Dear Future president,

Picture a world in which children in coastal towns can play in the streets without fear of flood waters, where everyone is working together towards a common goal. Wouldn’t a world like that be a good thing? As the holder of the highest office in the land, you are responsible for a lot of things that involve the country and well being of its citizens. As a concerned citizen myself, I find the need to express my opinion over one of the most important issues that this country is faced with: Climate change.

Climate change is an issue that affects all of the people on this planet. A simple increase in the global temperature of the Earth can easily destabilize the life that lives here and upset the connections between the people and the environment. The leading cause of this warming trend is the emission of harmful greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. These emissions can come from a number of sources, the main ones being cars and power plants. Currently, the U.S. is likely to fall short of the targeted level of emissions as set by various climate agreements. According to experts, even if the current climate control measures are implemented, the U.S. will still fall short of its emissions goals. As stated before, cars are a main source of these harmful greenhouse gasses with the majority of them not being as clean as they could be. “ Like the vast majority of vehicles, it falls short of the emissions benchmark set by the Paris committee for 2030 ”Says experts who studied the top cars in the U.S. This proves that climate change is a pressing issue and much of how we are using fossil fuels reflects directly in the data. The U.S. alone is responsible for seven percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions- totaling to about 5,425 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

I am aware that some people out there believe that climate change is a myth or over exaggerated by the media and scientists. To these people, I would like to point out the fact that there is in fact data to back up climate change. According to experts, greenhouse gasses are in fact responsible for a gradual increase in the world’s temperature. “These gasses have caused the Earth’s temperature to rise over the past century to levels that cannot be explained by natural variability” The fact of the matter is that these emissions are very harmful to the environment and need to be controlled/limited. This is where you come in future president; as the leader of this country it is up to you whether the United States will set an example for the world to follow and take action to restrict these harmful gasses or stand by and do nothing to stop the planet’s slow demise. Would you be perfectly okay with standing by and letting someone die if you knew you could do something about it? That’s what many people are doing when it comes to climate change. Standing by and doing nothing.

I know what I would do, steps need to be taken to implement policies that restrict the emission of these gasses while keeping our economy and other aspects of American life relatively unchanged. The choice at the end of the day though, is yours. Make sure that it’s the right one.

Sincerely,

Andrew