Address carbon fee or the consequences

Are we preparing to evolve to robots?

Consider: 97 percent of the people we pay to advise on such things (climate scientists) say humans are causing global warming. The increased droughts in dry areas, the severe storms, the rising sea levels threatening coastal communities (think Olympia), and the dying seas are problems we could be addressing now, but we’re not. They all can and will threaten our fragile human bodies.

On the other hand, we’re populating our work spaces with robots and machines driven by artificial intelligence. These could be jobs for our unemployed and under-employed work force. Note these “workers” are largely unaffected by climate change.

So are we making this choice to evolve? Humans to go the way of the dodo, and electronic machinery to follow? Or will we take the first tiny step and pass a carbon fee and dividend bill to keep fossil fuels in the ground?

This story was originally published May 6, 2017 at 6:35 PM with the headline "Address carbon fee or the consequences."