The Milwaukee Post

April 6, 2018 • Milwaukee County Post • 9 Kudos for action on climate change To the editor: Hats off to the organizations that are reversing the damage President Donald Trump is recklessly inflicting on our drive against global warming. Driven to undo everything President Barack Obama had put in motion, he defunded the Federal Advisory Committee that Obama had appended to the National Climate Assessment Group that had been producing global warming reports since the 1990s, with the next one due in 2018. The hatchet job on the Advisory Committee, which had been putting the National Climate Assessment's global warming reports into terms useful to local planners and movers, brought protests from all over the country. With 2018 as the starting gate, two promising catalysts are going beyond protest to positive action — in effect, bypassing the president. Starting Jan. 1, Columbia University's Earth Institute brought in Richard Moss, former chairman of the Advisory Committee, as a visiting senior research scientist, providing financial support and office space for him to reactivate the Advisory Committee, and finish off the report that had been scheduled in 2018. "It's not an ivory tower," Moss said. "It's been a place where practitioners interact with scholars." Also a driven man, Steven Cohen, executive director of the Earth Institute, said, "Connecting science to decision-makers is a core part of our mis- sion." The second catalyst, just as motivated, is the U.S. Climate Alliance, consisting of the governors of the 15 states that have signed on to the Paris Accord goals for reduced carbon burning, who claim their states are already seeing promising eco- nomic trends from those efforts. In hopes that such moves will inspire more elsewhere, we climate change activists are greatly cheered by the burst in congressional representatives joining the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus. Encourage them all. Let them know we're behind them. Zero global warming may be an impossible goal, but we can't settle for a lesser one. Seymour Stillerman Milwaukee Climate change poses national security threat To the editor: "As greenhouse gases increase, sea lev- els are rising, average global temperatures are increasing, and severe weather pat- terns are accelerating. These changes, coupled with other global dynamics, ... will devastate homes, land and infrastruc- ture." Is this statement from a) the Sierra Club, b) the Democratic Party platform, or c) recently uncovered documents confirm- ing a Chinese plot to harm U.S. manufac- turing? The answer is actually d) none of the above. It's from the Department of Defense, which has expressed concern about climate change since the George W. Bush administration. Dozens of DOD doc- uments on this issue can be accessed at climateandsecurity.org. In his news conference on the omnibus spending bill, President Donald Trump lauded the armed services and said that his "highest duty is to keep America safe." However, with respect to climate change, President Trump is placing ideol- ogy above country. That's why the Department of Defense can clearly state that climate change is a national security threat, yet the Trump administration, which is usually so supportive of our mili- tary, can continue to dismiss it. We must urge our members of Congress to protect America's security by recogniz- ing the threat posed by climate change and taking a leadership role regarding climate action. Terry L. Hansen Oak Creek OPINION LETTERS TO THE EDITOR By OWEN B. ROBINSON When children and philosophers think about government, they will often romanti- cize the philosopher king or benevolent dic- tator as the ideal form of government. The idea of a wise, thoughtful, kind, and gener- ous ruler making decisions to correct the wickedness of ignorant people for the bene- fit of the entire society is a tempting and alluring story. But history has shown us that such fantasies are best left on the pages of storybooks and treatises. They have little relevance in the actual history of mankind. When our founders began on their journey of self-governance, it was largely a reaction to the tyranny of monarchical rule. As the spark of the Reformation helped ignite the flames of the Enlightenment, people began to consider the notion that they were not only capable, but entitled, to rule themselves. Such thoughts traveled to America and made the yoke of a distant monarchy weigh heavy. Finally, our founders cast off that yoke and began the great American experiment of self-governance, which continues to this day. Our founders were students of history and recognized that one of the critical footings of successful self-governance is education. Indeed, only an educated people governing themselves could can off the abuses of tyranny so often inflicted by the cruel on the ignorant. As Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Jarvis in 1820, "I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlight- ened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power." In order to ensure that the people were educated enough to govern themselves, the founders viewed it as a duty of government to provide the people an education. Not deemed a responsibility of the federal gov- ernment, our founders worked hard to enshrine the responsibility to provide an education into the state constitutions and local charters. It is an important ethos that has helped carry our nation into its third century of self-rule. As a people, we have decided that it is crit- ical for our republic to not only provide, but also to require that every citizen be educat- ed. While rooted in the preservation of our liberty, compulsory universal education also has significant secondary consequences like raising the standard of living, enabling inno- vation and reducing poverty. Whereas we all agree that it is in the best interests of our liberty and our general soci- ety to require and provide for universal edu- cation through our governments, there is less agreement about how that education should be delivered. At the root of the issue is that while we all generally agree that we should use our collective tax dollars to fund education, there is no rational basis for the government to own the means of delivering that education. Education is one of the few areas of civil society where we insist that the government both fund and own the means of production for a public good. For example, in trans- portation, the government pays for infra- structure, but utilizes mostly private enter- prises to complete the work. When it comes to welfare, we all generally agree that the government should pay for the indigent, but there are not government-owned grocery stores. In fact, there has been strong push- back to President Trump's idea to provide packages of government groceries to welfare recipients instead of letting them choose their own groceries. In the 21st century, the idea that the only way to provide a good education is for the government to own, manage and run the schools is as antiquated as the boys-only one- room schoolhouse. As our society speeds up, the rigidity and sluggishness of the public schools have struggled to keep pace. That fact, coupled with the frustration from some that some public schools have become cen- ters of neo-Marxist indoctrination instead of education, is part of what has led to a major- ity of states offering some form of school choice in the form of vouchers, education savings accounts or tax exemptions for pri- vate schools. The heart of the school choice movement is the recognition that every child is pre- cious and unique. Each child deserves the educational environment in which they can best thrive, and the child's parents — not politicians — are the most informed, most interested and most invested in making deci- sions about their child's education. For some parents, that choice may be a government- run school. For some it might be a religious school. For some it might be an online or pri- vate school. For some it might be home- schooling or an immersion school. The point is that it is the parents who should decide and our societal obligation and commitment is to ensure that money, within reason, is not the sole determinant of educational choice. The rich already have all of these choices. School choice levels the field by ensuring that people of all economic means also have choices. If an educated people is a free people, then we must free our education system to reach as many children as possible. Our founders were willing to tear down old societal struc- tures to build a better future. Are we willing to do the same? (Owen B. Robinson is a West Bend resident whose column appears occasionally in The Milwaukee County Post. He can be reached at owen@bootsandsabers.com.) Schooling options a product and protector of liberty Robinson

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