The Real War on Christmas: Climate Change

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Every year we hear about some new front in the “War on Christmas” that liberals are supposedly waging against this most important of all Christian holidays. But an actual war on Christmas is coming—and it’s spurred by climate change. It’s a liberal conspiracy!

The summer drought caused many Christmas holiday tree seedlings in Tennessee to die this year, The Tennessean reports:

Record heat and abnormally dry conditions conspired to cause significant losses, especially among seedlings and saplings, local growers say. That could result in higher prices in the future, when those trees would have been hitting the market.

“The drought sure made it rough this year,” said Wayne Pressler, owner of Kirkwood Tree Farm in Clarksville, who estimated he lost about half of his roughly 400 trees.

Other growers reported losing up to 80 percent of trees that were planted in the past year, and as much as 20 percent of older trees, the Tennessee Department of Agriculture said.

The Department of Agriculture notes that this won’t really affect the trees people are buying this Christmas, since it takes trees six to seven years to get to an average height for holiday festivity status. But it will likely have an impact in a few years, when we’re all fighting over a few statuesque firs or stuffing presents under some puny Charlie Brown pine.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

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So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

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