It’s Not Only What Climate Change Will Do To Our City, It’s What It Will Do To Our Whole Network
We live in a complex interdependent world, where most of the connections are invisible to us. Our city does not grow its own food. It does not supply its own water locally. We do not supply our own electricity. We do not supply our own gasoline, or natural gas. We have jobs outside the city. We do not build our own highways. We do not regulate our clean air or water. Climate change, and our efforts to fight it, will involve this entire network.
The commerce that our incomes depend on, are regional, state, national, and international. Our retirement plans invest worldwide. Our health can be affected by flu strains and diseases all over the world, and carried world-wide in a day. We all have relatives in other cities.
Oceanside cities have to obey the maxim, that with great enjoyment comes great responsibility. They have to guard the purity of the ocean from pollution, and from over fishing, and from oil drilling threats. They have to fight sea level rise, ocean acidification, and ocean warming destroying coral reefs. They have to regenerate sea life and fisheries with Marine Protection Areas. They have to prepare for increased storm intensities, as has been demonstrated by five severe hurricanes in the last two years. While opening the cities to welcome visitors, they have to protect the ocean from their abuses of them.
We are even in battles with our federal government on all aspects of our state’s and our representative’s ability to regulate our own environmental pollution.
The battle against greenhouse gas emissions is personal, local, nationwide, and global. We are all in this together. Persons displaced by climate change worldwide could run in the hundreds of millions. As the world’s second greatest greenhouse gas polluter, and the greatest per capita polluter, the US is responsible to control its pollution, and to aid countries and people affected by climate change. This starts even on our own shores.
I can drone on illustrating all of these points, but they are well known, and some are studied individually in this blog.
United We Stand, Divided We Fall.
