Trickle-down climate change

Kansans and Kansas legislators, should you care about Bolivia? Maybe.

In early March, my NPR radio speakers brought a story of a high-mountain glacier called Zongo, near LaPaz. It acts as a “water-bank.” From time immemorial, it has offered its melted winter snow for the spring and summer crystal streams feeding the village below. But slow water-melt is no longer “glacial.” The village’s savings account is nearly gone.

A 2006 ice thickness of 20 meters now measures a scant 2 meters. Extreme water shortages are predicted by 2009, with resulting crop failure.

Tens of millions of Andean villagers in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia may soon find their water supply, nearly 70 percent of the world’s tropical glaciers, literally dried up. And then what will they do?

Walter Delgado, World Bank expert, aimed his pointed voice right through my radio speakers. It was trained directly on Kansas legislators. “The world’s energy-intensive nations, the United States and China, have a moral obligation to reverse direction, to stop, to make all efforts possible [to change energy consumption direction].”

Legislators, are you listening? Jesus echoes Delgado’s plea in his first commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” But a vote for the Bolivians and against the coal plants is ultimately a vote not just for them. More than Bolivian glaciers and villagers are put at risk by coal plants. All of us are. Bolivia’s troubles, sooner or later, will trickle down to their source. And how will you make a law preventing that?