The tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu is literally fighting for its survival. Unfortunately, its survival depends on drastic action to fight global warming. In fact, it seems to depend on a worldwide agreement on target carbon dioxide levels (350 ppm) that neither developed nor developing countries are willing to agree to.

Ian Fry, the lead negotiator for Tuvalu at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen seems to think his country’s future is in the hands of the U.S. Senate. And he seems to think there’s some future in trying to shame U.S. Senators into action:

It appears that we are waiting for some senators in the U.S. Congress to conclude before we can consider this issue properly. It is an irony of the modern world that the fate of the world is being determined by some senators in the U.S. Congress.

Someone should take the poor man aside and explain to him: “Dude, better men than you have tried to shame U.S. Senators into action. The ones who need to be shamed have no conscience. What they do have is a deep and abiding thirst for political contributions. And a fine sense of quid pro quo.”

After all, we’re talking about a bunch of men and women who are not just cheerfully willing but eager to sabotage healthcare reform, even though the reality is that in their own country, 45,000 people die every year due to a lack of health insurance. People who don’t care diddly-squat about killing off 45,000 of their own countrymen each year in order to achieve narrow partisan political ends, can hardly be expected to care if a few island nations vanish off the face of the earth because of a rise in sea levels. It’s not even as if the people will die. They’ll just be displaced. Hey, it might even improve their lives.