The second urgent issue that concerns me is our national disregard for climate change. The vast majority of climate scientists conclude that the human inhabitants of the earth are responsible for global warning. We are already seeing the results with fires raging in California and Australia, communities world-wide facing floods, and islands disappearing as the volume of water in our oceans grows as a result of melting ice in our two polar regions. Venice is now flooded, and coastal communities as well as islands in the U.S. are sinking. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just issued a report warning us that the time to make changes is now.
But the U.S. government is ignoring the problem. President Trump maintains that global warming is a hoax. He has taken us out of the 2015 Paris Agreement, an international pact designed to avert the effects of global warming. The Republican Senate refuses to take any steps to ameliorate the growing threat. We have, in effect, another year to wait until the government installed as a result of the 2020 election takes action to ward off disaster.
So my two greatest concerns about the future of our country and the world—gun deaths and global warming—won’t be addressed in the United States until 2021. By then another 40,000 U.S. citizens will have been killed by guns, and low-lying regions, including islands in the Chesapeake Bay, will be swamped by rising tides.
Maybe the impeachment of Trump and the increased unpopularity of the Republicans will save us sooner. I doubt it.
Tom Glenn, Writer 