Today is the first annual Blog Action Day:

On October 15th – Blog Action Day, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind.

In its inaugural year, Blog Action Day will be co-ordinating bloggers to tackle the issue of the environment.

Here at VL we are participating and I thought I’d add a Latino angle to an environmental issue.

As Al Gore scooped up the Nobel Peace Prize last week for his work in educating the world on the disturbing trend of global warming, and his enemies work double time to call him out as a hoax, the topic of climate change is getting a lot of media attention lately.

While many are shaken by the alarming images of melting glaciers, deadly heat waves and dried up ski resorts, some of us may ask what concrete effects climate change might have on our everyday lives.

Last year I read a report which discussed the effects of global warming on people of color communities in California and was riveted. Here are a few of the disturbing highlights:

- Mortality rates for blacks from heat-related affects [sic] could increase sixteen-fold for blacks, fourteen-fold for Asians, twelve-fold for Latinos, and eight-fold for whites within this century.

- Expected increases in food and energy prices will hurt low-income blacks and Latinos more than others since they spend more of their income on these necessities.

- As global warming disrupts farming and tourism, people of color will find it more difficult to find jobs. Nearly 77 percent of California’s agricultural labor force is Latino.

This 2006 report is specific to California, but we’ve already seen the devastating effects that a heat wave, for instance, can have on low-income people of color communities elsewhere, and the biggest revelation with regard to economic disparity and climate change evidenced in Hurricane Katrina, the effects of which I don’t need to remind you of.

Who cares about global warming? We all should.

Via / New America Media

Image by Sagrado Corazon via Flickr