Letter: Green New Deal: Our lives depend on it

Posted 3/10/19

To the editor:

In "Uninhabitable Earth," David Wallace-Wells points out that the greenhouse gas emissions that threaten to overwhelm our planet have not been steadily rising since …

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Letter: Green New Deal: Our lives depend on it

Posted

To the editor:

In "Uninhabitable Earth," David Wallace-Wells points out that the greenhouse gas emissions that threaten to overwhelm our planet have not been steadily rising since industrialization.

In fact, it has been an exponential rise — with almost all of the climate-changing pollutants released in the last 30 years. That's since the first episode of Seinfeld aired.

I am 33, and I now understand that my whole life I have participated in disrupting the majestic equilibrium that has allowed life on earth to flourish since the last mass extinction. I've tried to recycle, sure. Even reduce and reuse. And my first car was a hybrid.

The point is: the scale of this problem is societal. It's a total myth that individual choices to travel or consume less could be enough to turn the tide. Only the Green New Deal is conceptualized at a scale that can salvage our habitat for generations to come. Our lives, and our children's lives, depend on it.

And as the generation who is primarily responsible — after millennia of human life — of catastrophically altering the Earth's atmosphere, really, it's the least we can do. I have never been a single issue voter, but I now recognize that without truly bold action on climate change, the other issues will all be taking a back seat to continuous massive storms, floods, fires, and freezes.

Please, join me in prioritizing the Green New Deal so we can have ground (literally) on which to fight for all other causes.

Toby Kramer

Tiverton

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