Climate change is real.

As a journalist and an intelligent human being I believe this because it has been proven. The scientific community has consistently proven and come to a consensus on this issue. The National Aeronautic and Space Administration has compiled several peer-reviewed scientific studies stating that more than 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists agree that climate warming trends over the last century is likely due to human influence.

This is something that we need to face but there are angles to this story that people are not addressing. There are hundreds of thousands of  workers in the oil and gas field just in Oklahoma.

According to the Oklahoma State Chamber of Commerce nearly 150,000 Oklahomans are employed in oil and gas industry and that’s not even counting how huge a part it plays in our state economy.

Without oil and gas so many of the advances we’ve made would not exist. So it is in this way I understand the pushback from these oil drillers and workers who feed their babies through this field.

However, it is foolish to simply ignore what is blatantly and consistently shown to be true, especially something so vital to our future. Recently, however, clean energy has been on the rise.  American wind power supported a record 88,000 jobs at the start of 2016, an increase of 20 percent in a year according to U.S. Wind Industry Market Report. This is the solution I feel we need to be looking for — supplementing the jobs lost from shifting focus away from oil and gas and towards clean energy.

Everyone contributes to the polluting of our world. So the solution, in my mind, is to fix the technology. Recently on National Public Radio’s Christopher Joyce, the science correspondent, and Scott Simon, the host, had this to say about the hurricanes that hit Texas and Florida:

SIMON: Global warming can provide that heat from the ocean.

JOYCE: Yes. I mean, there’s always heat. And there’ve always been hurricanes. But there’s extra heat now. I mean, this summer, the Atlantic Ocean, where the hurricanes form, was close to two degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the normal. And that may not seem like a lot. But you’re talking about tens of thousands of square miles, 150 feet deep. That’s a lot of heat. We saw a similar situation in 2005 when Katrina hit in 2010 – a very warm ocean and lots of hurricanes. And we should note that it’s not just power you get from the heat. More water vapor means more rain. And that’s what happened with Harvey. A warmer atmosphere holds more rain. More of it comes out of the hotter ocean. So that’s what happened with Harvey.”

Republicans and corporations want to protect their investments and their agendas and have a realistic view of how much we desperately rely on this energy. Oil industry workers want to feed their families. Environmentalists and liberals want to protect the planet and preserve nature. Many are concerned that petroleum-based energy is extremely harmful to our world.

Everybody wants something and to an extent everybody has a valuable point. Too much time is spent debating the existence of a problem and less time spent on solving that problem in a way that doesn’t create more problems.

Climate change is real, dangerous, and directly our fault as humans. Only we, as humans, can fix it. Unless we are united on this issue nothing will ever change. That is the reality of the situation whether you like it or not.