On Sept. 11, America mourns the loss of innocent life from an ignorant and vicious foe. At the same time we celebrate the heroic response to this challenge. Tom Osborn’s column of the same date addresses an even more serious threat: the climate crisis. The problem we have in responding to this threat is that it comes in slow motion. Instead of planes flying into the Twin Towers that collapsed in an hour and forty two minutes, climate change takes decades to make its deadly effect felt. Instead of being played and replayed on TV, climate change can only be detected by careful scientific measurements and analyzed by mathematical models.
Even the current wildfires and choking air quality can easily be dismissed as being causally unrelated to climate change without trust in the scientific consensus that the link is causal and not coincidental. How often have you heard the throwaway line “Oh, California always has fires?”
A starting point in solving the climate crisis is The Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, HR 763, which uses market mechanisms to move America away from its dependence on fossil fuels. The City Council’s resolution supporting this act is a positive step in building public awareness and support for a solution to the stealthy threat of the climate crisis.
John P. Boyd, Laguna Beach
