become environmental refugees? To other cities, putting pressure on their resources as well. When these dry cities empty out, there will be a ripple effect of disruption spreading throughout the region, creating dangerous political unrest.
We need an American President who is prepared to deal with these problems in a more subtle way than the right wing Republicans have shown us. We also need a President who will start reducing the underlying industrial cause of these problems – from day one.
(Source: Associated Press, November 23, 2007)
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Peru is drying up like the American southeast and southwest, only at a faster rate. They have a glacier that’s been there for thousands of years and it’s scheduled to melt completely within the next 7 yrs (according to scientists who are using the current rate – but it’s speeding up all the time). The oceans are becoming acidified due to excess carbon being absorbed. It goes on and on, but it’s business as usual every day, right? ["No, effect here, heh heh, guess those people are just makin' it up!"]