Dear Friends:

Saving Ourselves is a work in progress, but I felt compelled to publish it on-line because I believe the circumstances require it.

Saving Ourselves describes the transformation over the past 40 years of the Republican Party into an institution that today threatens the very survival of humanity. It also offers a prescription for saving our lives, those of our children and others with whom we share the present and future. Allow me to explain.

This will sound harsh, and it pains me to say it, for I once considered myself a Republican and spent a professional career working for two of its finest office-holders, Sens. Robert T. Stafford of Vermont and Bill Roth of Delaware, and others. But they, and I, have virtually nothing in common with the GOP of today, which rests on three great pillars: racism, religious bigotry and money. The Party and its operatives have reduced to a science the manipulation of voters in order to win elections. Once in office, power is exercised not for the benefit of the voters who made victory possible, the deeply religious and the deeply resentful, but for corporations and the rich.

Whether Republicans win or lose the 2008 elections, they will not slink silently into the night, nor will the changes they have wrought in the last forty years be undone easily or quickly. Now is not the time for smug satisfaction based on a single election, for we are in deep trouble. There is no question that global warming is real and is happening as I write these words. Humanity might survive gradual warming over a period of, say, one or two centuries, but that is not what is likely to happen. Probably change will occur very suddenly and violently, and it will be irreversible.

Solutions exist today, and have for decades: power plants that generate electricity and useful heat from coal, extracting over 90 percent of its energy instead of wasting two-thirds, like most in the United States, Germany and Japan; cars that travel 100 miles on a gallon of fuel, and even newer ones that achieve 300 miles per gallon; electricity from sunlight and wind with zero pollution; lights that will last 7 to 10 years in ordinary use and cut electricity consumption by 90 percent. These and other solutions can curb global warming and start saving lives within a few minutes to a few years, unlike responses pushed by industry–so they can profit from them–that can require 50 to 50,000 years.

There is very little time to act, which means the grip of ExxonMobil, General Motors and the like on government must be broken and broken quickly.

I am a reasonably accomplished writer, and I have worked on these subjects for more than three decades. I have written other books in whole or part, but no publisher would touch Saving Ourselves. That left me with two choices: do nothing; or, do this. Nothing was never an option.

If you are so inclined, a donation for the non-profit foundation that supports my Newsletter, Health & Clean Air, using PayPal would be appreciated, but that it entirely voluntary. The primary purpose here is not to make money.

I hope you read Saving Ourselves and that it will move you to action, because our lives and those of our children depend on it.

With Regards,

Curtis A. Moore