Several vectors in today’s world threaten human civilization, e.g., nuclear war and runaway artificial intelligence, but the one that’s bearing down on us like a train wreck is climate change.
Tragically, this crisis is especially challenging for humans to confront due to the subtlety of its workings, a slow accumulation of carbon dioxide and other pollutants in our atmosphere and the complexity of its impacts.
Though less stark to visualize than nuclear winter or robot armies, climate change is already leaving its calling card all around us, including Biblical-scale “100-year” storms and hurricanes, drought, wildfire, and polar vortex disruptions that burn Alaska and deep-freeze the Midwest and Northeast.
Here in Clallam County, we witness shrinking glaciers and water supplies, freak storms, fires burning in our rain forest, poisonous algal blooms and acidifying, “blob-forming” seas.
Sadly, our national leadership is too blind, too self-centered, too timid, or too well-paid by fossil fuel interests to attack this problem at the necessary scale and speed, at least until the 2020 elections, which may well seal the fate of humankind.
Until then, we must lead the way at the state and local levels, and this election is no less crucial; the true test of moral courage of our candidates is their position on climate change.
Please, therefore, support the following local candidates who have taken positions showing leadership on this issue: for county commissioner, Mark Ozias; for port commissioner, Maury Modine; for Port Angeles city council, Richard Robinson, Navarra Carr and Brendan Meyer; and Port Angeles School Board, Katie Marks.
Ed Chadd,
Port Angeles