The New York Times has published an amazing tool, that shows the last year’s temperature for many cities around the world. Port Townsend was 1.4 degrees warmer than average last year.
Our average temperature was 53.3 degrees F. Our politicians on the right, continue to fiddle while the world burns. Help vote them out this year. Give money to political campaigns, like Emily’s List that are fighting to put in politicians that believe in Global Warming and want to pass legislation to do something about it. What could be passed that could help? Here’s a few ideas:
- Force a conversion of all coal fired power plants to natural gas as quickly as possible (which is a bridging strategy to the future). Rate payers will have to be the ones to pay for this, with some government assistance for bridging loans.
- Support mass installation of solar panels everywhere viable in the US. Think south of a line drawn from the Ohio River west, just as a start. This would create millions of new jobs, especially in lower income communities. There should be no roof left without some solar panels south of that line.
- Shut down off shore oil drilling and move the workers to creating a national network of off shore wind farms. Do it as a national emergency, to overcome the legal objections of Not in My Backyard by people wanting to protect their coastal views. Fund this with future bonds, or from the Defense budget.
- Support R&D for electric automobiles. Take the money from the Defense budget. A few less Cruise missiles for example could fund it.
- Support significant tax breaks for buying electric cars and bicycles.
- Support buildout of a electric vehicle charging station infrastructure across the country. This can also come from the Defense budget.
- Triple support for mass transit to get people out of cars.
- Support building high speed rail service between major cities, to get people out of jet fueled airplanes for short hauls. Another Defense budget move. Remember Interstate Highways were built as a national defense infrastructure to move troops in times of war.
Bottom line, these things will make us safer, get us further from dependence on fascist and religious fundamentalist regimes in places like the Middle East, stop us from needing to run coal and oil trains through our cities, giving us greater freedom and not less. What stands in the way? The Republicans in the State and Federal government. It’s time to vote them out. The status quo is the Titanic and the iceberg is global warming.
Scientists declared that 2015 was Earth’s hottest year on record. In a database of 3,116 cities provided by AccuWeather, about 90 percent of them were warmer than normal.