Hydrocarbon corporations are not making a bootleg turn from that profit source. No change of heart has occurred there, and this is clear to all of us.

Carbon pricing could work, but it is flawed, politically. An April 12 New York Times Magazine article by David Leonhardt, “The problem with putting a price on the end of the world,” urges clean-energy programs, which can bring voters in to support a measure with results that carbon pricing alone will not.

Polls show that most voters support clean-energy measures, and, after four decades of slow-growing living standards, also support federal action to create good jobs. Costs of energy for heat and transport is major for families, especially while the middle class and the poor have struggled with slow income growth.

But while voters fear climate change, they resist supporting some measures. So, as the Green New Deal says, along with supporting expansion of clean energy, carbon pricing would have many benefits. Clean-energy ballot initiatives won in Nevada and (essentially) in Michigan, losing in Arizona when the Attorney General’s Office entered the fray.

John Podesta, the best mind on this issue, believes clean energy will bring wage increases and health benefits to the middle class and the poor. Podesta, according to Leonhardt, has “spent as much time as anyone thinking about how to pass federal legislation on climate change,” and “he thinks a carbon price needs to be in a bill, so long as it isn’t the focus.”

The future will bring increasing harm, more extreme weather. We cannot wait for the politics to change to begin to take action.

Anne Vaughan

Berwick

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