Resource Management
Managing the natural resource of this country is one of the most important jobs of the Federal Government. Congress has been completely shirking its responsibility in this area. Beyond being disastrous for our Environment and Food Safety, this is also creating much long-term economic risk.
Reducing Greenhouse Gasses
Reducing greenhouse gasses is the biggest challenge we face now.
Other Energy Issues
It is strategically important to develop all safe energy technologies. Virtually all of the energy currently used in the world is created by the sun and stored in a myriad of different ways until we end up using it (those energy storage methods include petroleum and coal, BTW). There isn't any one magic solution and we haven't got time to try these technologies one at a time. Read More...
Climate Disaster (aka Global Warming)
People are now recognizing that Global Warming is a huge problem and we are now calling it Climate Disaster. It's not totally proven that there is such a thing as global warming and we can't predict exactly what will happen; however, we really can't wait for absolute proof. I can tell you as an engineer that even though we can't predict exactly what will happen, it won't be good. At this point, the handwriting is on the wall: The weather is essentially a very complex, under-damped, resonant system. When you feed more energy into a resonant system, the system tends to get higher resonant peaks. When talking about the weather, that means more violent storms, colder winters, hotter summers. There are even some theories that melting polar ice will reduce the saline content of the ocean enough to cool the North Atlantic and make the northeastern part of the US, Canada and most of the UK like the current arctic regions (while the equator gets much hotter). A lot of this may be overblown, but it's clearly starting to happen. The conservative thing to do here is to avoid global warming, because the consequences run from dangerous to a disaster whose scale we can't even comprehend.
Junk Mail
I think most of us are really sick of getting so much junk mail. Not only that, but trash disposal costs are increasing dramatically. I favor legislation that requires the Post Office to collect a disposal surcharge on all 3rd class mail. The surcharge must be enough to cover the cost of disposing of that mail (and collecting the surcharge). The collected funds would be distributed to the cities and towns receiving the mail to help pay the cost of trash disposal. This isn't as important as many other issues, but it is one little thing we can do. It helps the environment and also eases the growing financial burden on local governments.
Environment
With the exception of global warming, I think that our environmental laws and policies were in pretty good shape before Donald Trump took office. The Trump administration has been on a mission to reverse the last 40 years of environmental progress. All of this needs to be put back to where the Obama administration left it.
Food Inspection
We tend to take our food supply for granted, but there are two things that are currently threatening our food supply:
- The push for Globalization is attempting to usurp our ability to set our own food safety standards.
- There has been a big business effort to replace responsible FDA food safety inspectors with industry shills that are only concerned with making money, not food safety.
