Sustainable U

The way we live our lives is putting our environment and public health at risk.  Global warming, caused largely by our reliance on fossil fuels, threatens to wreak havoc on our climate and way of life.  Air pollution causes asthma and respiratory diseases.  Mining and drilling continually threaten our oceans, waterways and landscapes.  Trash pollutes our water and uses valuable land.  

Fortunately, we both have solutions to these problems and have a long track record of being able to solve other environmental problems.  While we don't have every solution we'll ever need to stop global warming, stop trashing our communities and stop destroying our forests, we have a lot of them right now.  We can make plug-in hybrids that get more than 100 miles to the gallon and electric cars that use no gas.  We can harness the power of the sun and wind across the country to get our power without the dangers of oil and gas drilling or the destruction of coal mining.  And, we can make homes that are so efficient in how they use energy that they can produce everything they need on site.  We can also re-use, re-cycle, compost or simply avoid using most of the trash that's being thrown in landfills, incinerated or floating away into the trash island by simply changing the way we create products and handle them after their first use. 

Simply put, we have the resources and technology to solve nearly all of these problems and the ingenuity to figure out the solutions to the rest.  We simply need to build the political will to put these solutions into action across the country.  The polluting industries that cause these problems both have a ton of influence in Washington and in the states and have been doing everything they can to convince the country that a sustainable future isn't in the cards.  That leaves us in a situation where our neighbors think solving environmental problems can only happen at the expense of economic progress and our political leaders are unwilling to act.