Trump failing children

How the world started, and where it is going, have no doubt been debated throughout human history. But pondering the world’s origins in the first quarter of the 21st century seems ridiculously irrelevant in light of the serious consequences to decisions we desperately need to make on how to stem the steady rise, in recent years, of global temperatures.

The severe climate aberrations that already are displacing whole populations need to be seen as a prelude to an epidemic of such disasters for all of us if we don’t stop burning carbon — before it’s too late.

The overwhelming majority of the world’s scientific community has been warning us for over 50 years of how complicit a part we have been playing in producing the present impasse, with the oil industries’ powerful public relations yapping at their heels, spending billions of dollars in ads to negate their findings. And when — two years ago in Paris — we were finally able to get the world’s worst offenders to commit to at least a starting plan for averting that catastrophe, along comes our president intent on pulling us out of it.

The kindest possible assessment of the reason he gives would be that he is unaware of the way the number of new jobs generated by renewable energy enterprises are bypassing those lost in the environment-ruining ones he’s trying to save.

If we let him take us out of the agreement, our grandchildren will one day disappointingly look back on our having failed them, and future historians will mark it not only a “hu-u-uge” failure in “Making America Great Again,” but a tragic setback in the fortunes of the whole human species.

S. Stillerman Milwaukee