This is the editorial we posted today. We welcome your comments.
If anyone had any reservation that President Trump would soften his stance on Climate Change, or begin to embrace the business opportunities of clean energy, well you can lay those reservations to rest. Yesterday Trump signed an Executive Order that will begin to dismantle some of the most important environmental gains over the last decade. This Executive Order is an incentive and a gift to polluters and the oil and gas industries and is undoubtedly meant to tear apart the Clean Air Act. This order, for us at RNN, tells us that Trump is pushing polluter’s profits at the expenses of Americans’ health.
And, you ask yourself, why? When the US leapfrogs to new technology--horse and buggy to combustion engine, candles to light bulbs, wired to wireless--do we ever turn back to what is old and antiquated? Of course not. Here we are speeding through the clean energy economy, with amazing results and ROI's, right into the digital economy. We are quickly re balancing environmental protection with job creation and financial prosperity. Recognizing our past mistakes on stripping away our eco-capital, we are reversing and working again to build natural assets. Accepting, even begrudgingly, that there can be no commercial system without support from natural resources.
This fight has lead us to what? Innovation, clean tech, smart grids, smart city technology, a start up boom, historic global collaboration, amazing new companies, the birth of whole new industries and a reversal to bring both food and energy production local. What is the cheapest form of energy coming on to the grid today? Renewables. What is the fastest growing segment of our investment portfolios---impact investing funds. What are the best products made today? Those that are efficient, smart, high on reuse to cut costs and fully embracing new tech. Does burning oil and gas embrace new tech? Does it put us in a worldwide leadership position? Does it become a beacon of good public policy for others to follow?
On the pure ecological side, we don’t know if Trump has seen what is happening in other countries such as India and China. Back in January 2017, it was reported by Australian News outlet ABC, "That China had been covered in a thick toxic smog. It is one of the worst episodes of air pollution the country has seen, affecting 460 million people.
Coal is the major cause and will continue to be the country's biggest source of energy and air pollution. Although billions have been pledged for renewable energy, 200 new coal power plants will be built across the country."
The air quality in China is so bad that they have actually begun to important clean air in cans from Canada which we reported on back in November 2016.
There are hundreds of these similar reports coming out from couturiers around the world where people are suffering similar to what the people of China are experiencing. When you over produce, fail to protect your quality of life, race to pure profits at the expense of a community of any size, you lose the battle. You gain short term and sell your soul, and body, to the devil. As with life and faith, greed, selfishness, a failure to care about anything but your own warped view of success ends in a meltdown of epic proportions.
Of course at Renewable Now we care very much about jobs. About energy independence. About balance. We care about the jobs in fossil fuel. In those places we can extract, burn, consume with adequate protection of people and nature, we endorse their use. The Clean Air Act was designed to lead us, with bridge fuels, including natural gas, to, what we hoped, would be a day of 100% clean, renewable energy. Produced not just within a county--but keeping production in states, local, keeping that revenue and jobs in our backyard. Cutting long transportation and waste. Insuring resilience for each and every city and town.
Trump bills himself as a business genius. Has he calculated the cost of the health ramifications from embracing fossil fuels back to the public? Maybe he has, and maybe he just doesn’t care because this WAR on GREEN for him is personal, he feel he’s got something to prove and while he’s doing it we’ll all pay the price. And if he is wrong, have we lost, forever, all that we have gained? Have we stepped back in time and permanently crippled our chance to build a clean, healthy future?
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