GW Bush and his gang of neoconmen are busily trying to sell the idea of a "Social Security crisis" in order to advance their agenda of destroying the public sphere and privatizing absolutely everything.

Surprisingly, Bush has admitted a willingness to consider raising the income cap on Social Security taxes. This is surprising because it admits a bit of "reality-based" thinking into the dialogue: federal agencies have noted that this simple fix would keep Social Security solvent for the next 75 years. Without that fix, we're good for about half that time. Some crisis.

But while neocons have been fulminating over this fake crisis, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, issued a warning at a UN conference in January that greenhouse gases had already reached dangerous levels in the atmosphere. New measurements show that these levels have increased abruptly in the last two years, suggesting climate change may be accelerating. (This is supposedly what the IPCC was created to prevent.)

Without "very deep" cuts in greenhouse emissions very soon, warns Dr. Pachauri, "we are risking the ability of the human race to survive." (Poetic sidenote: Dr. Pachauri was advocated by Bush as a replacement for the previous IPCC chair, who was deemed by US oil companies as too aggressive and alarmist on the matter.)

The biggest-ever study of global warming, based at Oxford University, has reported that climate change could prove to be twice as catastrophic as the IPCC's previous worst predictions. Another international task force has concluded that we could reach "the point of no return" in a decade.

Now that's a crisis.

Let's review: on one hand, we have a very successful federal retirement program at risk of reducing benefits four decades from now, and on the other hand, we have global climate change risking human and biospheric cataclysm unless seriously addressed within the next decade.

Guess which "crisis" will get more immediate attention inside the Beltway and within corporate media? And which crisis had better start getting a whole lot more attention outside the Beltway and within independent media?

The Kyoto Protocol just went into effect in February, after being signed by 141 nations. Meanwhile, the biggest culprit in global climate change--our United States of denial--sat on the sidelines, having rejected even this modest step forward.

The bad news is that there's no way the oil-soaked Bush administration and the Republican-dominated Congress will deal with this real crisis without a groundswell of grassroots political pressure. The good news is that remedies exist, and there's still time to muster the political will to implement them. Here's a couple great places to start: http://www.climatesolutions.com and http://www.climatecrisiscoalition.org.

We need to move our nation from the sidelines to the frontlines of confronting this planetary crisis. Quickly. Or else.