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State of the Union: Climate Change Is a Key Challenge

Posted January 14, 2016

On January 12, 2016, President Barack Obama spoke of four key challenges he believes our country must solve. One of those was climate change and the current and future actions needed to make our environment cleaner and healthier for generations to come.

Acknowledging that the military; most of the people in America, including business leaders; almost the entire scientific community and 200 nations across the world agree climate change is a problem and intend to solve it, President Obama went on to lay the foundation for the urgency of this issue by noting that 2014 was the warmest year on record, “until 2015 turned out to be even hotter.”

Referring to “the single biggest investment in clean energy in our history,” which is the more than $1 trillion invested into green energy technologies and the smart grid, Obama touted several results, including:

  • Across our country, wind power is now cheaper than dirtier, conventional power
  • Solar is saving Americans tens of millions of dollars a year on energy bills
  • The energy industry employs more Americans than the coal industry does
  • Imports of foreign oil have been cut by nearly 60 percent
  • Carbon pollution has been cut by more than any other country

Calling out the need to accelerate the move from “old, dirtier energy sources,” the President went on to say that, “rather than subsidize the past, we should invest in the future — especially in communities that rely on fossil fuels. We do them no favor when we don’t show them where the trends are going.”

Obama closed his comments on climate change by acknowledging that getting to where we need to be to stop climate change will take time, but that “…the jobs we’ll create, the money we’ll save, the planet we’ll preserve — that is the kind of future our kids and our grandkids deserve… it’s within our grasp.”

New Jersey needs to heed this call and be a leader in the global push to address the climate crisis, and transition rapidly from reliance on fossil fuels toward the use of clean, renewable energy!

(Read the official transcript of the president’s 2016 State of the Union Address here.)

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