I couldn't admire Mr. Ban Ki-moon more, but his essay Tuesday about Climate Change came right out of the mouth of my wife who has been peeling wallpaper with that rhetoric for most of the thirty years we've been married. He is pleased, he wrote, "to see Climate Change rise on the political agenda and in the consciousness of people worldwide." Well, if he hasn't got my wife to thank for that, I don't know who it could be. The woman hasn't had a word to say on another subject since she was pregnant with our first child 26 years ago.
"Climate Change is accelerating and human activities are the principal cause," the Secretary-General declares. So does Lyn Lear, as agitated and exhausted as if she, too, was convening a Climate Summit at the United Nations in New York on September 23. Then again, the way she's been carrying on about it, they could be in this thing together. In a way they are; she's producing a short film to open the summit.
My wife gives me every assurance she's never met Ban Ki-moon. Hell, I know that. But there isn't anything he said on HuffPost yesterday that I haven't heard over and over again, wall to wall and floor to ceiling, in every room of our home, on the telephone and in the car since I was the lad that knocked her up.
This is to tell my lady and the Secretary-General -- once and for all -- that I am among the converted. I haven't seen "the encroaching deserts in Mongolia and the Sahel and the endangered rainforests in Brazil," but my God have I heard about them. Time now to enlist "the scientists, economists, entrepreneurs and investors who can persuade government leaders and policy-makers that now is the time for action."
Good luck, my Lyn. And Mr. Secretary-General.