Planet Earth Needs You

Is new development really good for your community? Are there limits to what your local community can support? Have we reached the point where further development results in a decrease in the quality of life for the majority of its residents? With the planet heating up faster than predicted and the effects of the global increase in temperature occurring faster and more severely a more thorough look at further development of our local community would seem  necessary.  Severe rain events that last longer and bring many inches of rain in a very short time are occurring much more frequently and causing extensive damage to local communities. Wildfires that destroy our homes and send smoke that keeps us in our homes, with windows and doors sealed tight so we are not made sick by breathing them. Droughts that destroy crops and grazing fields result in higher priced food for us. More hurricanes with stronger winds staying long and reaching further inland are destroying our local commun...

  By Nancy Williams and Michael Coppola The tobacco industry touted the filtered cigarette as being safer than their unfiltered brands in order to keep selling cigarettes, but the filtered cigarette was not actually safer. Now we see similar misinformation from the auto industry, backed by the powerful fossil fuel industry that the Hybrid Internal Combustion Engine Vehicle [HICEV] is less polluting than the Internal Combustion Engine Vehicle [ICEV] and, therefore, it can get us to achieve the goal of the Paris Agreement of staying below a 2 degree C increase or hopefully below a 1.5 degree C increase. How much time do we have left to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement? According to all sources we cannot meet the 1.5 goal by 2030 as required and are headed to exceeding 2.0 C by the mid 2030’s if we continue on our current path. However, it is still possible to halt warming to 2.0 C if we were to immediately dramatically reduce our greenhouse emissions. The latest data shows ...

By Michael Coppola When it comes to the climate emergency there are two allegories that exemplify what has gone on in the USA for the past hundred years or so. For the citizens it is that of the frog slowly being cooked in the pot of water and for the political leaders it’s Nero fiddling while Rome burns. If one looks at the headlines in the media, we see the Epstein scandal; the war crimes in Gaza and Ukraine; the death of democracy; the tariff policy of a deranged president. Rarely does one see even a footnote mention of the climate crisis even after the reporting of wildfires; hurricanes and massive flooding destroying neighborhoods. If we do not stop the politicians from fiddling and the citizens don't begin to feel the heat, business will continue as usual and we will lose the last opportunity to save ourselves. The science tells us that we have less than 5 years to dramatically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Currently we are increasing our emissions. The ...

  By Nancy Williams and Michael Coppola Greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase in the United States.  If we want to keep the increase in global temperature from rising to the level that will make it very difficult to survive, shouldn't we be spending taxpayer money on the most cost-effective solutions; the ones that are already available and can be implemented the fastest?  We have to question the government spending $808,000,000 in grant money on a technology that will not be commercially available for almost a decade and will contribute little to the reduction in GHG emissions. The Federal government is offering that $808 million as a grant to the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) for the development of a nuclear reactor known as a Small Modular Reactor (SMR). There are several types of SMR's that are being investigated today. Some are designs that were rejected in the 1970's. The type that the TVA is betting our tax money on is a modified design of the reactors b...

  by Michael Coppola and Nancy Williams We are stuck in a world of two battling tribes. One believes in man-made climate change and one that denies it. Even when storms repeatedly destroy a person's home, often that person, if he is a climate denier, will come up with some reason to continue denying the existence of the crisis. They will say such things as, we have always had storms; it's God's will; man is being so arrogant to think he could effect a change in the climate. Are they reacting this way because they have to support their tribe? The other tribe believes that these events are happening because the climate is changing. Human activity has been putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere at a rate that far exceeds anything the planet has seen in the lifetime of humans. They cannot understand why people would deny the evidence and conclusions of climate experts.  The tribe believing in climate change may fail to see that some of the climate deniers have a legitima...

By Michael Coppola and Nancy Williams The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated that not only must we immediately stop burning fossil fuels that add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, but we must also remove them to get the level back to pre-industrial levels to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. They say that once removed these gasses must be stored so they are not released back into the atmosphere. Planting trees is one of the ways that we can remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Most people know, and what we often see in the media, is that trees take in carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas and give off oxygen, which helps in the battle against global warming. However, there are other ways that trees battle climate change. What is rarely talked about is that trees cool the environment in other ways. They take in water and move it through the whole tree; ultimately sending the water out via little holes in its leaves to the atmosphere using the ...