The Coming Climate Crisis
In the 1930s, reckless farming practices and extreme drought caused massive dust storms all across the American prairie. Tens of millions of acres of farmland blew away with the wind and five hundred thousand Americans became environmental refugees.
Since then, a lot has changed. We've put a man on the moon, eradicated smallpox and built a global society connected by satellites, cell phones and the internet.
What hasn't changed is our need for water. Without it, we die. We can’t drink, we can’t bathe and we can’t grow food.
Water is our most precious resource. It’s also one of the scarcest. Less than one tenth of one percent of all the water on earth is safe and available for us to use. One in five people worldwide doesn’t have safe drinking water. One in two don’t have water for sanitation.
In the United States, the fossil fuel industry has brought the water crisis to our doorstep. Mining and drilling have poisoned countless communities' drinking water with methane, benzene, lead, and thousands of other known carcinogens and deadly toxins, leaving parents helpless to protect their children from what comes out of the tap.
What we get in exchange for those billions of gallons of poisoned water is a warming planet. If we don’t dramatically reduce carbon emissions soon, we’ll pass the point of no return.
For many, climate change has already destroyed the American dream. Last year, an all-time record of almost 1,000 tornadoes tore through the heart of the country, killing more than 500 people and causing billions of dollars of damage. Hundreds more died when flooding along the Mississippi river - the result of the Midwest's wettest year in a century - washed away tens of thousands of homes and forced thousands more to evacuate. Meanwhile, in the midst of a historic drought in the Southwest, millions of acres of land were burning.
This is just the beginning. By the end of the century, the ocean could rise by six feet, inundating coastal cities, while catastrophic hurricanes, floods, droughts, crop failures, tornadoes and wildfires make our way of life impossible.