Political talk about climate change is heating up again (pun intended). A friend just sent us this scare piece from the New York Times. The two members of Congress who represent West Boca and most of Palm Beach County are our neighbor Ted Deutch and also Lois Frankel.
Frankel posted this yesterday on Facebook:
Deutch is a member of Henry Waxman’s Safe Climate Caucus.
We could get into a discussion of whether climate change is real or not, but that’s unnecessary. Let’s suppose it’s genuine – that human emissions of carbon into the atmosphere are changing and indeed have changed the climate, putting us all at risk and threatening to flood much of southeast Florida.
The New York Times article says:
the only major policy solutions to climate change [are] taxing or regulating the oil, gas and coal industries
But these are not solutions. Such policies might reduce increases in carbon emissions or maybe they would even reduce total carbon emissions. In the “science” advanced by the climate change community, this would not stop global warming. It would merely slow it a little.
To solve the problem, we would have to stop carbon emissions (and even that might not be enough). That means eliminating all use of these fossil fuels. To avoid economic collapse, these sources of energy would have to be replaced. So we have a few questions.
Dear Representatives Deutch and Frankel:
1. Where in Palm Beach County do you propose to locate the nuclear power plants, solar farms and wind farms necessary to replace the energy we will lose from not using oil, gas and coal?
2. Leading electric car maker Tesla faces lawsuits from car dealerships opposing their business model. Electric cars will be necessary in the post-carbon world you advocate. The UAW is fighting their labor model.
What are you doing in Congress to remove such obstacles to electric cars?
3. One of the largest carbon emitters in our country is the federal government. What government activities are you willing to eliminate? Do you support bringing all US troops home from overseas? Are you prepared to end drug prohibition and your war on guns by closing the DEA and ATF?
4. Even if we stop carbon emissions from the US, we would need other countries to stop their carbon emissions too. How do you propose to get China and Russia to stop carbon emissions?
We’ll send this to Deutch and Frankel via Twitter, but we invite our readers to offer their thoughts in the comments, either here or on the West Boca News Facebook page.
Please note that we will keep a tight rein on comments – stick to the issues and stay away from partisan shots, name calling or profanity. Also, there will be no discussion about whether climate change is real or not. Have those conversations elsewhere. This post assumes for the sake of argument that it is real and the discussion is limited to what would actually stop it and how to get it done. So stick to the five questions above.
