New Rule: Nobody can use the phrase “our greatest problem” anymore unless you’re talking about global warming. President Bush has been saying we’re in a war on terror, and now I get it: he’s not saying terr-or, he’s saying Terra, as in Terra Firma, as in the earth. George Bush is an alien sent here to destroy the earth – I know it sounds crazy, but it made perfect sense when Tom Cruise explained it to me last week.

Last Sunday on “60 Minutes,” James Hansen, who is NASA’s leading expert on the science of climate, delivered the world’s most important message. He said:

“We have to, in the next ten years, begin to decrease the rate of carbon dioxide emissions. And then flatten it out. If that doesn’t happen in ten years, we’re going to be passing certain tipping points. If the ice sheets begin to disintegrate, what can you do about it? You can’t tie a rope around the ice sheet.”

Although, I know a certain cowboy from Crawford who might think you could. And that cowboy and his corporate goons at the White House tried to censor Mr. Hanson from delivering that message, claiming such warnings are “speculative.” This from the crowd that rushed into a war based on an article in The Weekly Standard. This from the guy who thinks Kyoto is that Japanese Emperor dude his Dad threw up on.

Global warming is not speculative. It threatens us enough so that it should be considered a national security issue. Failing to warn the citizens of a looming weapon of mass destruction – and that’s what global warming is – in order to protect oil company profits – fits, for me, the definition of treason.

And codified treason: the guy in the White House who made the edits was Phil Cooney, who’d been an oil industry lobbyist before given this job as head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. That’s the office that’s supposed to watch out for us. But that’s where Phil busied himself crossing stuff out in scientists’ reports, because apparently in Phil’s mind, he hadn’t switched jobs, he was just doing his old job – oil industry lobbyist – from a different office. You know, in the People’s House.

Republicans have succeeded in making the environment about some tie-dyed dude from Seattle who lives in a solar powered yurt and eats twigs. It’s not. This issue should be driven by something conservatives are much more familiar with: utter selfishness.

That’s my motivation. I don’t want to live my golden years having to put on a HAZMAT suit just to go down and get the mail. Those are my Viagra years. When I’ll be thinking of having children. But I wouldn’t know what to tell a kid about our world in twenty years: “Dad, tell me about the birds and bees.” “They’re all gone, now eat your Soylent Green.”

We’re letting dying men kill our planet for cash, and they’re counting on us being too greedy, or distracted, or just plain lazy to stop them. On this day, the seventeenth anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, let’s pause to consider how close we are to making ourselves fossils from the fossil fuels we extract. In the next twenty years, almost a billion Chinese people will be trading in their bicycles for the automobile – folks, either we get our shit together on this quickly, or we’re going to have to go to plan B: inventing a car that runs on Chinese people.