To the editor: Visitor contributor Michael Mische (“We still rely on gasoline. Why is California adding to the cost and the pollution?,” July 6) says “California’s power transition is inevitable,” however needs to gradual the transition lest oil firms punish us with greater gasoline costs.
However Mische ignores the prices from local weather change-induced harms — catastrophic fires, floods, sea-level rise, droughts and excessive warmth — for which taxpayers are presently footing the invoice. This 12 months’s L.A. fires alone are estimated to have value upwards of $250 billion, and Californians are paying for local weather injury by greater power payments, insurance coverage premiums, healthcare and rebuilding prices.
In the meantime, massive multinational fossil fuel corporations and California refineries get pleasure from file income and are set to obtain much more tax breaks and incentives below President Trump’s backwards funds invoice.
As an alternative of asking fossil gas firms to frack the thus-far unfrackable local weather bomb that’s the Monterey Shale, how about we demand a transparent reply on why we pay the mystery gasoline surcharge?
The oil and gasoline business has held Californians hostage for too lengthy. The one approach to escape is to spend money on the transition to renewable power, and shortly. There’s a invoice for that. The Polluters Pay Local weather Superfund Legislation would require the world’s largest fossil gas polluters to pay a tiny portion of their huge income to contribute to the transition and clear up the mess they created.
We’re in a local weather disaster as a result of fossil gas firms gaslighted us for many years to complement themselves. Mische suggests they need to bury us even deeper.
Cooper Kass, Los Angeles
The writer is a workers legal professional on the Heart for Organic Variety’s Local weather Legislation Institute.
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To the editor: A troublesome facet of coping with the local weather disaster is our deficiency as people in projecting in the long run. With no disrespect for Mische’s experience, one wonders if he’s contemplating the tragic long-term financial penalties and human struggling related to the continued combustion of fossil fuels. To make sure, we have to contemplate the impacts on these least capable of afford greater gas costs and supply reduction accordingly as we transition, however these are the exact same individuals who might be hit hardest by the local weather disaster. We simply misplaced greater than 90 folks in Texas due to a flood associated to that very disaster.
Mische is nervous a couple of potential value hike this summer season. We ought to be nervous about each summer season’s local weather disaster and the struggling that our grandchildren and their kids will face if we don’t act within the close to time period to rein in carbon air pollution.
Michael Selna, Huntington Seaside
