The news media and the government are fixated on the fact that the U.S. economy may be headed into a recession -- defined as two or more successive quarters of declining gross domestic product. The situation is actually much worse. By some measures of economic performance, the United States has been in a recession since 1975 -- a recession in quality of life, or well-being.

Once Americans' well-being becomes the basis for measuring our success, other reforms should follow. We should tax bads (carbon emissions, depletion of natural resources) rather than goods (labor, savings, investment). We should recognize the negative effects of growing income disparities and take steps to address them.

Here’s the political reality check, just as sobering as the data about sea ice and drought: China last year passed the United States as the biggest emitter of carbon on Earth. Now, that doesn’t mean the Chinese are as much to blame as we are -- per capita, we pour four times more CO2 into the atmosphere. And we’ve been doing it for a hundred years, which means it will be decades before they match us as a source of the problem. But they are growing so fast that there’s no way to head off this crisis without their participation. And yet they don’t want to participate, because they’re using all that cheap coal not to pimp out an already lavish lifestyle, but to pull people straight out of deep poverty.

Which means that if we want them not to burn their coal, we’re going to need to help them -- we’re going to need to supply the windmills, efficient boilers, and so on that let them build decent lives without building coal-fired power plants.

Which means, in turn, we’re going to need to be generous, on a scale that passes even the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild post-World War II Europe. And it’s not clear if we’re capable of that any more -- so far our politicians have preferred to scapegoat China, not come to its aid.

Progressives have worked so hard to elect Democrats to represent our demands for ethics reform -- this is a slap in the face to everyone that has contributed money to the party in the hopes that they would represent our values on this matter.

Progressives that champion transparency, ethics, and accountability in government should feel betrayed. New York Democrats will have a lot of work to do to regain the trust, not just of average New York voters, but also of core constituents.

So you may be asking yourself, "How do the drugs get into the water supply?" The answer is very simple: humans consume drugs, which are only partially metabolized then excreted in the urine (and also in perspiration), and then returned into the water cycle via metropolitan sewer services. Believe it or not, even after treatment some of these residual chemicals remain, albeit it in the parts per billion or trillion, well below the doses used clinically.

Perhaps this is just another side-effect of our pill-popping culture. But just because they exist in trace amounts does not mean that they are harmless. There have been some studies that suggest birth control hormones that have found their way into local environments have had adverse affects on fish, reptiles and amphibians. Unfortunately, there is no present data to determine what effects these trace chemicals might have.