Environment

ENVIRONMENT POSITION, Mel Packer 5/26/10

As a nation, we in the US currently consume 25-30% of the world's energy resources while being only 5% of the world population.

Now, every day of our lives, we wake to find ourselves in ever increasing ecological disasters that threaten our children's futures and the very existence of our planet as we now know it.

We have depended for far too long on non-renewable, carbon-based energy sources that continue to harm our planet and endanger our lives.

Energy companies continue to rent or buy most of our elected leaders in an effort to persuade us that we can continue to plunder the earth for new oil, coal, and gas deposits as those companies make ever-increasing profits.

The Gulf of Mexico becomes an oil-soaked bathtub destroying the land and water and the lives of millions who live and work around it.

Our government grants thousands of new drilling permits on public land and forests for Marcellus Shale wells and private landowners across our state and others see their wells poisoned, streams polluted, and quality of life destroyed for the foreseeable future.

Other alleged "solutions" to the energy crisis such as carbon capture and sequestration (CSS) and cap and trade schemes (which create huge investment opportunities for the banks that have been pillaging us for the last few years), are touted as reasonable answers so we can continue to burn vast amounts of coal, while our once beautiful mountain tops are blasted away to expose even more coal.

Nuclear power remains on the planning table as a "solution" but we still have not found a way to deal with the inevitable, dangerous, and long-lived waste products.

Face facts. These are not solutions, but simply band-aids on cancer.

While some of these alleged "solutions" may enable energy companies to continue raking in mega-profits (which is their only real goal), they do nothing in the long term to save our planet. Instead, they compound the problem and push the search for REAL solutions off on our children and serves to destroy their futures.

I believe the right to clean air, clean water, and clean land is a human right due all of us and I will continue to stand and fight for that in every way possible.

In the early 1940's, the Federal Government created the Manhattan Project. That effort gathered some of the great scientific minds of the US and other nations and developed the "atomic bomb", a weapon of war that did nothing to aid humanity.

A similar, federally funded project should begin again but with the goal of finding new answers to the growing energy crisis and environmental destruction and also emphasizing the need for the industrialized world to consume less with the understanding that the energy resources of the world belong to all who live on this planet.

Continuing to depend on corporations and private industry that cares about nothing more than increased profit is to continue the road to destruction.

We can do better and we owe it to our children to do so.

Mel Packer, US Senate candidate, PA, Green Party