Editor’s note: This article appeared originally on September 08, 2022 in the Duluth News-Tribune.
“Sustainable development is the pathway to the future we want for all. It offers a framework to generate economic growth, achieve social justice, exercise environmental stewardship, and strengthen governance.”
— Ban Ki-Moon, former United Nations secretary-general
From 1917 to 1918, to defeat the barbaric Central Powers, the U.S. government sold Liberty Bonds. The sales supported the Allied cause during World War I. More than $17 billion were raised through the sales.
Then, from 1941 to 1945, to defeat the even more barbaric Axis Powers, our federal government issued Series E United States Savings Bonds that became known as war bonds. An estimated $185.7 billion of war bonds were sold.
In the 21st century, American citizens — as well as city, state, and federal governments — are fighting a climate crisis, a different type of war to protect human lives, critical infrastructure, and the natural environment. Even the U.S. Department of Defense is elevating climate change as a national-security priority.
Every week in the news, it seems, we see and read that a human-caused climate crisis is happening. Therefore, we need to deal with this climate crisis now.
Imagine U.S. citizens buying hundreds of billions of dollars of climate bonds for sustainable development and to build a sustainable economy, based on good-paying clean-energy jobs, while reducing our production of harmful greenhouse gasses. Also, we need to be rebuilding our infrastructure to protect our economy and human lives from increasingly destructive and lethal weather.
Please tell your congressional representatives to create federal climate bonds to prevent ongoing human illness and death as well as environmental destruction from becoming even worse than it is now.