In the media there have been constant reports of efforts to curb the world’s climate changes.
Numerous articles have been written, and vivid videos have been shown stressing reasons for curbing those changes that have sprung up — unexpectedly — in parts of the world, including in America, which had never before seen such changes of increased and concurrent destructive episodes of hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, flash floods and the uncommon, lengthy time periods of droughts and excruciatingly hot temperatures.
And in these curbing efforts, America has been successful in reducing the toxic gas emissions. I know this well because I have lived through those emission changes.
I was born into a coal miner family in southern Colorado. My maternal grandfather was a coal miner — as was my father and my maternal uncle and great uncle.
Living on a coal miner’s wages, our family of 10 used coal constantly for heating our home and bath water, and for cooking our meals. In so doing, we filled our air with smelly sulfur dioxide fumes.
From the day I was born and until the day I graduated, I breathed in those same toxic particles, which tinted our white curtains black, covered our ceiling with soot, and filled the miners’ lungs — which for some miners resulted in the fatal “black lung†disease.
But today, as many of us have felt, America has gotten rid of coal as poor people’s prime heating and cooking source, and America is presently replacing our cars’ liquid petroleum usage with electricity.
Soon, America will be the cleanest country in the world from fouling the air with toxic gasses and hoping to help curb those many climate change catastrophes. However, I now wish to offer herein a different view from America’s wishful hopes.
No matter how successful America’s efforts might be in producing clean air, other countries — which contain more many poor families — will continue to emit toxic particles exactly as did our family of yore.
Two of these other countries — China and India — for example, are not doing their part in keeping climate change to a minimum. They are not doing so, I believe, not because they do not want to, but because they simply cannot, no matter how hard they try: they simply have too many poor families.
According to Google’s data, America has a population of 332 million with a poverty rate of 11.6 %, or 3.8 million people. In contrast, China has more than 1.4 billion people, of which 185 million are poor. Similarly, India’s population of 1.4 billion includes 231 million people in poverty.
These two countries alone have a combined population of 416 million people who cannot afford fuels other than coal or wood. This combined poverty population of only two countries is 1.25 times larger than the entire population of America.
And when other countries’ data are factored in (Africa, Pakistan, South America and Europe, for example) the convincing realization is that climate change is here to stay, and even to become exacerbated.
So on this Labor Day, a day which made our family proud of our dad’s coal mine job, I would like to propose an added focus on using our climate changing expenditures. These foci are:
Shore up resources of contending with those sure-to-come climate change tragedies. Increase care systems of emergency response and add more and better equipped rural and urban fire departments. And provide greater numbers of police officers and health care personnel.
These are the true labor resources that will help families in their hours of need, and even to prevent some homes from being burned to the ground.
