Opinion: We should want to give children a better world

Imagine living in a household full of smokers.

Whether you like it or not, you’re stuck with each other, so if you want to overcome your problem, you’re going to have do it together.

More than one doctor has told you as much, but not everyone in the household believes what the docs say, opting instead for a quack’s opinion that the whole problem is better off ignored.

The problem is, you’ve all got to quit together or you will all get sick and die by either first- or second-hand smoking. All that coughing and hacking around the house are obvious signs that if you don’t clean up the air you’re breathing, we’re not going to make it — so you call a big family meeting to consider ways to stop smoking collectively.

As you can image, it’s not easy getting everyone on the same page. Some want a total and immediate ban on smoking, while others seek a slower, more deliberate approach to cleaning up the air inside. Still others say to hell with fresh air, this is how we’ve always lived and this is how it’s going to stay.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, this hypothetical household isn’t so hypothetical when you apply it to the smoke-filled environment we’re living in nowadays. We need to break our addiction to carbon-based fuels, but we can’t seem to agree on how best to do it, while Earth’s atmosphere becomes more smoke-filled every day.

We’ve got the environmental extremists, who want to change our consumption overnight. They may be right in their urgency, but they’re unrealistic in how to get it done.

Then we’ve got a more deliberate crowd, more inclined to let market forces push us toward clean alternatives. They recognize the need for the government to set standards and regulate a growing renewable energy industry, but they see technology and free enterprise as the best way to get there from here.

And, of course, we have our climate change deniers who, lacking any scientific basis to their denials opt instead for pseudo-facts and scriptural misreadings to justify their head-in-the-sand view of the world and its future. Theirs is the most nonsensical viewpoint in our smoke-filled house and yet, almost unbelievably, they have one of their own running for president.

Of course, Donald Trump’s not a sincere climate change denier; he doesn’t seriously believe the climate change is a hoax. It’s just his way of blowing off tomorrow’s problem for the power and riches of today.

Unfortunately, however, it’s not tomorrow’s problem any longer. Global temperatures are rising — last year was the hottest since humans started recording global temperatures, while the last 10 years were the hottest decade — and extreme weather events are becoming more and more common. Denying such a reality doesn’t make it go away.

The other day I read a great quote in the Union County Leader — a Native American proverb, the newspaper called it:

“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.”

Wouldn’t it be great if we really acted that way?

Collectively, we absolutely do not. In fact, at this rate, our children won’t just be inheriting a smoke-filled house, they’ll be addicted too.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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