Beijing smog; Friedman columns

Most people who know about this stuff believe that the global climate crisis is a lot more serious than even concerned folks in the developed world are willing to accept. _Accepting_ [am using a weird keyboard--for me] means significantly changing the way you live your life, which we're not doing in the West--not in so-called enlightened Western Europe, and certainly not in the U.S. There are changes, but it's too tepid, too slow. Meanwhile, newly rich and developing countries don't seem to take their cues from the way the West has industrialized and post-industrialized but instead seem to be going down the same path (i.e. first get really dirty and wasteful, and only then get worried about the effects and begin to change). See the Beijing smog saga of this summer; see also a report (I forget where I saw it recently) on how a newly proseprous, Western country like Poland (yes, it's all relative) seems mostly unaware of things like environmentalism in general, and something like recycling in particular. Of course, there are counterforces, and sometimes certain events trigger disproportionate reactions. I'm not talking about the columns Thomas Friedman is penning from Greenland at the moment, even though yesterday's piece was particularly troubling and Friedman on the whole deserves credit for his relentless current focus on the problem. But maybe the endless stream of images from Beijing (I mean the smog, not the Olympic festivities) will cause people around the world to make a few connections. Something has to, if I believe the experts, and it has to happen soon.