In rebuttal to Frank Bailey’s July 23 letter “Environmentalists talk the talk,” it is global climate change that Bill McKibben (http://350.org) is fighting against, and not to enhance the wealth of oil, gas, and coal corporations. Most environmentalists, including McKibben, recognize the necessity of continuing to use carbon fuels for mobile applications. It’s highly compact portable energy and we don’t have the technology yet to replace it. But for the production of electricity? That has to stop ASAP. There are alternatives that can be scaled up to replace carbon fuels if we have a mindset to do so. This is going to require compromises and yes, we all will be making sacrifices.
This is a crisis of unprecedented magnitude and we have run out of time. Why does anyone support the continued buildup of an infrastructure that is going to allow the production and yearly release of many gigatons of CO2 into our atmosphere (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel)?
Do we want our children to live on a planet where extreme summer temps may reach 150 degrees, with constant hurricanes, tornadoes, floodings in some areas and never-ending droughts in others? Rising acidic oceans? No cryosphere left?
Wake up, the large majority of environmental, climate, and planetary scientists, who have spent years studying this problem, cannot all be wrong.
