G8: Won’t someone open a couple of windows?

The air is so stale around the G-8 meeting, it almost smells like the cigar-smoke-filled rooms in the all-boys’ clubs of yore. Just as we still rely on fossil fuel (“fossil,” shouldn’t the very word scare us away?) and fight wars over it—killing an amazing number of people, with no one batting an eye—just as we build enough nuclear energy sites, shown catastrophe after catastrophe to be lethal, to give cancer to half the world population, we keep on trotting out workhorses that should have been put to pasture a while back. Even a village idiot understands that if he holds his hand to the flame, he’ll get burned. That’s called experience. But our leaders start every day anew, not having learned anything from anything.