Fighting Pollution and Climate Change: An EPA Veterans' Guide How to Join in Saving Our Life on Planet Earth

Inside the U.S. government EPA (from 1979), scientists clearly saw climate change as a potentially horrific problem. Since 2017, U.S. tools of pollution control have been disassembled or left unused. Climate change is on the national agenda for the first time in the 2020 Presidential election. The western world sees the need to resuscitate the U.S. EPA to manage the "Green New Deal", and for the U.S. to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord and restore U.S. global climate leadership.

Fighting Pollution and Climate Change provides needed and timely advice to new activists in the Congress, to the youth of the Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion, We Don’t Have Time, Right to Zero, and to similar movements around the world and now marching into the news. Climate change is an air-pollution problem like others already successfully resolved or at least effectively addressed, many nationally and some internationally. In recent decades, new technologies have proven themselves to be effective, affordable, safe, and climate-friendly. This book displays these tools and the policies and laws needed to apply them. Starting whenever our national government regains its senses, it shouldn’t be too late to save our life on planet earth.

In this genre, the interest is global, upon such a compelling topic, the content of Fighting Pollution and Climate Change is outstanding and unique because of these features:

-Authenticity--Other authors in this genre--bona fide scientists, a politician, an academic and social organizer, a philosopher, journalists, and concerned and well-meaning persons--are government outsiders and commentators. The author is not an outside observer. During more than three decades when EPA developed and applied the now well-used and trusty tools of effective pollution control, the author was part of it all. This book may be the first written by an EPA insider who, working both at home and abroad, has confronted and can tell us what both our nation and our planet are facing and what must be done.

-Scope--Broader than climate change, it is about a variety of other environmental threats that require global attention and must be approached holistically. Accordingly, this multi-disciplinary book covers science, technology, engineering, economics, history, policy, law, and governance both domestic and international. The scope increases it’s intellectual appeal and usefulness in college courses in environmental studies and pre-law.

-Focus on Needed Results--The book reviews the dismal climate science and the consequences of continuing with the fossil-fuel business-as-usual. Yet the book is positive and hopeful, with emphasis on solutions, being the technologies and proven policies that EPA has available now.

-Adventures and Fun-To lighten the mood, to engage and amuse the reader, and to attract young readers to follow in a career like the author’s, the book describes his adventures in public service, from the military to courtroom trials to foreign missions and living abroad.

-Personal Growth and Civic Action--Finally, the book speaks to environmental activists of all ages, especially younger people worried about (and many protesting) climate neglect as an existential crisis. Within the popular genre of "how-to-do-it" guides, the book shows the way to build lives of happy employability as full-time professional pollution fighters working to save life on our planet--finding real pleasure, even joy, and paychecks for doing this important work. At the same time, the book will engage their parents and grandparents, who will find reasons to support younger family members seeking education leading to "green" professional careers. All readers will find inspiration to make climate-friendly lifestyle changes and voting choices, and to take effective civic action.

As a pollution fighter, Richard Emory served in the Headquarters of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He was the nationwide legal advisor for all EPA pollution-crime investigations, and completed his public-service career working internationally for EPA. He was educated at Yale University and Harvard Law School.