Some alternative assumptions on climate change

I noticed a letter in the paper Monday from a reader in Bella Vista offering an “only partially tongue-in-cheek” remedy to the climate change controversy.

The writer asked us to make an assumption that “the country is roughly split 50/50 in the belief of anthropogenic climate change in the form of the green-house carbon theory.” Well, that’s not a very good assumption. According to a national poll conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Communication after the November election, 70 percent of Americans support staying in the Paris Accord, so let’s make that assumption instead.

The writer then (all in good humor) suggested that those who support steps to combat climate change “drop off the grid,” leaving him and others to enjoy the “benefits of our great capitalist system.”

Here’s another suggestion, not offered tonguein-cheek. How about ending government support of the fossil fuel industry, estimated at as much as $50 billion by the United States, and $450 billion by the G20 governments, and re-invest that money in renewables? Those jobs, rather than being dead-end jobs in an outdated industry, will provide training, employment and economic growth for the next century.

In a 2015 study by the International Monetary Fund, the unpaid costs of fossil fuels are upward of $5.3 trillion annually. Meaning that, as a global community, we’re giving the fossil fuel industry $10 million per minute to destroy our environment. Seems like in a “great capitalist system” we ought to be able to let the fossil fuel industry get by on its own, don’t you think?

CHALON RAGSDALE Fayetteville