So-called global warming is just a secret ploy by wacko tree-huggers to make America energy independent, clean our air and water, improve the fuel efficiency of our vehicles, kick-start 21st-century industries, and make our cities safer and more liveable. Don’t let them get away with it!
Chip Giller, grist.org
The climate is changing because human and natural systems are out of synch. Climate change alters water availability, degrades ecosystems, destroys biodiversity, and acidifies oceans. Right now it is killing and impoverishing people in the poorest countries, who have contributed least to the problem. It could cut unirrigated farm yields by half in many African countries by 2020 – a vast human disaster a historic eyeblink away. It makes poor people poorer: Inuit, who can no longer hunt on the ice the way they have for centuries, and Sahelian farmers south of the Sahara, who find it too hot and dry to keep farming.
Extreme weather events are increasing in the rich countries, causing huge property damage and loss of harvests.
There is no single “solution”, but there are thousands of solutions: small individual acts; big government policy changes; radically new forms of global governance and co-operation; new and renewable energy systems; cap-and-trade systems to establish a high price for carbon; new technology standards; new technology. We’ll need them all.
Changed human minds must drive these and other changes toward a new world of human activity and human living everywhere. All countries are “developing countries” now, needing to develop new, lower-carbon ways of heating, air-conditioning, moving around, manufacturing, farming and prospering.
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