At the height of the pandemic and critical race relations, I make a plea: Don't forget the other existential crisis, climate change.
The three are related. Like climate change, the pandemic requires scientific solutions on a global scale. And many communities and countries of color are and will be hardest hit. 2020 is seeing a run of natural disasters driven by global warming. Wildfires devastated Australia, its worst ever. Siberia had a six-month record heat wave, facilitating extensive Arctic wildfires, Death Valley set a world record temperature. Record-breaking wildfires are again destroying the West. Intense hurricanes and rainstorms again batter the Gulf to the southeast and Midwest. Deadly typhoons hit Asia.
Just since 1994, the world lost 28 trillion tons of ice, adding enough water to the oceans that would cover all of Illinois by 560 feet. That's halfway up Willis Tower. Every one inch of sea level rise creates 2 million climate refugees. Natural disasters attributable to climate change cost about $200 billion annually. That's making insurance companies reassess their policies using ever more of your FEMA tax dollars and producing more climate refugees.
With this economics and a workforce desperately needing jobs, when better to restructure our economy to deal with the climate change emergency? Meanwhile, the current administration has rolled back one hundred environmental regulations and withdrawn the US from the Paris agreement to decrease greenhouse gas emissions. There has been a one year waiting period on our withdrawal, which ends on November 4 -- one day after elections. And five days later, all 196 countries meet again to agree on the next steps. I strongly urge you to vote with these facts in mind.
I'm Ross Powell and that's my perspective.
