Guest opinion: Action against global warming can wait no more

What do we owe posterity? We hear a lot about the federal debt that we baby boomers will be leaving our kids and grandkids. But we hear much less from Congress and those running for president about the climate legacy we are leaving our grandchildren, great grandchildren, and great-great grandchildren.

Yes, I know this piece will spawn the usual denials that human-induced climate change and ocean acidification are real or a problem, but the objective evidence continues to mount (and I’m not talking about model output). Even oil companies such as Exxon and Shell are admitting that:

• Climate change is a serious problem,

• Greenhouse gases are the principal cause, and

• Net emissions of these gases to the atmosphere must be reduced to zero before the end of this century or sooner.

When leaders of one of the most affected industries recognize the problem, you know that climate-change denial is rapidly approaching the same level of credibility as saying smoking is not a cause of cancer.

Fortunately, we still have time to address climate change in a way that will forestall some, but not all, of its worst consequences and in a way that will not wreck our economy, but actually generate new jobs and economic growth. I am talking about the carbon fee-and-dividend proposal of Hoover Institution fellow and President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz, which is supported by the Citizens’ Climate Lobby and described by Shultz in the March 13, 2015, issue of the Washington Post as “A Reagan Approach to Climate Change.”

Shultz proposes a market-driven approach to mitigating climate change that should have bipartisan appeal and an actual chance of being implemented. He calls for imposing a gradually increasing fee on carbon at the point of extraction or import. The proceeds of this fee, by law, would be immediately refunded to the consumer, thus bypassing the inevitable attempts to divert them to some other purpose. These revenues would provide relief to consumers from rising costs of carbon-based fuels, and they would create price incentives to develop and switch to ultra-low or zero-carbon emission sources of energy.

The focus of this approach is on making change happen and not dictating how it should happen. That should be the business of innovation. Otherwise, we are locking ourselves into yesterday’s technology. But the key is that the fee must increase over time to account for the increasing social and environmental cost of these emissions.

It is time to take action, because the longer we wait the more disruptive climate change will become to human society and to the environmental systems that sustain it. Yes, we can continue to deny that climate change and ocean acidification are occurring, in spite of the evidence. Or we can say, yes they are occurring, but it’s not my problem because the most serious consequences will not be experienced until after I am dead.

It really boils down to a moral decision: “What do we owe posterity?”