Lesson of a Fiery Summer: The GOP and the Chamber of Commerce are clear and present dangers to you and to your family's future

Ralph Waldo Emerson said "We learn geology the day after the earthquake" . . .

Our problem is that climate chaos isn't a one-off earthquake, a five-minute event followed by a long cleanup and chance to rebuild.

Climate chaos is like one earthquake after another, each one progressively more serious, and each one hitting already weakened and vulnerable nations, after our resources are depleted from the effects of the prior ones.

The best way to understand the US Chamber of Commerce and its sock puppets in Congress and in the 50 state houses is to go back and watch "Dr. Strangelove" and see them their insanity in full flower on the screen in the form of General Buck Turgidson, brushing off concerns about the impending holocaust about to be unleashed on the world:

President Merkin Muffley: I will not go down in history as the greatest mass-murderer since Adolf Hitler.

General "Buck" Turgidson: Perhaps it might be better, Mr. President, if you were more concerned with the American People than with your image in the history books.

That's the Chamber of Commerce and the whole climate denialist industry in a nutshell -- to hell with a livable world that can sustain civilization so long as we in the US can tell ourselves that we "won" . . . before the whole thing collapsed around us.  The Chamber's strategy on climate is to figure that no matter how bad things will get, it will be much worse for everyone else than for the US, so our relative power will be preserved or even increased. "Winning!" as Charlie Sheen would put it.

Eerily, in writing Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick even anticipated the most dangerous delusion of all, the belief among the elites that their wealth will protect them from the catastrophe and that they and their select few friends will be able to hide out in places of safety while us proles are wiped out. This failure to comprehend the nature of the calamity we have unleashed is their most dangerous mistake, because it fools their instinct for self-preservation and lures them into ignoring the mounting alarms, no matter how loudly they scream warnings.

The lesson of the fiery summer of 2015 is that, in November 2016, we either defeat the Chamber's candidates all across America or they will destroy us and our hopes for a future filled with something other than one catastrophic tipping point after another.