Connie Young - 9-20-2019 - CLIMATE SCIENCE, OR PURE PROFIT MOTIVE?

CLIMATE SCIENCE, OR PURE PROFIT MOTIVE?

My daughter lives in the Bahamas, so I watched Hurricane Dorian closely. While my daughter's island was spared, sadly the Abacos and Grand Bahama took a direct and deadly hit.

Once again, another monster storm has destroyed lives, livelihoods and property. For four decades, climate scientists have warned that a warming climate would make storms more intense and dangerous.

I find it tragically ironic that some of the politicians who rely on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to help them decide when and where to issue hurricane advisories and evacuation orders, are the same ones who belittle and ignore NOAA’s climate research and advice. In both cases, NOAA utilizes super-computer modeling and scientific consensus to make its predictions.

Are your local, state and federal representatives listening to climate scientists, or to special interests who profit from the status quo? If you don’t know, this is a good time to find out and demand that they utilize sound science to solve the climate crisis.

After all, next time my daughter … or your loved one … may not be so lucky.

Connie Young, Fresno

https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article235240922.html

 

September 20, 2019

Andrea De Zubiria - 9-6-2019 - On climate, go past business as usual

On climate, go past business as usual

I’m glad that the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups now acknowledge that climate change is real and caused by greenhouse gas emissions. But the recent opinion piece by Heritage staff seems to claim that we can’t address climate change without harming our economy.

Three thousand five hundred economists, including all living former Federal Reserve chairs (ie, Alan Greenspan, Janet Yellen) and 27 Nobel Prize winners urge putting a price on carbon where it is produced and returning all the collected fees to American households. A recent study aggregated the results of 11 top peer-reviewed models that simulated the results of such a policy. There was a clear consensus this would not harm the economy. The study showed it would save thousands of lives, reduce climate risk, and save money by eliminating a number of regulations.

HR763 is a bipartisan bill that proposes such a policy and now has 59 co-sponsors in the House. The bill uses market forces rather than regulations to inspire the innovation we need to drawdown greenhouse gas emissions. It also offers a just transition to a cleaner energy economy For the sake of our children’s future, we need to move beyond “business as usual”

Andrea Farber De Zubiria, Fresno

https://wwwfresnobee.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article234727527.html

September 6, 2019