Ohio Dem needs new climate plan

The April 1 Contributors post at The Hill by former Rep. Zack Space (D-Ohio), “What to do about climate change?” acknowledges the reality of man-made climate change, but gets the science and the economics all wrong.

The op-ed promotes “clean coal,” clearly a reflection of the writer’s financial interest in Blue Coal. “Clean coal” will never be economically viable. The first “carbon capture” coal plant in the U.S. finally opened this year in Kemper County, Miss., costing $5 billion with a $1 billion cost overrun, a slew of legal battles, a revolt by ratepayers who are being charged 40 percent more and a credit downgrade for the utility. 

Government subsidies to fossil fuel corporations to fund ventures like “clean coal” cost taxpayers $550 billion annually, while the climate change disasters fossil fuels cause have cost taxpayers $1 trillion. Economically, that’s crazy.

And, scientifically, the “all-of-the-above” energy strategy advocated by the op-ed would create “catastrophic, irreversible” climate change, according to every scientific body of national or international standing.

The correct answer to “What to do about climate change?” is simple: Leave fossil fuels in the ground and transition to solar and wind energy now. The real question is, what’s the best economic plan for that?

You can see a copy of a bill ready to be introduced in Congress on the volunteer Citizens’ Climate Lobby website that would use market forces to cut U.S. emissions in half in 20 years and make major cuts in China’s emissions as well. It would also create 2.8 million permanent U.S. jobs (net) and add $75 billion to $80 billion annually to gross domestic product without government regulations, expansion or expenditure. It’s revenue-neutral and supported by prominent Republicans like former President Reagan’s Treasury secretary, George Shultz.

This bill would place an escalating carbon pollution fee on all fossil fuels (and on imports from carbon polluters like China, until they cut their emissions) with 100 percent of that revenue returned to every American, in equal shares, every month. As the fee makes fossil fuels increasingly more expensive than clean energy, people would switch and make a profit. The import tax money would give Americans the ability to buy U.S. products again.

The bill is modeled on the highly successful revenue-neutral carbon fee instituted in British Columbia six years ago. It’s supported by more than 2,500 major economists, conservative and progressive, nine of them Nobel Prize winners.

From Lynn Goldfarb, Lancaster, Pa.

Netanyahu unwelcome, unwanted

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recalcitrant interjection into America’s political system these past two months is absolutely reprehensible (“Netanyahu: Iran deal ‘absolutely’ threatens Israel’s survival,” April 5).  

President Obama has repeatedly stated Israel is shielded by, and under the protection of, America’s military umbrella. In the doctrine of collective self-defense, an attack on Israel is an attack on the United States. Therefore, nobody is going to mess with Israel, including Iran. But Netanyahu, apparently, is unable to conceptualize such a basic fact. 

The United States, along with its five partners in this Iranian nuclear program paradigm, is handling the current issue as well as could be expected given the circumstances. Netanyahu’s media-meddling only serves to tear asunder the framework’s set of conditional principles recently agreed upon by the parties to these negotiations. In this context, Netanyahu’s further involvement in this ongoing diplomatic process is neither solicited nor wanted.

From Earl Beal, Terre Haute, Ind.