Watching the Ken Burns documentary, "The Roosevelts," on PBS recently, I saw remarkable black-and-white newsreel footage of Teddy Roosevelt, the progressive Republican, fighting the corporate power of the 1 percent and defying his own corrupt political party bosses who did their bidding.

Who knew? Certainly not the GOP of today.

You don't hear anything from the GOP about T.R. the environmentalist. Republicans seem to have forgotten their own proud legacy and their greatest leaders.

The next day, riding a bus to New York City to participate in The People's Climate March, I couldn't help thinking that T.R. would have been leading such a demonstration.

He stood for true capitalism, not the phony, crony capitalism of his day or today, when we have fat-cat fossil fuel corporations controlling Congress and receiving multibillion-dollar annual government subsidies.

Fossil fuel corporations also are exempted from a long-established principle of our nation: Polluters pay. Instead, fossil fuels are allowed to use our atmosphere as an open sewer, free of charge.

The U.S. has well over 30,000 premature deaths annually from carbon pollution with $35 billion to $90 billion each year in associated medical costs, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

But that's dwarfed by the $1 trillion taxpayers have paid for climate-related disasters since 1980, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website.

And climate change has barely begun. We are guaranteed a minimum of 50 more years of rapidly worsening storms, floods, droughts, etc.

That's because it will take at least a decade to transition to clean energy, and it will take about four decades for the record amount of excess carbon dioxide we're pumping into the atmosphere today to heat up and affect us. It won't dissipate for millennia.

Climate change is not like acid rain or the ozone hole. We were able to take the advice of scientists and make those problems go away. Not this time.

"The Roosevelts" documentary showed the spectacular achievements of this nation when government and industry cooperated during World War II and all our efforts were directed toward fighting our common enemy.

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When Americans finally realize that fossil fuels pose a greater threat than the Axis powers ever did, they could unite with that same fighting spirit and determination. However, time is not on our side, as it was in WWII.

Our growing carbon emissions will occupy our atmosphere for many generations to come, and their effects on humans and all life on the planet will be drastic.

We are consigning our children and grandchildren and their children to increasing scarcity and suffering by ignoring the warnings scientists have given us for decades. The only question now is whether there will be millions or billions of deaths caused by climate change.

That number depends on how long we procrastinate. Fortunately, we have a solution to climate change that can prevent most of those deaths, if we do act now.

And — some really good news — this solution will also be good for our economy. It's endorsed by eight Nobel economists, and, according to The Economist, it has cut emissions dramatically for six years in British Columbia while that economy has thrived.

A carbon pollution fee on all fossil fuels (and on imports from carbon polluters such as China) that is rebated, 100 percent, to every American, every month, would create 2.8 million net jobs and add $75 billion to $80 billion annually to GDP by 2030, according to a recent REMI economic report.

Raise the fee annually, and people would use their rebate money to buy cheaper clean energy. It's the opposite of a tax because we get the money. Most people would end up with extra cash in their pockets, especially lower-income and middle-class Americans.

Revenue-neutral with no government regulations, this plan unites conservative economics and progressive thinking to prevent global disaster and to create a better future.

They say great leaders arise when they are needed. Let's hope that's right. We certainly need a leader right now who can combine the best of our political left and right — a sort of T.R. and FDR combined — to unite the American people to act.

Our political gridlock today could literally destroy our nation in the future. The time for climate action is now, not when climate change has bankrupted us and we are victims, not victors, in the climate change battle.

Lynn Goldfarb is a Manheim Township resident and volunteer with Citizens' Climate Lobby. Her daughter and son-in-law are climate scientists who work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Academies of Sciences.