Should We be Considered an Endangered Species?

If catastrophic climate change is for real and is as devastating as most of the world’s scientists say it could be, most of us would be killed prematurely by its effects.

The naysayers tell us it’s a big hoax; it’s just big corporations finding a new way to make money, and more government taking over our lives.

And anyway, for us to build an entirely new alternative Energy System would create more enormous debt that our children and grandchildren would have to pay back.

And With our present economy the last thing we need is more debt!

But let’s stop and think. What if it is a real and present danger? Can we afford to do nothing or very little? Is our national debt a bigger threat then the possible extinction of most life on earth? These are really tough questions and nobody has complete and perfect answers.

And by the way, the gathering body of evidence from the applicable scientists, is that the really bad part is coming a lot sooner than originally thought. This means that most of humanity will be extinct within 40 to 50 years.

It’s sort of like this is one big scientific experiment: let’s see how much carbon dioxide we can pump into the air before the climate is radically changed and the kind of life that is now on earth will no longer be able to survive. This is basically like we’re living in a test tube, and nobody really knows how the experiment is going to work out.

Let’s look at some possibilities:

1. We do nothing to solve the problem and there never was a problem. O.K., we win.

2. We spend a huge amount of money and we replace the oil and coal Energy System with an alternative nonpolluting Energy System. We may end up ducking the bullet and saving humanity. Maybe there never was a problem and we will never know. We would then have a whole new Energy System that’s no longer dependent on foreign oil and we’ve ended that kind of pollution in the world, not an entirely bad way to go.

3. We spend a lot of money to build a completely new alternative Energy System that is nonpolluting even though it’s too late or beyond the tipping point. We’re all dead and it doesn’t matter if we run up the debt.

4. We do nothing, because we don’t believe there’s a problem, most of life on earth is gone, our young children today and our grandkids of tomorrow, all die.