Category Five and Counting

As another colossal storm lumbers into the Gulf of Mexico, Bush's energy dispolicy is primed for a Wizard-of-Oz unveiling. "We got to be ready for the worst," the president said this morning, throwing conjugation to the wind. Hurricane Rita is currently generating the third lowest barometric pressure ever recorded in the Atlantic Basin. It thus supplants Katrina, which at 27.11 inches of pressure prior to landfall was the third most intense storm since 1900. Of the previous top ten storms, none struck within the same season as another.

Bush's rejection of the Kyoto accords was the signature act of his presidency pre-9/11. Kyoto proposed to reduce world carbon dioxide emissions and cap them at 1990 levels; American emissions have grown by more than 15% since 1990 and are increasing. While the Bush administration has softened its devolutionary denial that the biosphere is warming, he again rejected a global accord at this summer's G8 summit in Scotland. "The Kyoto treaty would have wrecked our economy, if I can be blunt," he said, as simple as pie. And one cannot deny that Katrina has already benefited certain sectors of the American economy.

The Guardian's science correspondent posited not long before Katrina that global warming has reached a tipping point. A permafrost region of Siberia the size of France and Germany combined has begun to melt for the first time since its formation 11,000 years ago. The terrain is a peat bog, which by one estimate will release as much methane per year as is currently released by all global wetlands and agriculture, a cloud to humble even Dick Cheney on cabbage rolls. (According to the EPA, Methane traps over 21 times more heat per molecule than carbon dioxide.) Of course, Bush could blame the mammoths for their untimely rotting. Or perhaps his noise makers can explain all the unprecedented storm ferocity with satellite pictures of massive fans blowing northward from the coast of "Hurricane" Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.

Hurricanes culminate on the last swell of summer, and Rita appears to be taking this equinox seriously. In the next few days Bush will have plenty to do: He needs to be shown sharing the pain by constructing levees around his little hobby farm in Crawford so he'll have brush left to cut. He might determine which Best Buy in Galveston has the dopest booty to loot. He certainly must figure out how to pin the misery on Michael Chertoff. But from here on out we desperately need leadership instead of some aw-shucks Nero fiddling while Babylon drowns.