Letters to the editor for Thursday, July 13, 2017

Letter writer misses mark on climate change

The July 1 letter in the Nevada Appeal, “Taxing Fossil Fuel Companies a Poor Solution to Climate Change,” misses the point that the tax money paid by fossil fuels would be paid TO the taxpayers.

If you buy clean energy, you don’t pay the carbon pollution fee, you just get the same annually-increasing equal monthly “carbon dividend” checks as every other taxpayer gets.

That’s why independent economic studies show “carbon fee-and-dividend” will increase U.S. GDP by more than $75 billion annually and make the vast majority of Americans better off financially. It’s already worked as promised in British Columbia for the past eight years (citizensclimatelobby.org).

The letter rejects Stanford University studies showing the world can easily and economically be powered by solar/wind, and its projection of more than 5 million U.S. clean energy jobs (solutionsproject.org), but California already has more than 500,000 clean energy jobs, while the entire US coal industry now employs only 50,000 (Bloomberg).

Clean energy will be a $50 trillion industry (Bloomberg). Solar and wind prices keep dropping exponentially, as do storage costs. Solar and wind energy will be virtually free within 20 years (Washington Post).

Unlike the Paris Climate Accord, “carbon fee-and-dividend” can create a global transition to clean energy within the next decade (Newsweek), using market forces, not government regulations. The “Taxing” letter also ignores the fact that “carbon fee-and-dividend” also will make other countries cut their GHG emissions as much as the U.S. does by using market forces. See the Citizens Climate Lobby website for more.

Pete Kuntz

Denver