JEROME RINGO
President, The Apollo Alliance

Today the environment is at the forefront of everyone's thoughts, not only in this country but also worldwide. I haven't seen an issue with such a magnetic capacity to bring people together since the Civil Rights movement.

Excessive temperatures have a greater impact on the poor who have less access to air conditioning and proper heating. Poor people have less access to health care to deal with climate-related medical problems. Water is a major problem worldwide, either because there's too much of it-the poor tend to live in flood zones-or not enough that's safe to drink.

The most powerful mechanism of change is our right to vote. We have the ability to elect officials who are going to focus on and

THOMAS E. LOVEJOY, PH.D.
President of H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and The Environment

The ocean's food chain is at risk
We were one of the first to call attention to the acidification of the oceans. The oceans take up a huge amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. A portion of that carbon gets turned into carbonic acid, so that the more carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere, the more acidic the oceans become. The oceans are now 30 percent more acidic than they were before the Industrial Revolution. It's the most chilling change I've seen in my professional career. If it continues, tiny organisms at the base of the food chain will have their shells dissolve while the animals are still alive. It will

ARTHUR H. ROSENFELD, PH.D.
Commissioner, California Energy Commission

Energy efficiency is the ultimate answer
If we're going to survive global warming, there are two things we must do. We have to move in the direction of renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, and we have to improve energy efficiency. You can measure it in different ways-passenger miles per gallon of gas, lumens per watt-but we need to think in terms of doubling efficiency. Not "conservation," which implies sacrifice. Efficiency doesn't involve sacrifice. If you compare a modern refrigerator with one from 1973, which was the year of the OPEC oil embargo, it's bigger, it's gotten rid of CFC refrigerants, its inflation-adjusted price is two thirds less-and it uses 75

Our Solar System is seeing vast alterations in its planets, obviously including that of Earth. As our solar system continues its swing around galactic center it has entered a higher density of energy. This higher density of energy is causing ‘transformations' of all our planets including the sun.
These dramatic changes have been and are currently being studied by top scientists around the world. Unfortunately the news media of the world refuses to run stories to educate the people of the world as to what is actually occurring. It is of extremely

Sustainability? I don't believe there is such a thing anymore. If we were to sustain our current rates of consumption, habitat destruction, emissions, etc. the Earth's biosphere will collapse within a century.

The concept of sustainability at this point is flawed. It is now not a matter of "sustainability", it is a matter of retreat. We need to drastically reduce consumption, drastically reduce emissions, halt all critical habitat destruction, reduce an exponentially growing human population, end industrial pollution, end the expense of war in both monetarily and human life, and educate the world.

We need to rebuild a vast network of environmental habitats linked continuously throughout continents. We need to dive headlong into clean