Our planet is becoming a perilous environment for humans and other living things. It is becoming toxic. Our air, water, land, food, and animals are being contaminated daily: toxic water from fracking, overflowing landfills, the destruction of the earth through coal removal and processing, depleted topsoil through monoculture crops, methane about to be released from the thawing of the permafrost in the Arctic, overfishing of our oceans, GMOs in our food, bees dying from pesticide use. The list goes on. Most urgent is global climate change caused by our use of fossil fuels.
We must change our economy and our culture. We must disengage from the current economic model which requires constant growth and which stimulates artificial “needs” while not fulfilling genuine human needs. We must move away from our consumerism and materialism. We must stop rewarding greed and extraction. We must build community by doing such things as encouraging local self-reliance in food production. It will all end soon if we don’t.
Some of these goals are beyond the direct purview of the EPA. But the EPA can influence the administration and Congress and other government agencies in ways that we citizens cannot. We thank the EPA for labeling carbon emissions as pollution that can be regulated. We thank it for its critique of the State Department’s Environmental Review of the Keystone XL pipeline. Please hold firm on those stances and expand them. Please don’t give in to pressure from the fossil fuel industry. We want the EPA to take an aggressive stand to fight for our planet and reject the powerful lobbies of the money-hungry corporations that will let us all die for a dollar.
We propose that the United States Adopt a Carbon Tax, as described by the Citizens Climate Lobby: