“My mom was telling me tonight about what an incredible time it is to be alive. She said that of the billions of years the Earth has been in existence and of the millions of years that humans have been evolving, we are now, in this decade which is just a blink of an eye in the history of our world, facing our own extinction. We hold the future in our hands at this second.

Listen, If we keep doing what we’re doing now, your parents, children, pets, loved ones will never see another day.

Not only do we need to have STOPPED burning fossil fuels by now, but we need to be healing the planet. No travel unless necessary.

No lights or power at your home unless it’s renewables. Why can’t we all have renewables? Who is keeping us away from that type of thing? Each and every person needs to be working on renewable energy and whether you think it or not, your actions impact whether you live tomorrow or life as we know it ends.

Forgetting to turn off the lights before you go to work, throwing your Subway wrapper on the ground, dumping your excess craft paint, you don’t realize how much you are hurting this once so beautiful place we all call home. The place you call home will turn into hell in less then a decade. Together, we can get these dumb drilling idiots to be overpowered by us active smart people. People are being brainwashed and it honestly scares me to be born with such a short lifespan. I’m only 12. I deserve a future and the fossil fuel industry ruined that for me. Imagine I never even met these people and they ruined my future. How does that make sense? It’s shameful…

I’m done with sugar coating it. I’m straight out saying it. If we don’t stop what we’re doing, the ground will turn to molten lava in a matter of years. Our surface will be like Venus is today.”
_____________________________

The above letter was written a while back by one of my daughters.

Hopefully it hits you as hard as it hits me. She, and my other three kids are the reason I started spending literally all of my available time to fight climate change and the forces that keep us from reversing, or at least minimizing the worst parts of global warming. I promised this daughter, the one who wrote those paragraphs above, a solemn promise last summer that I would “fix this” for her. And she said that she believed I would because I had never let her down before.

Last night, she came across me sitting at my desk looking pretty upset while reading the National Petroleum Council’s ridiculous press release about their “report” to the Department of Energy regarding drilling for oil in the Arctic. The Arctic, of course,  is a place that is made more accessible to gas and oil companies because of the melting sea ice, caused by the very people that now want to use that environmental “tipping point” to their advantage to drill for MORE oil. And such activities will surely release more methane because of the increasingly melted permafrost. For these reasons, this region of the world is being referred to as the “Arctic Time Bomb.”

Here is a video of this same daughter “reading” me a letter she “wrote.” Even though this video is many years old, it is one of my favorites, for obvious reasons…

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