Des Orsinelli: Join Citizens Climate Lobby to fight global warming
What we need now is federal legislation to prevent climate change. While I commend California leaders, it’s time to step up our game. Alone, California carbon reduction regulations reduce our competitiveness with other states and countries, while reducing the world’s emissions only a little.
A federal law, as proposed by the Citizens Climate Lobby, will solve the problem globally, cheaply and with almost no new bureaucracy.
How? By placing a small but annually increasing fee on fossil fuels, distributing these collected fees to American households (i.e., no new spending revenue for Congress) and implementing a border fee on imports from countries with no carbon program. It’s a conservative plan, and would increase the cost of living only a few percent over 30 years. Compare that to the sustained costs we can expect in the valley due to projected warming related drought.
Join me in asking our Rep. Jeff Denham to support a cheap no-new-revenue approach to stopping human-induced climate change. Climate change is a global problem, we need a global answer. Someday Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jerry Brown and all of California will truly be able to say we led the way.
Des Orsinelli, Ripon
This story was originally published August 4, 2015 at 6:03 PM with the headline "Des Orsinelli: Join Citizens Climate Lobby to fight global warming."