It’s too big, it’s too hard, it’s not our problem, they are worse, what can we do? He started it. Oh to be young where the biggest issue was Jimmy stole the toy you were playing with. Why are we using those same excuses when faced with our own survival? We have billionaires trying to leave our planet in the name of survival while we sit down here and suffocate on our inability to make a simple decision. Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, Nobody. Us.

The impossible is a decision not a fact. We have seen it done time and time again. The Americans in World War Two went from a peacetime to a wartime economy in months, factories went from the Ford Model B to the M2 light tank. The Russians blockaded Berlin and the UK and the US decided to fly thousands of tons of fuel, water and food into the capital daily, a feat that still seems impossible to this day. Then JFK comes out and says “we choose to go to the moon, not because it’s easy but because it is hard” with about 15 minutes in space, barely out of the atmosphere, 8 years later, one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. They showed us that the impossible is a decision. It’s our turn to decide.

I know what the problem is. We think we have something to lose, and we do, but it’s not air-conditioning, it’s not economic dominance, it’s not even the roof over our heads. It’s food, when the droughts stretch longer than we can irrigate, when the oceans become too acidic to support life. It’s the water, when the aquifers give their last drop and the lakes turn into valleys. It’s our children’s futures.

We could as a nation as a people, save not only our children but everyone’s children. We could stand up and be counted as the nation that is willing to do what needs doing despite the risk. We could transition to a wartime economy, but instead of bullets we build solar farms, instead of tanks we build carbon capture facilities. We throw our significant resources behind healing the world. We go to war, but not with the Middle East, not with Russia or China or North Korea, but with climate change. Our loftiest goals are net zero by 2050. That’s not good enough. Let’s do things because they are hard. We build a carbon sink to rival the Amazon, to rival the Pacific, to be remembered for.

We take untold wealth from our golden soil and we bet it on ourselves. We take this land we are so proud of and we create the largest research and development project in history and aim it at the reversal, not reduction, not net zero, net -. We take our abundance, the wide open sky over the wide open plains, we take the wealth generated by pillaging the earth and we back a future where the lakes are full and the valleys are ancient.

We can be the change. the enemy’s at the gate and we have watched it approaching for 70 years.

Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, Nobody ….

Us?