Re “Progress in responding to climate emergency? Not if emissions are at an all-time high” (April 26): Thank you to The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board for your continued coverage of the climate emergency and raising the alarm.
Yes, there is not enough progress on climate yet, but there is hope ahead.
Our own congressman, Scott Peters, D-San Diego, is an original co-sponsor of the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act. The bill could get us nationally to net zero emissions by 2050. Nothing else out there can do that.
This bill, more than a decade in the making, puts a steadily rising fee on carbon pollution at the source, returns the money to U.S. households and applies a border adjustment to level the playing field on carbon pricing.
It is a nonpartisan bill that incentivizes innovation in clean energy. It is ed by economists and offers households cash back.
Talk about it, write about it, get it ed.
— Kate Keith, San Diego
Thank you for your powerful editorial about climate change. As you say, there is now “the broad belief that the climate emergency is an existential threat.” The breadth and relatively rapid diffusion of this belief is encouraging. On the other hand, as you also point out, progress to address this threat continues to be grossly inadequate.
I would like to think we’ll miraculously find a silver bullet (such as geoengineering), or that we’ll abruptly wake up and put a tax on fossil fuels — see, for example, the excellent Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act currently in Congress (HR 5744). It is, however, looking more likely that the massive changes required will take generations to work through, and that there will be constant climate-induced disasters to remind us of our collective folly.
Meanwhile, many of the incremental solutions are known and moving slowly forward. We must keep pressuring our political representatives to accelerate them.
— Peter Thomas, North Park
