Solar industry already a boon

The Sept. 9 letter to the editor, “Finding balance between heating our homes and preserving Earth,” points out that we don’t need to choose between jobs and clean air. The fledgling solar industry already provides more jobs than the coal industry and job creation in renewable energy is 10 times faster than in the economy overall.

The Solutions Project website has economic projections of the tens of thousands of clean energy jobs that will be created in each state by going 100 percent renewable. These are “40-year jobs” — lifetime employment in both skilled and unskilled positions. The same website also shows the projected savings in healthcare from prevention of asthma attacks and other illnesses caused by carbon pollution.

{mosads}And there’s a way we can transition to clean energy that can be essentially free, create millions of U.S. jobs while making much faster and bigger emissions cuts than the Environmental Protection Agency, without any government regulations or expenditures. 

It’s called “carbon fee and dividend,” or CFD. British Columbia passed CFD legislation years ago and it’s been a success. The Citizens’ Climate Lobby is a national volunteer organization whose members are Republicans, Democrats and Independents, all working to get this market-based plan passed in Congress.

CFD gives all the money collected from a steadily increasing carbon pollution fee on fossil fuels to consumers, rather than the government, in monthly amounts. The fee increases annually, so people use their carbon fee rebates to buy cheaper clean energy. The ordinary consumer has more money in pocket each year. Critically, a similar rebated fee would go on imports from countries like China that have higher emissions, cutting emissions there while bringing back manufacturing jobs here. This is a much simpler, fairer, more transparent, effective and efficient way to cut greenhouse gas emissions than cap and trade, and the benefits to our economy will be enormous.

From Lynn Goldfarb, Los Angeles