Dear Next President,

I know you have tons of important things to do, but this is a really big problem. Climate change is a serious issue in this world that should be fixed. Many people don’t know the dangers of climate change. If we don’t stop this, in just 100 years or less, the risk of human extinction will be around 9.5%. If you look at the big picture, that is a lot. Think about it. As the years pass by, in 200 years, it could be 19%, then 28.5%, and so on. This is really more of a risk than we can afford. Robinson Meyers wrote on April 29, 2016, “The Stern Review, the U.K. government’s premier report on the economics of climate change, assumed a 0.1-percent risk of human extinction every year.” I don’t think anyone wants to die. This is one, because of the temperatures and overcrowding. The Earth’s temperature has really grown since 1880. A graph by NASA(at the bottom) made in 2015 shows the temperature rise from 1880 to 2015. It shows that over the time of around 1036 years, the global surface temperature has grown by around 1.7 degrees. That is a lot for the surface temperature to rise. This has to be fixed. The ice caps are melting because of this and sea levels are rising. The Union of Concerned Scientists(UCSUSA) said in 2014 that if we keep up the rate of producing this many emissions, the sea levels can rise to be the height of an average man. You can check out the infographic at this site: http://tinyurl.com/UCSUSA-info. Imagine this, you go to the beach now and it is around 20 miles away. After 34 years, it could be around 15 miles away. Think of how much land would be lost because of sea level rise. The oceans would rise and the polar ice caps would melt. Not only that, but because of the polar ice caps melting, many animals would lose their habitats and some of them would even become endangered.

There are ways we can either delay or solve this problem. One way is to increase the amount of electric cars on the road. UCSUSA reported, “Two-thirds of all Americans now live in areas where driving an EV produces fewer climate emissions than almost all comparable gasoline and gasoline hybrid cars—a fact attributable to more efficient EVs and an increasingly clean electricity grid.”(2015) That means that by buying electric cars, people are making a difference in their community. They are reducing the amount of pollution in their community. By more people doing so, they can help the entire world. By doing this, we can give more benefits of buying an electric car. Right now there is only the benefit that if you buy an electric car, you get a sticker that allows you to use the carpool lane with your electric car. By adding more benefits, people will be thinking, “Oh, this guy gets to work faster because he has an electric car.” which will cause more people to buy electric cars for their own benefit. Fossil fuels such as oil are a helping hand to global warming. The more we use them, the more smoke and carbon dioxide are released which absorb some of the the sun’s heat. Since electric cars run on electricity, they require less fossil fuels than normal gas cars. We can also reduce the amount of fossil fuels. We can use renewable sources such as windmills and solar panels. Justin Gillis, a researcher and author, says that using renewable sources such as the sun will help. Also Mathias Aarre Maehlum, a scientist working on energy, wrote, “Fossil fuels are not green sources of energy. In fact, they contain high amounts of carbon and have been blamed for being the main contributor to global warming.”(May 2, 2013).

Another big thing we can do is reduce airplane travel. David Biello an editor at Scientific American, states, “Cutting down on long-distance travel would also help, most notably airplane flights, which are one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions and a source that arguably releases such emissions in the worst possible spot (higher in the atmosphere).” By releasing greenhouse gases so high up, the pollution reaches the ozone layer faster and thus absorbing more heat. By reducing air travel, we reduce a lot of the greenhouse gas emissions.

Of course, there are some problems with these solutions. First off, electric cars are either too expensive or have too little of a range. On September 29, 2016, Brad Berman, a writer for plugin cars, said that most electric cars have a little range of 30 - 40 miles, and cost a lot like somewhere between $40,000 and $50,000. Also reducing the usage of fossil fuels could put many people out of jobs. A lot of people rely on gas stations for their job. Then with the airplanes, there’s the problem of jobs and families. A ton of people live away from their family in a distant country for a job and need air travel to go meet them and jobs send people overseas for some task. Reducing air travel could really affect these people. They wouldn’t be able to visit their family that often and many businesses would be restricted to one area.

First off, there are new electric cars coming that are cheap and with a good mile range. There is the Tesla Model 3 and the Chevy Bolt. Both are cheap and have a mile range of just over 200 miles. This would really increase the amount of electric car owners but we could put more and more research into finding ways to increase the mile range for the cheaper cars such as the Nissan Leaf. Reducing fossil fuels wouldn’t reduce that many jobs. There are Tesla Superchargers which are like gas stations for electric cars. You could have people pay to use them but not as much as the gas. Also most jobs at gas stations are in the stores next to it. You could put those stores next to the Superchargers as well or just them as stops along the road. Then, With the airplanes, we have so many resources in this world that we could invest some of them to find ways to reduce the amount of emissions released by airplanes or find better ways to travel. That way airplanes could be used either the same or less and people would still be able to travel overseas. Another thing for businesses is that we have many other ways to communicate such as Skype and Slack. My dad worked with people internationally and because of Slack and other ways of communications, he never had to travel overseas even though there were tasks that were overseas. By not having to travel a lot overseas for work, he saved a lot of time and pollution.

Consider these reasons and solutions carefully and meticulously. Climate change is a serious condition that isn’t addressed seriously enough. It is not something to be overlooked. There are serious dangers that come from climate change. People have ignored it for so long and look at where we are now. California has been in a drought for so long, the ice caps are melting, and human extinction risk has increased. There is no reason this should be ignored now that it has gone so far into its stages.There is too much at stake for global warming to be ignored. There are tons of people’s lives that are at stake. We must try to either delay it or stop it fully. Hopefully, you will not goof around with the topic and take a stand against climate change since this is a problem that will affect us physically and environMENTALly.

Sincerely,

Saksham Madaan

Bibliography:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/10-solutions-for-climate-change/

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles#.WB6m-jsUVBU

http://climate.nasa.gov/

http://www.plugincars.com/electric-cars-pros-and-cons-128637.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/a-human-extinction-isnt-that-unlikely/480444/

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/28/science/what-is-climate-change.html

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/10-solutions-for-climate-change/