Letter: In the next decade, address climate change
(Czarek Sokolowski | AP file photo) In this Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2018 file photo, plumes of smoke rise from Europe's largest lignite power plant in Belchatow, central Poland. As politicians haggle at a U.N. climate conference in Poland over ways to limit global warming, the industries and machines powering our modern world keep spewing their pollution into the air and water. The fossil fuels extracted from beneath the earth’s crust — coal, oil and gas — are transformed into the carbon dioxide that is now heating the earth faster than scientists had expected even a few years ago.
As we close out this decade, one may reflect back at the many triumphs and trials of the past 10 years and look ahead with hope at the next, maybe the most critical in much of human history.
The last decade brought a blossoming of awareness of the environmental crunch we’ve put ourselves in. The science is now clear that the climate is changing, with human activity as a major driver. Myriad resulting effects are appearing, which will mostly be to the detriment of all life on Earth, as we’re already witnessing the most intense die-off of species in millions of years. For humans, the outlook is dire with the advent of more extreme weather, ocean level rise and acidification.
Luckily, we have also learned what we need to do to reverse these effects: Stop putting carbon into the atmosphere and control our population growth. We also know how to do it, but the challenges are steep: Convert to clean, sustainable, carbonless economies in all aspects of our activities, and consume less material goods and energy.
The hope for the next decade is to build the political will to innovate for this transformation, and then just do it.
John Kennington, Cottonwood Heights
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