With Father's Day approaching, I'm thinking about the world that my kids, and their kids, will inherit -- and I can't help but worry about the dramatic changes in the climate they will experience.
Already, Michaela and Rory are growing up in a world that's made less safe because of global warming. Rising heat is increasing the risk of bad-air days, and for both of my children, who suffer from asthma but love sports and the outdoors, high smog levels are a double whammy.
At the same time, here in New England, flooding and storms are starting to become the new normal. Our research shows that since I was about my kids' age, extreme rain and snow storms have increased by more than 30 percent. In fact, everyone in Massachusetts lives in a county recently hit by at least one federally-declared weather disaster - like the snow storms from last year that dumped more than 100 inches, shattering previous records.
We were relatively lucky during last year's storms. We made it through with a few leaks from ice dams and some sore backs from shoveling. But not everyone was so fortunate, with lives lost, tens of thousands without power, and more than $1 billion in lost profits and wages in one month alone.
I know that without action to stop the build-up of climate-altering pollution, even worse is in store. So, as a father, I worry. I worry that my kids will live in a very different world. I worry how another storm like Hurricane Sandy on our East Coast could flood homes, uproot families, cripple our infrastructure, and set communities back years. I worry about how the threat of insect-borne illnesses like the Zika virus could impact my kids' decision to have children of their own. If they do, I worry heat waves and the resulting air pollution will make summer outdoor fun challenging for our grandchildren.
Three years ago, in honor of Father's Day, Environment America put together a little video of dads asking President Obama, dad-to-dad, to do all he could to act on climate for the sake of our children. The project was part of broad, sustained effort across environmental and justice communities to urge bold action on climate.
On a hot June day that same year at Georgetown University, President Obama announced his Climate Action Plan to a packed crowd of youth, saying, "Someday our children and our children's children will look at us in the eye and they'll ask us did we do all that we could when we had the chance to deal with this problem and leave them a cleaner, safer, more stable world. I want to be able to say, 'Yes, we did.' "
Time and again the president has repeated this vow. And time and again, backed by fathers just like me across the country, the president has delivered on it. And so this Father's Day, father-to-father, we've put together a new video to give the president thanks.
The list of the president's accomplishments in the fight against climate change is long. He doubled the fuel-economy standards for cars and light trucks. He set the first-ever national limits on carbon pollution from both heavy-duty vehicles and power plants. His leadership was crucial to the Paris climate agreement, in which nearly 200 nations set a goal of keeping global warming beneath dangerous levels.
The progress we've seen since the president took office is real. We have 30 times more solar power and three times more wind. In 2008, there was one model of electric car available; now there are 20. All the while, the costs of climate-friendly technologies keep falling.
Of course while these steps are huge, they won't, in and of themselves, solve the problem. It will be up to the nation's and the world's future fathers - and others -- to follow through on the progress President Obama has begun. For now, I'm wishing President Obama a happy Father's Day, and thanking him for all he's done to make the world safer for all our children.