Change our ways before it’s too late

By Becky Hall

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I joined 100Grannies.org, a new and growing environmental group of older women in Iowa City, after reading James Hansen's book, Storms of Our Grandchildren, and Bill McKibben's Eaarth,

I realized that the science is clear, that evidence is overwhelming, that climate change is happening much faster than we thought and that humans are responsible. And that I was born into the generation and the country that is the most to blame for the problem. I also realized that if I don't want my grandchildren to live in a very inhospitable world, I needed to step up and do something before my life is over.

Time is quickly running out for humans to take the decisive steps necessary to avoid the catastrophic effects of climate change. Failure to shift away from the burning of fossil fuels, which emit the greenhouse gases warming the planet, will condemn my grandchildren and their peers to living in a world that lacks enough water and food for everyone.

Such a world, where people struggle to acquire basic necessities, will be brutish and nasty. It will be a world where people scramble to find high ground as increasingly frequent extreme weather causes more and more floods, floods such as my family and many others experienced in 2008 when we were flooded out of our homes.

Populations also will be subjected to unbearable heat waves where the mercury stays above 100 degrees for most of the summer, even worse than this summer when Iowa City experienced strings of days above normal temperatures.

Scientists tell us we can avoid this grimmest of futures if we can contain global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, 3.6 Fahrenheit. As 350.org founder McKibben pointed out in a recent Rolling Stone article, our “carbon budget” before we hit 2 degrees C of warming is 565 gigatons of CO2. The fossil fuel industry is sitting on coal, oil and gas reserves that, if extracted and burned, would emit 2,795 gigatons of carbon dioxide, five times the carbon budget for staying in the safe zone.

The greed of the fossil fuel industry would mean leaving our grandchildren with an unliveable world, one where the average global temperatures will increase by 11 degrees F. The scary thing is this is exactly what the fossil fuel industry plans to do!

The members of the American Petroleum Institute, the Koch brothers and all the fossil fuel companies of the world are sitting on trillions of dollars worth of assets that they must burn to make their money. Estimated spending on television ads promoting coal and more oil and gas drilling or criticizing clean energy will exceed $153 million to defeat a candidate who will slow our path to self-destruction. These companies' leaders have little or no concern for the fate of our heirs or, apparently, of theirs.

We must put our civilization on a path to end our destructive addiction to fossil fuels. It means putting a tax on carbon-based fuels, speeding the shift to clean renewable energy and more efficient transportation. Tax credits for solar energy, as Iowa has passed, will help make that shift.

This path begins with everyone writing a letter to our congressmen and women, our governor and legislators. Give them permission and the gumption to stand up to corporations that would mortgage our future for short-term profits. It's the least we can do for our grandchildren.

Becky Hall of Iowa City is a retired elementary teacher for the Iowa City school district. Comments: beckyhall2012@gmail.com