Here's what apparently happened: Friedman wrote the column, then had one of those blue-screen-of-death/didn't-save-properly snafus, and when that happens of course the content that was lost goes to the Official Ricochet File Depository, where a friend of ours sometimes delivers Jimmy John's. Anyway, I guess he thought he was watching CNN and not Syfy, and this is what he wrote. I'm told.
Peering out my hotel window in Shanghai, it occurs to me that we often miss the big picture when it comes to climate change, for the simple reason that we can't cut through the usual back-and-forth to implement the correct solutions.
The smart thinkers recognize that this is the future on a globe that sees mercury rising and resource consumption increasingly concentrated in the nations from which I regularly meet delegates at Davos, but for whom the siren call of environmental urgency presents an ever-more-irresistible call to action.
And that brings us to Los Angeles and the sharks.
It's the perfect storm of climate change consequences that might finally bring us to that which we should be pondering anyway - a carbon tax that would not only cleanse the atmosphere of CO2 but would also give the UN, NGOs and the leading experts access to resources that hold out the hope of climate change reversal before we face disappearing islands and intractable disruption of the ecosystem and the vegetation cycle.
The waterspouts bearing down upon Los Angeles offer all the rebuttal required for the deniers. The sharks descending upon the Southern California coastline - driven north by the warming trends that were all the buzz at Doha - became the perfect allegory to the dangers facing us as they were lifted up by the twisters and hurtled onto the city. Motorists caught on flooding freeways - their legs gnawed off, their arms turned into marine appetizers - recoiled at the horror of sharks today, and can now be made to understand that the climate change future is even more frightening.
This is an opportunity to take three crucial steps:
A. Push for the imposition of a carbon tax effective retroactive to 1934. This would immediately raise the funds needed to establish essential international monitoring bodies, while having minimal effect on polluting companies, who can merely write it off.
2. Highlight the plight of the tornado-gripped shark as an example of the peril threatening marine life in the face of future, far more severe, storms.
D. Initiate a national conversation on the real implications of climate change, the ecological imperative and the resulting impact on globalization, gentrification, urban sprawl and the reality of Third World emblomfikication.
A man named Fin, chain-sawing his way out of a shark, is in many ways the perfect allegory for the fix in which we find ourselves as a globe. Here in China, where policy solutions slice through problems like that revving chain in the hands of a kid from Beverly Hills 90210, I wonder if our global mindset is ready to embrace the paradigm shift by which we could bite down hard on carbon emissions and crash through the shark cage of climate change. The sharknado has much to teach us.
