ON BUILDING PATHS INTO THE FUTURE

Here is something I have seen again and again over the past seven decades. When we have seen the need, we have always rallied to repair any damage we were doing to our children’s futures. In fact, many of you were the very children we preserved the future for. I was here. I saw it all. We have had problems just as hard, with fewer tools, and with very powerful people trying to stop us, and still, we got the job done. Today, we have a serious problem, and many powerful people trying to stop us from succeeding, but we have the tools, and we have a future so bright that it will take most of this book to describe it.

The proof that we can repair the damage we have done to the atmosphere is significant and historical.

We have done this before … a dozen or more times. Through the centuries, we have damaged the Earth, often disastrously, but we have also shown that we can repair the damage, and it’s always involved the same pattern:

1. Science tells us that we have a problem.
2. We the people demand that the problem be fixed.
3. Corporations, willing to behave badly for profit, lobby Washington in an attempt to stop legislation that would cure the problem.
4. Members of the House and Senate, who are allied with the corporations drag their feet, and try to block legislation (we see a lot of that now).
5. We identify the rascals and vote them out
6. The new members of Congress legislate solutions to the problem.
7. The planet heals.

To repair major damage to our environment usually takes a population demanding that our representatives act on our behalf. To do this, some of us become proactive, forming committees, protesting in the streets, writing letters, voting, and the like, but we can only do what we can do. In every case, we have needed our government to act, and in every case we have made them do it.

• Coal-fired power plants once produced so much acid rain that they were killing forests and fish across the Northeast, but we stopped it and reversed the damage. This required legislating strict limits on sulfur emissions, which coal producers and utilities opposed because compliance meant installing expensive scrubbers and modernizing old plants.


• We poisoned our inner cities with tetraethyl lead in gasoline, especially poisoning our inner city children, but we stopped those emissions. Removing lead from gasoline faced strong resistance from oil companies and engine manufacturers who argued that unleaded fuel would damage engines and increase costs. We solved the problem by installing catalytic converters in vehicles and replacing lead with ethanol.


• We drove condors, wolves, bison, beavers, Peregrine falcons, and other keystone species to the brink of extinction, but we brought them back. Protecting these species means lost revenue from habitat restrictions and hunting limits, which ranching, logging, and development interests fought for decades. Still, we made it happen.


• We tore a hole in the ozone layer the size of Antarctica, but when we banned the relevant chemicals, the ozone began to heal. Chemical manufacturers resisted the ban on CFCs, claiming that alternatives were to costly and that the science was not proven. But we prevailed and danged if the chemical industries didn’t find acceptable substitutes for the old chemicals.


• We polluted rivers so badly that some of them caught fire, but we cleaned them, and today the Cuyahoga, Potomac, Hudson, Delaware, Willamette Rivers, and the entire Chesapeake watershed all run clear. Cleaning these waterways required regulating industrial waste and municipal sewage, which many industries opposed because it forced them to install treatment systems and change long-standing disposal practices.


• In some major cities (e.g., LA), the air pollution was so bad that children couldn’t play outside. Today, the skies are largely clear. Automakers resisted catalytic converters and emissions standards, arguing they would make cars too expensive and reduce performance. These catalytic converters are the same ones that made it impossible to burn leaded gasoline (the lead fouled them). In this case we killed two birds with one stone (apologies to bird lovers – this was just a metaphor).


• Lake Erie was declared dead, but we brought phosphorus and wastewater treatment under control, and restored the wetlands, fish populations, water clarity, plus tourism and recreation. Agricultural and industrial groups pushed back against phosphorus limits, claiming fertilizer restrictions and wastewater upgrades would be too costly.


• There are more than 1,340 superfund sites, where we have removed toxic materials and replaced them with healthy ones. Cleaning these sites required holding polluters financially responsible, which they resisted, using litigation and lobbying to limit liability.

These were all significant problems with huge health impacts, especially for children, the elderly, and the disadvantaged. If we had not solved these problems, by now we wouldn’t need to worry about climate change. That would be the least of our problems, but we fixed them. However, we did not fix them through individual efforts. We fixed them by urging our government towards action. And there were enough concerned heroes in our government to undo bad corporate behavior and replace it with better behavior. And once we had acted, the planet was able to repair itself.

This process worked because we responded as soon as we became aware of a problem. We demanded action, and action followed, because together we were strong, and, imperfect though it is, our government acted in the best interests of the people because the people put their collective heels on the government’s neck.

Now, we have to fix our climate. We have all of the tools, processes, and technologies we need to fix this problem, but one industry stands in our way. The fossil fuel industry has spent billions in an effort to denigrate the entire science community and thwart legislation that would solve the problem. So, we can reasonably say that our government has not been doing its job. For example, in 2025, it became public that eleven Senators were on ExxonMobil’s payroll. That’s eleven percent of the Senate literally on call, working for the oil industry! But don’t think that was a problem with one party. Five of those senators were Republicans, five of them were Democrats, and one was an independent, and of the eleven, five are still holding office.

We had critical legislation in place with the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, but when the Trump Administration came to power in January 2025, it gutted the Act. The thing we have to do for the sake of our children is to identify their enemies and get those enemies out of government, no matter what their party.

Although our government is currently actively opposing climate change remediation, all is not lost.

We don’t hear much about it, but around the world, countries are doing their share. China leads the way with energy production, having installed more battery-backed-up solar arrays than all other countries in the world combined. But others are doing their parts:

• Denmark has a strong national energy policy and is the world leader in wind energy.


• Sweden will be at net-zero by 2045.


• India has a national policy of renewable energy and already among the lowest per-capita emissions.


• The Philippines and Morocco have high scores for renewable-energy expansion.



I will speak much more about what the rest of the world is doing in a relevant segment of the book.