Climate Change and Local Leaders

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Editor,

Orange County’s coastal communities — Laguna Beach, Newport Beach, and Huntington Beach — host over 23 million visitors a year, almost 6 times more people than Yosemite National Park. Disturbingly, we now find our beaches and coastal communities in danger – from rising sea levels. This has been linked to global climate problems now exacerbated by greenhouse gases from poorly planned industrial activities. This summer was the hottest worldwide ever recorded, with last year coming in as second hottest. How does this affect us? Like other U.S. coastal communities, rising sea levels are hitting residential areas and streets, with even modest storms now causing flooding on Balboa Island in Newport Beach.

Within a generation, many of California’s beaches will be eroded and gone. The cost of relocating homes, businesses, and infrastructure could easily be tens of billions of dollars.

Greenhouse gas-driven climate change sounds distant and vague, but it’s not. We can easily make sensible changes while stimulating our economy and creating good-paying jobs. It’s not rocket science, just plain economic sense.

Incredibly, our U.S. Congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, and our State Senator, John Moorlach, refuse to act while greenhouse gases also affect our health with toxic smog and acid rain. Air quality is linked to childhood disabilities like asthma and autism and acid rain harms fish, birds, soil, and agriculture. Rohrabacher says global climate change is “a liberal fabrication to get funding for research and part of a worldwide plan to control our lives,” even though he represents people whose homes lie in harm’s way and Moorlach recently attacked a Senate bill that would reduce California’s greenhouse gas emissions, dismissing the need to do so.

We can begin by creating industry support for clean, renewable energy technologies and stimulating the jobs of the future. California can and should lead the world in the manufacture and the use of green technologies.

Lacking vision and political willpower, incumbents Rohrabacher and Moorlach are unable to do what needs to be done and plan accordingly. The political climate needs a change too – from their old-school, big-money denial politics. We deserve better representation than these two men are capable of providing. It’s time citizens vote the incumbents out – before it’s too lat

Ari Grayson, Laguna Beach

 

The author is running for California’s 48th U.S. Congressional District.

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