We can protect our environment and stop global warming in three ways:
- Prohibit dangerous chemicals and activities;
- Curtail licenses for activities that pollute land, air or water;
- Tax them – heavily.
Many corporations will fight back. Prohibition and licensing are “regulatory.” Some people think that’s awful. Choosing to tax more, would make what we pay for, more expensive. We could ease that problem for those who have the least ability to shoulder these burdens – whether “essential workers” or not – so more people would support the changes we need to make. But too many of those who could help are unwilling to share the slightest burden to save our families and our world. Heaven forbid the cost of saving ourselves. By elimination, people who are against ALL of those policy approaches are FOR extinction – of ourselves, humanity, men, women, children, OUR families and friends.
Local issues can be additional problems to solve or they can be reasons to resist doing anything about climate change:
- Water:
- Will dealing with the climate shrink or protect our water supply?
- Are we willing to stop wasting our water for lawns and the most water-hungry forms of industrial agriculture?
- Farming – are we willing to change what we grow and how we farm to minimize burning fossil fuels?
- Jobs
- Are we willing to replace gas-guzzling industries and the jobs they provide, to work at clean energy jobs, installing solar panels and wind turbines, among many new or changed industries, or do we insist on working at oil refineries and gas stations?
- Do we have to let crypto currencies gobble the power we generate?
- Plastics – plastics poison both wildlife and civilized life.
- Are we willing and can we stop suppliers from packaging everything in plastic bottles and wraps?
- Are we willing to protect a safe, drinkable water supply or will we insist on buying our water in plastic bottles?
- Scenery – are unobstructed views more important than wind farms or do we prefer the scenery of strip mines to windmills?
We can look at environmental issues as a mountain of local issues – too much for some of us to deal with – or, instead, treat those as the issues that draw us in.
If we’re unwilling to rise above our local and short-term concerns to put our own shoulders and wallets to the work, we’ll all be extinguished. If we’re unwilling to support a tax policy that stops what’s warming the world and making it unlivable, then we’re all guilty of murder/suicide. If we’re unwilling to ban, close or tax the facilities that are killing all of us, then we are investing in funeral homes, graveyards, and crematoriums.
But if we’d rather deal with impending extinction of ourselves and our world:
- We’ll have to support national and global efforts and rules, to get off our local hobby-horses and join the national effort to save our world.
- We’ll have to get rid of the arrogance that says that we know more about the environment we depend on than the thousands of scientists who have spent their lives studying and warning us about it.
Yes, this is a democracy, unless Trump’s goons block the process, but that doesn’t mean that each of us is a qualified scientist entitled to prescribe for the nation. That’s foolish arrogance. An arrogant people will get what it deserves but that’s not what you and I and our kids deserve.
This is a battle for our own survival. War isn’t cheap. But sometimes it has to be fought.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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