2023 Can Be the Year We Save the Planet
Source: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/save-the-planet
Author: John Nichols
The time to take climate change seriously arrived decades ago. Unfortunately, politicians in both parties were neglectful. Republicans chose to deny the crisis. Democrats chose to imagine that it could be met with half-steps. Former Vice President Al Gore is not alone in suggesting, "We are running out of time, and we must have a planetary solution to a planetary crisis." Domestically, the new Republican-controlled U.S. House is going to do everything in its power to undermine the minimal progress that has been made since Joe Biden and the Democrats took charge in 2021. As Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic warns: "If history is any indication, a Republican Congress could spell doom for climate policy. Since the early 1990s, when the GOP took a turn toward climate-change denialism, the party has been one of the world's top enemies of climate policy." "The world as we knew it is coming to an end, and it's up to us how it ends and what comes after," Solnit explains. "It's the end of the age of fossil fuel, but if the fossil fuel corporations have their way the ending will be delayed as long as possible, with as much carbon burned as possible. If the rest of us prevail, we will radically reduce our use of those fuels by 2030, and almost entirely by 2050. We will meet climate change with real change, and defeat the fossil fuel industry in the next nine years."