Most people out there believe that global warming is a real threat that we must do something about in our country. We simply can not go on consuming more and more energy, and producing increasing amounts of carbon dioxide and other more potent global warming gases, and assume that everything is going to be okay.

Al Gore has been saying this for a long time. In the past two years he has made this point well known through his tours, the film An Inconvenient Truth, and last week's concert series Live Earth. By now few people are truly ignorant of the problem, and many of us are taking action to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels and our massive emissions of carbon dioxide.

What can we do as a nation about this problem? What can the global community do about these emissions? There are no simple solutions, and most of them require a rethinking of at least part of the way we live. We want everybody to have a high standard of living, but we have to realize that way we are obtaining it currently is incompatible with everybody having the good life.

Here are some solutions to address the global warming problem:

• We must rethink our use of energy and emphasize conservation whenever possible. Technology and modernization of equipment can do much to save power. It can be expensive to implement efficiency at first, but it ultimately will reduce our costs over the long run.
• We must seek alternatives to building massive new power plants. We can get 'new' electricity for growth from conservation of existing uses, through small co-generation plants, or from renewable resources—either small or large in scale.
• We must make all new cars and trucks more efficient and cleaner. We must push automakers to improve efficiency for all vehicles and not just force people into smaller cars.

Our concerns about global warming can force us to rethink how we use energy, and ultimately save significant amounts of money through conservation of resources. Energy saved is free energy. This will be good for our society, as will be the reduction of pollution from the mass consumption of energy. All energy consumption ultimately produces pollution besides carbon dioxide, that dirties our land and pollutes our water. A well thought out policy on global warming can be good for the environment. We need to consume less as a society, and any policy that does will be markedly better for the world.