U.S. must curb building of nuclear reactors/weapons.

We in the United States must make serious efforts to reduce our stockpiles of nuclear weapons and cease increasing the number of U.S. nuclear reactors if we are to have the legitimate authority to tell other nations to do so.

Although modernizing or building new reactors to replace old ones may be acceptable, any new reactors should be built with a written contractual agreement to phase them out after cleaner forms of alternative energy generation can replace the percentage of U.S. power they are generating.

Surely no nation can legitimitely recommend changes for other nations concerning certain issues such as reducing nuclear weapons production or reducing nuclear power reactors unless we ourselves as a country and a people are making a sustained effort to do so ourselves.....to recommend these changes for other nations when we ourselves are not doing so is hypocrisy.

We as a nation must depend less on defense, spending, weapons and warfare as a basis for our authority in world politics and use diplomacy and goodwill through voluntarily donating our time, money, resources and knowledge to unstable countries and impoverished oppressed people around the world as much as is possible, ethical or realistic in our present state of national debt.

We must also better establish justice and fairness within our own borders through better enforcement and establishment of just laws and regulations to prevent the poor and middle classes from being preyed upon by the wealthy and powerful.

Of course, these laws and regulations must be within the bounds of reason.

We must as a country make a sustained effort to get out of debt through reduced military weapons spending and importing less foreign oil which reduces our national debt, trade deficit and reduces global warming emissions.

We need to pass cap and trade legislation to make alternative energy more competitive and establish our country/people as leaders in green/alternative energy technology and expertise which we can export to other countries.

When we buy oil from other countries we must examine the way that those nations are extracting the oil to establish if the nations that we are buying the oil from are polluting or defiling their own land and/or water by drilling for that oil in an environmentally detrimental or damaging way and make recommedations for change if we are to continue to buy oil from those countries.

Because if we don't drill on our own land because of environmental concerns how can we buy natural gas/oil from other nations who destroy or damage their own waters/land.....it's all the same earth and water.

Of course all oil and natural gas extraction has detrimental environmental effects.....but some methods of extraction can be more damaging than others.....standards should be established by all nations and accurately reported and monitored.

We would probably be well served to convert our coal burning power plants to natural gas which is cleaner ( 50% cleaner?) burning than coal..... until we can convert to a completely carbon free or relatively carbon free methods of energy generation.

Many private and public truck, bus and auto fleets in the U.S. and around the world have converted their vehicles to run on natural gas.

Natural gas is much cleaner than coal and no mountaintop removal is required to extract it. Natural gas is also quite abundant in th U.S. and other countries.
 
If we decide to drill for oil and/or natural gas on our own lands and waters we must establish if we have the ability to do so safely in areas like the Arctic and the Arctic Ocean which has continous winter darkeness and ice hazards in those waters which can make cleaning up oil spills difficult or extremely difficult.

40% of the U.S. fish supply comes from Arctic waters as well as huge populations of marine mammals which are some of the most intelligent and fascinating creatures on earth, as well as Polar Bears which are now threatened and endangered by the summer shrinking of the Arctic ice cap which is what Polar Bears hunt from because that's where the seals which they feed on live.....if the ice cap recedes further and further from shore each summer, where they can't reach it.....how can they eat/hunt?....how can they survive? Surely allowing massive extinctions of marine mammals, Arctic fish and the extinction of Polar Bears from global warming and oil spills is not a good thing.

Drilling for oil and gas in the U.S. might reduce the overall carbon footprint of the U.S. because were not shipping the oil from far away nations because this transport burns much fuel, but if we destroy fish stocks, marine mammals and ocean ecosystems are we getting much further ahead.

These are the issues that need to be discussed and debated. 

We the undersigned agree with the sentiments of this author and wish to petition the U.S. government to debate, clarify and develope accurate statistical data concerning drilling for oil/natural gas on U.S. land and water and how that would change the overall carbon footprint of the U.S. 

Also we should begin to reduce our stockpile of nuclear weapons and reduce our use of nuclear reactors for power generation with the goal of phasing out nuclear power and nuclear weapons completely, eventually, so that we can lead by example in the world and have the authority to advise and assist other nations on such matters without hypocrisy.