A BIT OF HISTORY
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limate change threatens all weather patterns,” John Kerry, special presidential envoy for climate said on February 19, 2021. “The planet is warming in large part because of greenhouse gas emissions that are pumped into the sky from power plants, cars, planes and industry. America is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases [and] we have only a few years left to avoid a climate catastrophe.” Merriam Webster defines greenhouse gases as “any of the various gaseous components (such as carbon dioxide CO2 or methane CH2) that absorb radiation; trap heat in the atmosphere and contribute to the greenhouse effect.” “Scientists told us three years ago we had 12 years to avert the worst consequences of climate crisis,” Kerry detailed. “We are now three years gone, so we have nine years left.” Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide (76%), methane (16%), nitrous oxide (6%) and fluorinated gases (2%). The most abundant greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide is the product of burning fossil fuels. “The time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are Old Town Crier
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exhausted, when the soils shall have been still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields, and obstructing navigation,” President Theodore Roosevelt [R-NY] told State Governors in 1908—113 years ago. “Conservation of our natural resources, though the gravest problem of today, is yet but part of another and greater problem to which this Nation is not yet awake, but to which it will awake in time, and with which it must hereafter grapple if it is to live,” Roosevelt continued. Carbon dioxide molecules, once emitted, remain in the atmosphere for almost a century. “One distinguishing characteristic of really civilized men is foresight,” Roosevelt concluded. “We have to, as a nation, exercise foresight for this nation in the future!” “We must emphasize research on solar energy and other renewable energy sources,” President Jimmy Carter [D-GA] commanded in 1977. Today his Georgia farm fields are packed with solar energy panels. In 2017 President Donald Trump [R-NY/FL] announced he was pulling the U.S. out of the 2015, 190 nation Paris Climate Accord. The Trump administration [2017-2021] rolled back more than 100
environmental regulations. Incoming President Joe Biden [D-DE] rejoined the Paris Climate Accord on February 19, 2021. His administration celebrates Earth Day April 22, 2021, with more ambitious emission targets. President Biden plans to spend $2 trillion over the next four years to increase the use of clean energies: in the transportation, electricity and building sectors. “He has set a goal of eliminating fossil fuel emissions from electricity generation by 2030 and has vowed to put the entire United States economy on track to become carbon neutral by midcentury.” “The big key levers for the 2030 pledge will be the auto and utility sectors,” Biden’s domestic climate adviser Gina McCarthy said on March 4. “The 2015 pledges made by nearly every country on Earth to cut their planet-warming emissions will no longer cut it,” Kerry explained. “Even if we did everything that every country set up to do in the Paris Agreement, and we’re not, the Earth’s temperature is predicted to increase something like 3.7o Celsius. That’s obviously catastrophic, and that’s why ambition is so critical.” “It is time to stop waffling and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the
greenhouse effect is here,” NASA climate change expert Dr. James E. Hansen concluded in 1988—33 years ago. “It is happening now.” Lyndon Johnson (D-TX) was the first U.S. President to concern himself with Clean Air and Water Quality. “There is no excuse for a river flowing red with blood from slaughterhouses,” Johnson said in 1965. “There is no excuse… for chemical companies and oil refineries using our major rivers as pipelines for toxic wastes. There is no excuse for communities to use other people’s rivers as a dump for their raw sewage.” President Richard Nixon [R-CA] established the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] in 1970: “We have the chance today to do more than ever before in history to make life better in America—to insure better health…better transportation, a cleaner environment…Let us be bold in our determination to meet those needs in new ways.” The EPA first proposed “bold actions” to curb warming in 1989. “We cannot dwell upon remembered glory,” President Jimmy Carter said in his 1977 Inaugural address. “We cannot afford to drift…to lack boldness as we meet the future.” Carter was the first president to openly
criticize America’s dependence on foreign oil; to install solar panels in the White House. Succeeding President Ronald Reagan [R-CA] removed the panels in 1986. “[T]ogether, in a spirit of individual sacrifice for the common good, we must simply do our best,” Carter concluded. To wear face masks in this pandemic age: to forego gasguzzling vehicles. Researchers at Melbourne, Australia’s RMIT University— in an effort to curb COVID-19 pandemic waste—may “have developed a way to repurpose single-use [disposable face] masks into roads. A new study, published in Science of the Total Environment, shows that using recycled masks to make a 1-kilometer twolane road would use up about 3 million masks, preventing 93 metric tons of waste from ending up in landfills.” The pavement mixture consists of both shredded face masks and processed building rubble “designed to meet civil engineering safety standards and add stiffness and strength to the pavement.” Microsoft founder, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Bill Gates describes today’s ongoing A BIT OF HISTORY > PAGE 10
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