Dear Editor:
While there has been a debate about individual versus collective actions to address increasing climate instability, the growing consensus now is that we need both.
Most of those who have been aware of the climate problem have been taking individual actions for many years now.
Yet emissions continue to grow every year. We are currently at 412 ppm of CO2, an increase of 3.5 ppm since last year, measured at Mauna Loa on March 3, the highest levels in 2 million years.
Humans have never lived in the world we’re creating. We’re on track for a planet at least 4 C hotter than pre-industrial average temperatures. As David Wallace-Wells points out in his new book The Uninhabitable Earth, the last time temperatures were 4 degrees warmer there were palm trees in the arctic. Think about that for a minute.
This is a problem that we need to throw everything we have at, including both individual actions, like driving electric vehicles and insulating our houses, as well as collective actions like fuel economy standards, building code changes and, yes, a price on carbon.
Whether or not they are rebated, carbon taxes do work, according to leading economists and to the data from BC, Australia and elsewhere. The taxes make choices of polluting products and lifestyles more expensive, and reward those who take those individual actions. The tax credit rebates (available now) are the same for everyone, so your net benefit or gain depends greatly upon your individual choices. It’s been said before: if you tax what you don’t want, like pollution, you get less of it.
This logic, these facts, are nonsensical only to those who do not understand them.
Doug Prest,
Kenilworth