Are You Listening Now, Stupid?

The title of today's blog is a suggestion for naming a sequel to Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, but then one of my character faults is being unduly confrontational. In the wake of a three tornado day in Massachusetts take a look at "Are You Ready For More?" in this week's Newsweek. Sitting in OA's auditorium for Class Night listening to the thunder and wondering whether Maggie was going to be blown to Oz before I got home did not make for a pleasant evening. As an aside, Maggie would have taken care of the Wicked Witch on her own and the flying monkeys too.

Pollsters for the President robocalled me last night. I like President Obama well enough and found that I could still blame his less than illustrious predecessor for the lousy economy. But all the poll questions were about the economy, it's not the economy, stupid! After three years of little action the Obama administration now owns climate change as much as Bush, Clinton, Bush. Stimulus money should have been better focused on converting to a green economy rather than pork projects like high speed rail.

Given that the world has probably passed the tipping point on avoiding dramatic climate change, the predictions for Easton are disturbing. Expect much, much warmer weather with more thunderstorms. Given that we've had one tornado and several microbursts in the last 60 years, we're probably in line for more. Some are predicting an increase in hurricanes, some aren't, but it seems certain we will continue to see periods of extremes with drought alternating with periods of torrential rains or record snows. Don't forget we've had one major dry summer and two "fifty year" floods in the last six years. Add in two snow droughts and a near record year of snow, and you can see that unpredictable is becoming the new predictable.

Thus, water-what to do with too much or too little,  energy to run our air conditioners, and emergency plans for the inevitable "unexpected" natural  events should become major town priorities. We continue to putter along in Easton doing the limited things a single town can do and  doing more than most. Among several positives such as the new solar field and solar field zoning, our leaders haven't made the mistake of listening to those who want to ship our sewage to Brockton. Rumors from many sources  hath it that this "solution" is being pushed by a large developer with visions of high rises dancing in his head, but it is absolutely the worst idea for Easton. It would ship millions of gallons of water outside our watershed making water bans and perhaps even water shortages possible in times of extended drought. We need to develop a solution to clean our water to "state of the art" standards not just "stated mandated" standards and keep it here for our use. We all start doing our part by conserving water-something our Water Department works hard at doing. That reminds me, I need to schedule getting my water meter changed…