Sunday, June 30, 2019 | 2 a.m.
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President Donald Trump recently told us that he is a strong environmentalist, but that the United States has the cleanest air and water in the world. His vice president echoed his words about how clean the U.S. air is.
There are a lot of folks in Flint, Mich., who could make a case against the country’s clean water, and the entire scientific community would laugh at the view that our air is clean. They would laugh, but it is not funny. Our air is increasingly filling with carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that trap more heat and raise the planet’s temperature.
The U.S can’t even convince one of its two political parties that the problem exists. And, though both China and India are signatories to worldwide agreements to take action, they are almost daily putting more coal-fired power plants into operation.
Global warming is happening. And its effects are going to become significantly worse. Any political candidate worth his or her salt is simply going to need to come clean to the American people about this fact. They can, to make it more palatable for folks, start by calling for a series of scientific, financial and political conferences whose aim is to project, as best as possible, what the actual effects are going to be across the nation. And then to assess what the best and most practical steps are to deal with these effects, and what the associated costs are.
