The political environment is as divided and charged as it has ever been, with intense resistance on one side and angry defiance on the other — not good for collaboration.
Even so, the time is over for claiming that climate change is a partisan political issue, or worse, fake news. President Trump may have decided that the U.S. doesn’t need to work with other countries, but there’s only one planet.
Billionaire CEOs like Michael Bloomberg and Rob Walton of Wal-Mart agree with environmentalists that the earth’s atmosphere is warming due to the uncontrolled release of greenhouse gases. The oceans are rising due to melting polar ice, ocean acidification is destroying fish, storms are more frequent and intense. Several “thousand-year” floods occurred in 2016. Our military says that climate change is an international security issue.
What to do? We can take personal actions — drive less, consume less, shop locally. We can encourage Mayor Tim Leavitt to join the Compact of Mayors to work toward 100 percent energy renewability, like 130 other cities. We can reject the development of new infrastructure that forces long-term investment in fossil fuels, like the Tesoro-Savage oil terminal and the Millennium coal terminal, and the use of fracked gas to heat schools. We can make Vancouver a welcoming place for family-wage jobs in sustainable energy and modern technologies. But we have to act now.
