EARTH DAY 2019 sunrises with our species in an awful place regarding long term planetary livability.
On the first Earth Day, regional concentrations of toxic air and water were not serious concerns — ones that we cooperatively tended to with some success. Today, we face the expanding disarray of environmental change brought forth by high levels of carbon dioxide. Undetectable, odorless and global in impact, atmospheric CO2 levels compromise each living thing. However, as the immensity of environmental change problems become more clear, our reactions continue to lack urgency.
Words give structure and shape to human musings, expectations and fears. They are our apparatuses of discussions or arguments; our agreeable standard for negotiation, influence or case. Yet, these words become altogether unimportant despite environmental change, a synthetic and physical procedure of significant extents with neither heart nor mind. There can be no arranging different needs we desire to be increasingly imperative. This procedure unyieldingly develops as long as we keep on bolstering it CO2.
Only effective actions to stop this CO2 feeding can stop climate change.
In coastal Virginia, a microcosm of environmental vulnerability, we search, trying to find something we can agree upon without having to face up to climate change. Doing nothing has been replaced with a focus on “adaptation” or “resilience” — fortifying infrastructure and homes from sea level rise and intensifying storms. But these results will always fall short.
Without stemming the flow of CO2, the majority of our defensive obstructions will in the long run be surmounted, as the physical and chemical processes of climate change are total and open finished. When the sticker price for misled endeavors rises forcefully, as it will, how would we get taxpayers in Nebraska to save us from ocean level ascent as they face the inexorable roil of their own climate disasters?
We can’t alleviate environmental change without pushing individuals past safe places. We long for “normal” and the opportunity to concentrate on favored social, financial or political issues. We imagine technology that pulls carbon out of the sky faster than trees can accomplish, even faster than we are putting it into the sky.
However, that isn’t going on now, and now is our opportunity to act to clear disaster for many individuals. It is our obligation to unequivocally follow up on quick decrease of atmospheric CO2. We can’t sit tight for an innovation not yet created. With particular center we have to drawdown the progression of billions of huge amounts of CO2 emissions into the sky, and the most effective method to do this is to put a price on those emissions.
The Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act (H.R. 763) at present before Congress will put a rising charge on every single non-renewable energy source and discount gathered monies to American families. This charge and profit bill with 28 cosponsors, including a very business-minded Republican, will arouse less outrage than other approaches, while proving extremely effective at reducing CO2 by shifting the market away from fossil fuels to renewables. It involves no new EPA regulations, does not grow government and will give financial protection for American households and businesses. It will not force people into renewable energy, but instead financially motivate them to go there themselves.
This isn’t enchantment. It utilizes cash to string the needle of political stalemate for speedy activity. This bill gives speculators, industry and families a strong money related motivation to move to the fuels of the future.