TO THE EDITOR:
Re “Interact with climate change deniers” (Jan. 28): That’s a fool’s errand.
Any climate change deniers who are left in 2018 are sure they’re the ones with the scientific facts and data. They live in a right-wing media bubble that feeds them a steady diet of climate pseudoscience.
For decades, the largest fossil fuels corporations in this country have spent billions on a climate change denial campaign, directly modeled on the tobacco industry’s denial that smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer. Big Tobacco hired fake “doctors:” fossil fuel corporations secretly hire fake “scientists.” Focus on solutions: we can tax fossil fuels out of existence and it won’t cost consumers or taxpayers anything.
In fact, it will put money in their pockets every month. British Columbia’s been doing it for nearly a decade and they have zero carbon emissions, lower taxes and energy bills and the fastest growing economy in Canada.
It’s called “carbon fee-and-dividend”: All fossil fuel corporations pay an annually-increasing carbon pollution fee and every taxpayer gets that money in equal monthly “dividend” checks.
Use that money to buy clean energy, as the fee makes oil, gas and coal increasingly more expensive and you make more money every year.
In the U.S., that’s projected to increase GDP $75-80 billion annually.
Pete Kuntz
