Our America

When I was a little girl growing up in Texas, we roller skated up and down our street in Fort Worth, played hide and go seek and kick the can. We climbed trees, enjoyed swings in a park on the grounds of the Will Rogers Memorial Coliseum, just a block from our house on Watonga Street, and climbed on the great comedian’s statue on a horse.

Those days are preserved in a photo of me, my sisters and playmates on Will’s statue taken by a news paper photographer who happened to be in the park that day. It ended up in Life Magazine on January 23, 1950, as the Picture of the Week.

The freedom children like us enjoyed in the late 1940s and early 1950s lives in memory. But the time may be coming when kids can’t play outside like we did, even if they want to turn off their cell phones and computers for a while.

Global warming is changing our world with temperatures that regularly soar above 100 over the U.S., wildfires that sear large drought-stricken sections of the nation, Texas drought and Camp Mystic Hill Country floods, a violent EF4 tornado that demolished an entire Oklahoma town and F5 hurricanes with winds over 156 miles an hour. Before 1924, no F5 hurricanes were officially recorded.

Last week, on the 29th of April, Mineral Wells, a Texas town near Fort Worth, was devastated by a tornado “on the sixth straight day of severe storms.” Bandera had 90 degree days in February. Scientists say that could easily get worse and could be coming even faster.

It’s a fact the oil and gas industries denied for years.

Had they phased out fossil fuels and used green energy instead to make money, global warming could have been averted or reversed to some extent.

Instead they deny that they ignored warnings about global warming and that they had spent millions to discredit the science that proved it. Just google “how the oil and gas industry lied about global warming.” At least 10 national stories will pop up.

Dr. Benjamin Franta, a University of Oxford expert who warned the world for years about global warming says we must reach the goal of “net zero emissions” before 2050 or else.

What are net zero emissions? Net zero emissions create a balance between the amount of greenhouse gas produced by the oil, gas and coal industry and the amount removed from the atmosphere.

Otherwise, earth will be a planet of extreme drought, heat, wildfires, floods, melting glaciers, rising seas and oceans, worsening smog and increasing immigration from already warmer countries near the equator, that are under direct sunlight all year long.

Is that what you want for your kids?

Democrat or Republican, we must all lean on our government, as hard as we can, to get America signed on to global net zero emissions agreements.

Otherwise In 25 years, weather, on the planet we all love, will be beyond dangerous.