The Future Part 7

The issue of environmental disaster is simply too dangerous to ignore as a species.  When one of the candidates and many Americans refuse to accept that we are playing with our survival as a species, it is troubling.

The danger of a bomb going off and killing you from a terrorist attack is a danger, not very likely in comparison to other immediate dangers, but something that gets a lot of attention.  But if you consider the devastation of any war we have seen, as terrible as it may have been,destroying the environment and climate will be worse.

It is happening now and it can be difficult to distinguish between what would be normal weather and what is climate change, but as we see storms of the century almost every year and the average force of hurricanes and tornadoes increases along with the earth's temperature it become a strong correlation.

The data is so very clear and the danger so real that it is hard to find any reputable scientist who doesn't agree.  The few that do, normally employed by energy companies, usually try to argue that these are natural changes, not caused by human activity. They can't really dispute the data but they argue the cause is different.  The simple point is that spewing dangerous pollutants and carbon into the air we breath is definitely not a beneficial thing.

We need to make this a cost of production and we need to impose it on all products, not just ones produced in this country.  Since any tax imposed on sales is regressive by nature, we should offset the regressiveness of it in other taxes or credits, but making pollution a cost of production will help with the deficit and make industry find creative solutions.

There is no better motivator than an economic one.

Of course any such action will meet resistance in our current political climate and what is probably the biggest challenge we face for the future is making the American public more aware.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, we have many sites spreading misinformation.  I'm not talking about opinions, but actual lies.  It may be the biggest challenge we have, It isn't an easy thing to fix.

I like to think that we are providing our children the skills they need to determine fact from fiction, but I am afraid that it isn't so.  So ultimately, creating an informed citizenry able to determine what is true vs what is false and forming an informed opinion is the biggest challenge we have.

We see to opposition to the common core efforts which ultimately were designed to deliver needed skills but too many in our society don't want an informed citizenry.

So the future is our children whom we need to protect from us and educate to make informed decisions.