To the editor:

Mitigating climate change might not be as expensive as you think. Adding carbon to the air is the root cause of the problem, so, the solution is to motivate people to reduce the amount of carbon added.  Nothing motivates people like money. So, make the carbon content of fuels more expensive and let the market sort out the right balance of solutions. You can do this with a carbon tax. If you make the carbon tax revenue neutral as far as the government is concerned, you protect the people in the lower two-thirds of income from higher prices.

This does not hurt the economy, and it is more effective and less costly than regulations or cap-and-trade. (Source: http://citizensclimatelobby.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/REMI-National-SUMMARY.pdf)

To convert from mostly dispatchable fossil fuel plants to non-dispatchable wind, solar, etc. requires engineering some new infrastructure for storage and distribution. We know how to build more transmission lines, and there are lots of ways of storing energy. I don’t know and I don’t care what solutions will be used. Solutions are possible; we just need to motivate the market to develop them.