Clean power for healthy future

I have a vested interest in the reduction of carbon emissions from fossil-fuel power plants. I have three children and a grandson. Air pollution from burning fossil fuels threatens them and their future. It threatens your families, too. In fact, these gases threaten the future of our planet.

Sometimes it is hard to grasp the magnitude of our current dilemma. After all, our planet is millions of years old, and mankind has been around for 40,000 of those years. However, the Industrial Revolution is a recent phenomenon in Earth’s history. Since its inception, 200 or so years ago, man has escalated the potential for the planet’s demise a million-fold.

President Barack Obama, trying to address this travesty, designed the Clean Power Plan to reduce life-threatening pollution by 32 percent by 2030. And yet, even that minor accomplishment has been stayed from implementation due to Big Coal’s legal challenge, which is before the Supreme Court.

Big Coal and Big Oil would do themselves and us a favor if they would just divest themselves of the polluting energies now and invest in clean energy. Our politicians should also step up and facilitate new jobs and new futures for coal region citizens by supporting solar and wind power, medical complexes, technology centers and other modern ideas.

This story was originally published March 16, 2016 at 7:58 PM with the headline "Clean power for healthy future."