Tackling climate change

James Hansen, the NASA scientist who sounded the warning about global warming in 1988, was featured on CBS’ “60 Minutes” on October 4. The segment focused on this year’s catastrophic California wildfires and the devastating storms and flooding in the Atlantic basin. These are attributed to the effects of climate change.

Hansen says in order to address climate change head on, “what we need is to have an increasing price on the fossil fuels and do it in a way that the public will accept.” This is the market-driven, bipartisan approach of groups such as Citizens’ Climate Lobby and the Climate Leadership Council.

Both groups propose taxing fossil fuels at the point where they enter the US economy and returning that money as dividends to US Households. This approach, which will reduce US emissions by at least 40% by 2032, is endorsed as the most beneficial to our economy by all the past chairs of the Federal Reserve and 27 Nobel Laureate economists. (Read their statement in the Wall Street Journal, 1/17/19)

Some who deeply care about climate change want to hold out for a more profound change in our economic system instead of “compromising” on a market-based system. But now is the time for all of us who are genuinely concerned about climate change to band together in common cause: the need for action is urgent. We need to support, as a first step, the approach that, as Hansen says, is politically realistic.

Mary DuPree

Moscow