President Trump can go ahead and leave the Paris accord. Where is it written that we do not have the right of self-determination when it comes to the health of our planet?

Why should we care what Trump does about global warming? He is not the commander in chief of how we live our lives, choose the products we buy or the science we believe. The man is out of touch, out of line and insulated from my reality. More than 60 percent of Americans believe that our CO2 emissions are making a significant impact on the planet and believe we should be doing something about it.

The office of the president does not have the power to stop us from conserving energy and making smart decisions about our future. It cannot stop us from buying electric cars, biomass fuels, renewable or more efficient products. We can choose to breathe clean air and have healthier lungs. We can choose to lead the world’s clean economy by our actions.

We have the ultimate power over the environment and the future of the planet. We have the power to adjust our spending. Buy electric cars, use biomass fuels to heat our homes, bike or walk to work for health, use products made from renewables, keep our food cold in more efficient refrigerators, insulate our homes, build homes that demand less energy, install micro-CHP (combined heat and power) in our houses and small businesses and put solar panels on our roofs.

The list is endless. The resulting economy created by moving in this direction would be a massive industrial revolution. It would drive a 3 percent-plus growth rate of the American economy for decades as we replace the old with the new.

We don’t need the White House or Congress to legislate our future. We have the ultimate power in our free capitalistic democracy – we decide how to spend our money. The best thing we can do is let our president know he is out of touch, and he should lead, follow or get out of the way. He’s confused about how to make us great again.

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The world needs to know that our country has the greatness that:

• Made computers mainstream.

• Invented social media.

• Supercharged the Industrial Revolution with hydroelectricity.

• Invented the light bulb and pioneered indoor plumbing.

We did all that and a whole lot more without the government telling us what to do.

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Thank you, Westinghouse, for the refrigerator that took the place of our icebox and RCA for the TV that brought the Beatles into my parents’ living room (so at least they had a clue about what was going on).

While we are at it, thanks, Samuel Morse, for the telegraph, the Wright Brothers for their historic Kitty Hawk flight and GE for all the good things it brought to life. Let’s have some more. None of this needed the three branches of government.

Frankly, Washington, your record in the last 25 years has been rather abysmal.

We can thank the Clinton administration and Congress for the last recession by sanctioning derivative trading of mortgages that never should have been written; the George W. Bush administration for invading Iraq on bad intelligence, and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton together for not protecting our ambassador in Libya.

Now the current guy can’t separate his business from ours. And they are laying the groundwork to convince us that the Russians are our friends when it was our allies of Europe that came to our side after 9/11.

We don’t need the president, or the Republicans and Democrats in Congress to figure out what to do with our lives, our planet or our future. We have always as a people led the world with our decisions on what we believe to be important.

Buy the products that make sense for the future, make decisions that are good for a renewable economy we want to fuel and the lives we want to live.

Leaving the Paris accord may be the freedom we really need to speak as a people through our actions instead of through our out-of-touch government. Let’s just build our great country without the politics of Washington.


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