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Editorial: Drastic or not, we must work to reduce global warming

Buried under the debris of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing and our nail-biting over whether the Cubs would win their division last week was a Washington Post story about a Trump administration report that used the inevitability of global warming to justify giving up on plans already in place to forestall global warming.

You read that right.

The Post delved into a 500-page report released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that sought to justify President Donald Trump's plan to freeze federal fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks manufactured after 2020.

Deep in the report, the NHTSA asserts that by 2100 the earth will have warmed 7 degrees Fahrenheit from its preindustrial average.

That doesn't just mean light sweaters in December, but enough polar ice melt to submerge Manhattan and Miami, more heat waves, droughts and other unsavory things.

The study essentially concludes Earth as we know it already has one foot in the grave and another on a banana peel, so what's wrong with some additional greenhouse gases?

To decry global warming as a hoax and then to use its existence as a reason to throw up our hands and essentially rob our children's children of a decent future on this planet is ludicrous. Have we really so thoroughly lost our way, becoming consumers of the planet rather than citizens of it?

"I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad," Henry David Thoreau wrote.

Thoreau was from a different time, but his voice should echo today. We're reminded of the episode of "Mad Men" in which the Draper family has a nice family picnic in the park and, at its conclusion, blithely flings all of its garbage onto the ground without a thought. The scene was shocking in its callousness.

"The amazing thing they're saying is human activities are going to lead to this rise of carbon dioxide that is disastrous for the environment and society. And then they're saying they're not going to do anything about it," Michael MacCracken, a senior scientist at the U.S. Global Change Research Program from 1993 to 2002, told the Post.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

The NHTSA report should be shocking; the White House's lack of reaction to it should be equally troubling.

The world we know is worth trying to save, no matter how big the challenge. If not for us, then for our children's children.

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