EARTH DAY 2000

April 22, 2000

"Thank you very much Mayor Williams. It's a great honor for me to chair Earth Day 2000.

Ever since I was a little kid, environmental issues have sparked my interest.

Let me start off by saying that the problem with doing a speech on the environment is that there is so much to say about so many issues. So let me first take a step back and tell a story that comes from my family.

My grandfather who lived in Germany told me this story. It was about an industrialist who owned the coalmine that my grandfather worked for. When the town demanded that the mine owner build a smokestack high enough to prevent smoke soot from overwhelming the town, he reluctantly agreed.

During the construction though, he proclaimed that the stacks should not be built too high as it would be sacrilege if they were built higher than the town's church steeple and of course conveniently would save him money.

Eventually he lived to regret that decision.

Not only did all his workers get sick, including my grandfather, but he also ruined the ecology of the town.

That shortsighted industrialist only took into account the monetary cost. And had to eventually pay a much higher price - the hidden environmental cost.

Since that time, problems have compounded. According to scientists throughout the world, we are on a downward slope.

Our fresh water and oceans are being polluted, soils are eroding, rivers are running dry, wetlands are disappearing, fisheries are collapsing, rangelands are deteriorating, temperatures are rising, coral reefs are dying, and not since a meteor hit the Earth 65 million years ago have so many species of plants and animals become extinct in such a short time.

How did we get to this point?

Quite simply, by making the same mistakes as that industrialist did by building his short smokestacks. With the ever increasing population and the constant need to tap into our planet's nonrenewable resources, we are quite frankly creating our own scenario for disaster.

Which brings us to the solution, clean energy now - the theme of this year's Earth Day.

The problem is we are pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere much faster than the land and seas can absorb it, the accumulating gas is trapping heat and upsetting the world's climate.

It only took five to nine degrees to bring us out of the last ice age. Five to nine degrees.

Now a couple of degrees difference in today's temperatures may seem insignificant, but again five to nine degrees is all that separates us from catastrophic change. We must break this cycle now.

And it must be a clean break.

The industrialist and my grandfather could probably never envision a time where we could produce energy without smokestacks or pollution.

But today we have technologies that allow us to use renewable fuel sources. Solar technologies are real, proven and in use now, wind power is a mature technology with a successful track record, and the hydrogen economy is the wave of the future. But unless we insist upon their use, technologies like these will never have a chance to develop and will never become a part of everyday life.

The United States is only 8% of the world's population but we produce 40% of the world's waste and because of this, experts say it would take two new worlds in addition to our own to provide enough resources for everyone to maintain a living standard equal to that of North Americans.

Two new worlds...

Enough is enough.

We must set an example now and move environmentalism from being the philosophy of a passionate minority like everyone here at Earth Day to a way of life that automatically integrates ecology into governmental policy and normal living standards.

We are entering an environmental age whether we like it or not.

As we progress into the twenty-first century, anyone who considers themselves a realist will have to make the environment a top priority.

Our planet's alarm is going off, and it is time to wake up and take action!"