Re: “Letter Perpetuates Climate Myth” (Terry Hansen, Aug 3): You can see every climate myth out there, clandestinely funded by the fossil fuel industry (scientificamerican.com), along with the peer-reviewed climate science that disproves them at skepticalscience.org, a website that comes highly recommended by Yale University’s Climate Connections website.
But let’s move from climate science to economics. Fossil fuels are very, very expensive. We’re still burning fossil fuels because people don’t understand what that’s actually costing them and what it will cost them in the future. Just ask the U.S. military, your insurance company or your bank.
The cost of climate change is increasing rapidly, now costing the U.S. hundreds of billions annually (NOAA.gov). These kinds of losses are not sustainable. The National Academy of Sciences says increasing carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels threaten to destroy not only the U.S. economy, but also the global economy.
On the other hand, if we switch to clean energy, nationally, within the next decade, it will be “essentially free” by 2030. That’s according to an analysis by financial giant UBS writing in The Financial Times, considered “the world’s most important business read” by the Global Capital Markets Survey. Clean energy will also create millions of good jobs, and those jobs will be evenly distributed, in every county in the U.S.
But this is a limited-time only offer. If we wait any longer, climate disasters will overwhelm us. We have only a decade left according to the world scientific community (IPCC). The Green New Deal can make that rapid national transition to clean energy we need.
The most important thing you can do to prevent climate disaster is to vote for leaders who understand the urgency of the climate crisis and the massive economic opportunity of clean energy.
“The Green New Deal is affordable; The cost of inaction is incalculable” — Forbes.
Pete Kuntz
Denver
