A not so trivial quiz — Who said: 1) “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect forget about the White House effect; as president I intend to do something about it!”
2) “The science of climate change is definitive as spelled out by many reports by the National Academy of Sciences. … In addition to reducing pollution, moving away from fossil fuels creates national security and economic benefits.”
3) “The growing possibility of our destroying ourselves and the world with our own neglect and excess is tragic and very real.”
Apparently Mitt Romney will sacrifice everything to his ambition. Not only does he ignore the impacts of burning fossil fuels but his energy plan calls for more burning. If you were informed that the bridge was out ahead would you speed up?
If 98 cardiologists tell you to stop smoking or there is a 90 percent certainty that you’ll die but you find two dentists who disagree, what would a reasonable person do? That is the consensus of opinion among the world’s climatologists and leading organizations like the American Meteorological Society which recently said, “There is unequivocal evidence that Earth’s lower atmosphere, ocean and land surface are warming; sea level is rising; and snow cover, mountain glaciers and Arctic sea ice are shrinking. The dominant cause of the warming since the 1950s is human activities.” (AMS 8/20/12)
When he pits the dire impacts of climate change and environmental degradation against the “family” does he really believe families can flourish without enough food, potable water and resources on a increasingly overharvested world dominated by severe weather like we’ve seen the past several years and shared by an ever increasing world population now above 7 billion? Why does he choose to ignore the fact that an economy, based on fuels from Heaven versus fuels from Hell, has been shown in studies and practice, to produce more jobs of higher quality and better pay then those from mining dangerous, obsolete fossil fuels. Or is it his blind ambition, which ignores facts and the necessity to evolve sustainable solutions? It is past time to move from the fossil fuel age to a clean, sustainable future.
Quiz answers: 1) H. W. Bush, 1988; 2) John W. Rowe Chairman and Ceo, Exon Corp; 3) Billy Graham, evangelical.
Gary Piazzon
Coupeville
