The Old Testament commands we treat our neighbors as ourselves for we were strangers in the land of Egypt. I see too little respect for that biblical command honored both here and abroad, but I wish good people everywhere a happy, healthy, peaceful New Year.

Let me also dedicate, to a friend on paternity leave, these comments about protecting the climate and environment for our families.

I am finding it difficult to understand the resistance to taking action that would protect our flesh and blood from tragedies of biblical proportion that the climate has in store for us, even spending time and money to protect the people we love most if it weren’t in fact becoming cheaper to protect them than to leave them in harm’s way.

Someone recently asked me what the happiest day of my life was. The most important thing that ever happened to me was my marriage. I celebrate that every day. But the single happiest day of my life was when our daughter, our firstborn child, was born. I went home from the hospital singing I’m a Daddy to the tune of Clementine. Friends invited me to dinner and found me out of my mind giddy.

Our daughter was born in St. Louis. That city had squelched the burning of coal decades before she was born because the pollution from coal burning was destroying the city. St. Louis came back and thrived because it confronted that problem.

Nothing was more sacred to me than protecting that little bundle of joy and protecting my wife and the son we had two years later.

But scientists, including some I knew and worked with in St. Louis were already describing what climate change would do to our loved ones, how it would attack them with tropical diseases moving north, with drought, floods, violent storms and fire and how air pollution would shorten their lives by corroding their lungs.

Sure enough, all of those problems, whipped up by a changing climate, have been crowding in on our own children and grandchildren, attacking their food supply, increasing what we pay for groceries, bringing tropical diseases closer, and threatening to flood them out of their homes and offices.

In a conversation with Tom Steyer titled “We’ve Both Got Grandchildren,” Bill McKibben commented that “every 10th of a degree that we raise [world] temperature moves another hundred million of our brothers and sisters out of a safe climate zone and into a dangerous one.”

Solar panels were originally developed in this country. They have become much cheaper than energy based on burning fossil fuels – gas, oil, coal – all of which produce greenhouse gasses that make our climate worse and less hospitable for our children and grandchildren. Yet despite the risk to our flesh and blood, those in charge of our country have been making it harder to switch to cheaper, safer, forms of energy.

And climate change has been creating another problem which I predicted decades ago. As the livable parts of the world move north, America will be ceding power to arctic empires. Instead of Canada becoming the 51st state as Mr. Trump would have it, Russia and other new arctic powers will become dominant in this world. Instead of becoming great again, we are already becoming supplicants to China and will become supplicants to the newly emerging arctic powers. In that world, we will no longer be in control of our own house and it’s hard to know whether our grandchildren will even speak English.

Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran. He enjoys the help of his editor, Jeanette Gottlieb

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