A letter about climate change

Hello, my name is Milo.

I am writing to you today to talk about climate change and the lack of action by governments all over the world and how you can help to fix this massive problem. People keep saying that climate change will severely impact my generation but there seems to be this idea that severe change in the climate will happen in maybe...30 years? 25 years? 20 years ?

No. Climate change is here and if we don’t do something about it soon more people will die. Record high heat all across the nation, long droughts. In Wisconsin it feels like a summer that was meant for Florida!

And yet we still don’t do what we can to stop climate change. There are solutions yet people make excuses to not use them. Switch to clean energy? “It will hurt jobs” people say.

Green new deal? Nah it costs too much even though we spend 778 Billion dollars annually on the military that could be given to other things such as climate change research.

What is the point of giving that much money to the military when it could go to other things and the military would still easily have enough money to fund itself while research on climate change would be well funded, and for what it is worth and I don’t think that the military can fight a war against the climate.

And what is the point of caring for the jobs which will be easily replaceable by new job opportunities if we switch to clean energy if they don’t exist in a few years because of climate change and how badly it has affected us if we don’t take serious action at that point.

Hundreds of people died in the pacific northwest this summer from the record high heat waves according to the Guardian, the Washington Post, the New York Times and countless other credible sources. And more people will be dying as well if we do not fix this problem. Did you know that according to the EPA in 2019 6,558 million metric tons of carbon dioxide were added to the atmosphere. And you might say, “Oh trees will help.” Well mature trees do remove around 48 pounds of CO2 per year. Unfortunately because of how much Carbon dioxide we are producing they just slow climate change, not fix it. For them to help fix our climate crisis we have to get our yearly amount of CO2 to 0.

Luckily there are solutions even if they are small such as picking up plastic which has been tied to pollution and harm to the environment, writing to our politicians or people on the climate change committee about the urgency of this issue so that they can try to introduce and pass bills that will give more funding to climate change studies and cleanup efforts. And raising awareness and a better understanding of how bad this is.

This is a problem and there are solutions. Many solutions. So I hope that this article inspires you to do something about this serious issue and be part of the solution.

Thanks, Milo.