Letter to the editor: Confronting change

To the editor:

A 16-year old at our Citizen’s Climate Lobby National Conference in June displayed remarkable insight when she said: “These are little tiny solutions we are offering to gigantic problems.”

Clergy suggest we approach climate change as intergenerational justice. Some in my generation resist change and think if we even talk about carbon emissions it will create socialism. They are mistakenly identifying environmentalism with intent to harm the American economy? Is it our failure to recognize new profit centers and therefore a slowness to embrace new energy technologies and efficiencies? Or is it the desire to not even think about it?

Citizen’s Climate Lobby suggests we approach climate change from the economic standpoint? Clean energy has all the characteristics for a prosperous way forward. More jobs, better GDP, opportunities for innovation, reduction in health related expenses and international cooperation. If you think about it, action on the climate sounds pretty smart. When you hear sentiments suggesting that changing weather might just be a natural cycle in the history of the earth, it is someone succumbing to seeds of doubt sown by the old energy guard.

According to leading climate scientist, Dr. Michael Mann, “those views are completely not credible”. The National Academy of Science, founded by Abraham Lincoln, reports with 97 percent accuracy that an overheated planet is a man-made phenomenon, nearing a cascading point. If you are passionate about something, you make time to do something about it. Confronting climate change is a way forward, toward building a better world.