American Environmental Concerns

"What we have seen regarding energy policy is that almost all Americans, regardless of their political orientation are decidedly for clean energy future for America.
"It's a transition that they would like to see happening now.
"Democrats and independents would like to see a rapid move toward renewables and a rapid move away from fossil fuels and Republicans would like to see a rapid move toward renewables but a much slower move away from fossil fuels."
Edward Maibach, George Mason University

Americans are taking up the carbon-free challenge that environmental change has thrust upon them, and everyone else living on this Globe. The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Management is prepared to lease 83,000 hectares of continental shelf along the coast of Rhode Island for wind turbines capable of producing up to 3,000 megawatts of power to furnish the energy needs of up to a million homes.

The five-kilometre traffic corridor that passes through Arlington, Virginia is being transformed at the request of its citizens, into a pedestrian and bike-friendly transportation corridor with electric trolley cars - ransacking the past to go forward into the value-packed future of environmental sensitivity. Buses operating on natural gas are now present in Washington, D.C. where there are now plentiful bicyling pathways and where public transit is prepared to keep expanding to the point where apartment dwellers are increasingly shedding themselves of car ownership.

Where once someone would most certainly have been characterized as an eccentric for choosing to remove themselves from the traditional power grid, living in a solar-powered home, driving an electric car, these life-style changes are emerging to reflect what may yet become -- at least among those elite who can afford it -- a preferred lifestyle change to reflect responsible-citizenry values.

These changes will not reflected across the nation necessarily, but they do reflect the growing mind-set in the corridors of power.

A sensibility that aligns itself with a powerful voting bloc; the passionate and robustly-growing environmental movement, the new key to social concerns impacting the planet, calling upon all those with a social-nature conscience to come to the aid of the afflicted by planning to "do something" to combat climate change -- or at the very least mitigate it. And this is the demographic to which President Barack Obama is responding.

And the issue to which he has turned his attention and the influence of his office in disregard to his country's demonstrable production needs leading to full employment and social harmony, pivots on his coming rejection of a foreign-invasive element which America The Strong, thanks to its own newer extraction techniques and huge gas fields recently opened up, no longer needs. Although having derived the greater portion of its energy requirements from Canada, the future beckons.

It is a future of self-sufficiency and rejection. Rejection of the Keystone XL Pipeline foremost and first, as the most acceptably visible culprit in the pollution of the global atmosphere. Its selection as the sacrifice on the alter of environmental-needs servitude will screen from notice the greater carbon degradation caused by the country's coal-mining and coal-fired furnaces, its extraction of oil from the Dakotas Bakken formation with its crude levels of hydrogen sulphide and benzene to be overlooked.

As well as the chemicals commonly used for hydraulic fracturing; fluids like ethylene glycol, carcinogenic naphthalene, and flammable hydrochloric acid that invariably mix with crude oil leaving it with cancer-producing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Inconvenient details not be dwelled upon, since the truly concerning object lesson is the isolation of Alberta crude, disturbingly dirty and environmentally threatening.

"We want to build on and complement these efforts [on carbon reduction]. For too long we have been focused on a false choice: between the health of our children and the health of our economy. Today, the truth we need to embrace is that cutting carbon pollution will spark business innovation, will grow jobs, and will strengthen the economy."
Gina McCarthy director, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

For, after all, there must be an administrative response at the highest executive level to the onslaught of nature's revenge against its creatures who have burdened it beyond its capacity to resist inimical change. America has been suffering through unprecedented floods, wildfires tornadoes and hurricanes. Its president has been forced to sign 17 disaster declarations, awarding federal financing to stricken communities and states.