I have an old 17’ powerboat that my wife and I take out to the Intracoastals a couple of times a week. Yesterday we were drifting in Tarpon Bay and I took a picture that I posted on Facebook saying that we need to work to preserve this. Every State has there treasures and our lakes, rivers and oceans have always been part of them. All my life I have lived near water and could not imagine life without them. I grew up in Kenosha, Wisconsin right on the shores of Lake Michigan. On a clear day we could see some of the Chicago skyline form our shores. We had a sailboat and we enjoyed the lake as much as we could. Moving to Florida to be near the Gulf just seemed to make sense. I have been down here now for two years and it seems that the Red Tide and the Green Algae are still a problem. I read an editorial from an Orlando newspaper that stated that if you treat your state like a toilet you can’t be surprised when it backs up. We have a beautiful recourse here that we need to do more to preserve for our future generations.

When I was a kid we did a lot of swimming in Lake Michigan. There was an area that we use to call the cove that was at the end of 68^th street that we would go swimming there quite often. It was not really a cove, it was just an open area for the storm sewer run off could flow into the lake but we were kids so what did we know. Also there was the pumping station for the American Brass where they would pump water out of the lake to use in the fabrication of their copper products. Sometimes you could see the green discharge oozing up from behind the pumping station. When I was growing up the water quality of the lake was not monitored like it is now so we had no idea what we were swimming in. I always wonder how many sicknesses were caused by that water. The Great Lakes have come a long way in the last 60 years. One reason there was a comeback with Lake Michigan is because we started monitoring what we were dumping in the lake but the other thing was that the industry that was causing a lot of the pollution is just no longer there. It is good to not have the pollution but the loss of the jobs is really sad.

In many ways we have cleaned up our environment but, in many ways we are still lagging behind the rest of the world. We are still trying to save coal jobs that should never come back and we are still too dependent on oil, two of the largest polluters of today. They are also two of the industries that lobby the hardest against a green economy. Not pursuing a green economy is just making us fall farther behind the rest of the world. Those lobbies that are bribing our politicians don’t care about the future of our country and in some cases the future of our planet. They care about profit and the future of their corporation and many times it is a foreign corporation. Do you really think that a Saudi Prince or a Russian Oligarch care about the future of any of our grandchildren. They use your own hate against you so they can keep on making huge profits. The saddest part of all of this is that our own government knows that all this is true but too many of our own politicians are just getting to much money to help promote change.

Climate change is real and it is not going to go away. It may actually be too late to reverse a lot of it. We can pray for rain out west to battle the draught conditions but we need to start preparing for that not happening. The solution, let’s start preparing to move people to places that have the water is to support the people and move the industry that will be needed. Science is not going to change what is happening out west. Science can only at this point help us prepare for what is going to happen and we need to start preparing for. At the least, we need to start talking about it. We need to get people to the areas that can sustain the population. I don’t mean that we have to abandon California but get it to the point where the water supply and the people can sustain themselves. The same with Vegas and many other parts of the west that are suffering the effects of climate change.

These are really hard discussions that have to happen and with today’s political climate will not happen. We need to get the climate deniers out of Washington. We need to have election reform to get the bribery out of Washington. Those two things are holding us back and are making us lose our standing as a leader in the world. When it comes to climate change a strong military will not help us. A green economy is the economy of the future. We can either lead or we can follow. We use to be leaders.