"The gap is too wide," the legislator emailed me.

I'd sent him written testimony on LD2255, legislation designed to give private corporations access to eminent domain procedures in order to expand energy production, to permit them to deregulate their financial activities and contract derivatives, and to help them push past environmental restrictions. I'd opposed it. I'd suggested that conservation would do far more for the State's "Energy Security" than expanded consumption. That decentralization rather than centralization would be a necessary component.

"Yeah," I say to myself, "he sees it as a gap, the difference between what I suggest and what people can hear. Good. Now it's time to make the gap wider, deeper and sharper. It's time to push people into the gap so they can start moving to the other side. To make remaining on this side of the gap untenable."

The Pope - Ratzinger, a former Nazi - has made environmental destruction a cardinal sin. Not soon enough for God; she is unleashing her wrath in the here and now. She crashed another ice shelf into the Antarctic last week.

We're already past the 350ppm CO2 that NASA scientist James Hansen says will tip the planet. One degree, maybe 1.5 degrees, that's all this planet can stand he says. The inertia from ongoing emissions will drive us well past that. Nor will we stop at 1.6 degrees or even 2 degrees Centigrade. The UK's Stern Report has set a 3 degree Centigrade target. So as to be feasible. Anything less is unfeasible.

The last UN IPCC report - already several years out of date - sketches out a range of near term outcomes. Anywhere from 1.6 to 6 deg Centigrade increase in global temperature or more. This century. Not in the lifetime of my children, but ending their lifetime.

Even the big corporations are taking notice. Dominion Bank, perhaps fearful of burning in forever in hell, is going to shut off its lights for an hour on Earth Day, March 29th.

"The gap is too wide," the legislator emailed me. Perhaps - as some suggested in verbal testimony - he believes this particular bill, LD2255, will limit environmental destruction and pre-empt federal action. He doesn't understand that the whole "progressive" concept of regulation has failed - based as it is on some pyramid scheme of wealth and shifting the costs of the environmental plunder.

Glaciers in the Andes, central Asia and Glacier National Park are almost gone. Trees, towns and lakes are disappearing as permafrost melts.

Ask yourself, "Is Maine overdeveloped?" Ask yourself, "What's your footprint?" Ask yourself, "Can the planet support you?" There's nothing progressive about our ever increasing footprints.

"The gap is too wide."

"Is a river and the dams along the river an Energy Corridor," I'd asked? LD2255 instructs the regulators to keep costs down for the corporations - to use eminent domain for their benefit. Bye-bye fish, bye-by web of life. That's the Governor's official stated policy - to consolidate Maine's environmental agencies so they can more efficiently help natural resource-business exploit the environment.

What does Governor Baldacci's pastor tell him on Sunday, I wonder.

I'm not enough of a sucker to buy the claim that this legislation would pre-empt Federal action. Look how eagerly the State rolled over in the case of the NSA/Verizon/PUC wiretapping, how the Governor continues to send the Guard to Iraq and how the State is about to roll over on RealID. 1000 signing statements - a government refusing to be bound by law.

One Governor, one state. That's all it would have taken a couple of years ago to roll back the Emperor. One Governor, one state, refusing to continue to deploy the Guard to Iraq. One state starting Impeachment.

It didn't happen. We've been derailed by "Legislators Against the War", by faux champions of Impeachment, by a new group of Vichy Democrats pretending "Bring Them Home Now", by a Responsible Plan Never to Leave Iraq.

"The gap is too wide," the legislator wrote. My examples of the State backing down were unapt he thought.

More like "pathological", I'd been thinking.

We'd spoken before, this Vichy Democrat and I, about the need to ban incandescent light bulbs (like Australia, Ghana and any number of other nations) and about the need for a much reduced speed limit~\footnote{http://www.usnews.com/blogs/beyond-the-barrel/2008/3/26/truckers-back-a-national-65-mph-speed-limit.html} (like Jimmy Carter's 55MPH). Both crackpot ideas he said and bad for Maine businesses. "The first rule of holes;" Molly Ivins wrote, "When you're in one, stop digging."

The crises we are in - whether energy and resource depletion, environmental degradation or financial meltdown - are the direct result of the belief system and values around which we structure our economy. Digging the hole deeper, harder, faster and more efficiently makes matters worse.

The gap is too wide to bridge; we need a paradigm shift.

UPDATE: Maine caves on RealID.