A good planet is hard to find.

Environmentalism is alive and well in America and that is a good thing.  Anybody who thinks that it is not is short sighted and ignorant.  There are seven billion people living on this planet right now and the projections for significantly more are right around the corner.  Like the bumper sticker says "a good planet is hard to find."  If we do not protect our planet we degrade our future.  A short sighted approach to protecting our environment is not in our national interest - even if it is to resolve very real economic problems that currently face us and will face us in the future.  We must find ways to improve our economic situation without further degrading our environment.

At the same time we have to face facts.  The only way that our environment will be protected is if we are rich enough to afford it.  Poor people are understandably so concerned with their day-to-day existence that they are willing to do almost anything to scrape together enough money to buy food for the table.  Look at any underdeveloped country and you can see examples of serious environmental degradation.  I live in California, which is leading the nation in generating stupid policies in virtually every field, many of them allegedly designed to protect the environment.  The state adopted policies that encouraged business to leave California. As a result it is currently flat broke.  One of the very first economy measures undertaken has been to close many of the state's parks.  Not really very important in and of itself, but symptomatic of what is to come if we stay on this road long enough.

The reality of our political system is not conducive of an easy resolution of this conundrum.  We have a tendency to flip flop back and forth about everything that we do in this country.  If we decide that there has been too much of something, we vote the other guys into office and go the other way far enough to generate another backlash.  Today, we are complaining about too much government regulation and demanding that it be reduced so that we can get our economy back on track.  I agree with that position, but have serious concerns about how far we might go in the other direction.  Energy is one of my biggest concerns and I find the enthusiasm of those crying "drill baby drill" to be somewhat frightening.  Water use is another serious issue and the competition for that resource is an extremely difficult balancing act.  The very air that we breath is another.  There is a long list of others.

Obviously, we have to deal with our economic problems, but we must find ways to do it that simultaneously protect our environment.  I agree with those that say that the world appears to be getting warmer and I can conceive of the possibility that human activity is helping to bring this about.  On the other hand, scholars tell me that the earth went through a number of very dramatic climate cycles before Adam and Eve discovered apples.  It occurs to me that whatever might be happening to our climate is bigger than we are and there may be nothing that we can do to change it.  I wholeheartedly support scientific research in this area, but I do not believe that we can base policy decisions on what we know about the issue right now, because we don't appear to know much.

One of our options is to continue with our current policies and see our economy go further into the tank, in part because we put up too many regulatory road blocks to business.  Here in California we still have a few more parks that we can close.  After that we can cut back on other government programs to include entitlements.  With a sputtering economy the cutbacks will, of course, continue until we eventually go out into the streets and burn tires in a last ditch effort to protect the environment while all the while demanding that someone find money from someplace to feed us.  It is simple.  All we have to do is re-elect Barack Obama.