To the editor: In 2009, then-Environmental Safety Company Administrator Lisa P. Jackson signed the Endangerment and Trigger or Contribute Findings, confirming that greenhouse gases within the environment threaten public well being and welfare. On Tuesday, the EPA proposed repealing these findings. As Hayley Smith and Tony Briscoe’s article identified, this would go away industrial polluters free to emit limitless greenhouse gases (“As Trump’s EPA reverses landmark local weather coverage, California may lead a resistance,” July 29). It is a harmful transfer within the fallacious route.
Some would say that clear power sources are too costly, although these sources are quickly changing into extra reasonably priced. The true price of soiled power lies within the externalities related to local weather change. Unprecedented floods, fires, hurricanes and glacial melting price billions. Air and water air pollution create expensive well being points. International migration due to desertification or flooding causes nationwide and worldwide strife. Past the monetary prices, after all, the well being and well-being of all life on the planet is gravely in danger.
It’s inevitable that clear power will prevail as coal and oil develop into exceedingly costly to extract. Why not expedite the transfer towards non-polluting power sources now, earlier than we’ve brought on higher irreversible harm? Defending the setting is the supposed job of the EPA, therefore the identify, so it must get again to the vital work earlier than it’s too late.
Margaret Baker Davis, Claremont
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To the editor: The latest article detailing the EPA’s transfer to reverse the endangerment discovering isn’t just alarming — it speaks of a betrayal. For these of us who’ve spent a long time grappling with the arduous scientific fact of local weather change, that is maybe essentially the most devastating environmental coverage determination in a technology. And for these within the fossil gasoline trade, who knew the dangers of carbon emissions way back to the Nineteen Eighties and selected deception over accountability, it’s a long-awaited victory.
The endangerment discovering has been a authorized cornerstone within the combat towards local weather change, recognizing greenhouse gases as a risk to human well being and the setting. To dismantle it’s to intentionally ignore science, public well being and our kids’s future — all in service of income for polluters.
Historical past won’t be sort to those that stood by or cheered this rollback. It is a second that calls for outrage, motion and fact, and California should prepared the ground.
Barry Engelman, Santa Monica
