Re: “Green New Deal not only option on table” (letter, Feb. 21). Here’s the thing —carbon dividends, the 
other “option” offered in this letter, can’t do the job alone. We’ll need it and the Green New Deal.

We now have only 10 years left to phase out fossil fuels, and even that won’t be enough to prevent “catastrophic” global warming, causing “global economic collapse” followed by “societal collapse,” according to the National Academy of Sciences, among others. The Green New Deal is the only plan out there that can meet that 2030 deadline.

The letter says carbon dividends will allow us to make the greenhouse gas reductions set out by the Paris accords. But the worldwide scientific community has made it clear that those goals were entirely inadequate.

What the Green New Deal has that carbon dividends lack is a way to actually reverse global warming. It’s a surprisingly underreported part of the Green New Deal: An agricultural policy that will use best practices in farming and grazing that have been proven to turn the soil into a massive carbon sink. Along with building a 21st-century clean-energy grid, that’s the most important part of the Green New Deal. And that’s why we will need it to decarbonize by 2030.

We’ll also need the Carbon Dividends Act because it will pay for the Green New Deal by taxing fossil fuel corporations, which knowingly caused global warming, out of existence, and giving all that tax money to taxpayers. Switch to increasingly cheaper clean energy, and you won’t pay the carbon tax; you’ll just get the monthly “carbon dividend” checks.

And, critically important, the Carbon Dividends Act can make other nations cut their greenhouse gas emissions as fast a we do. See how at: citizensclimatelobby.org.

 

Lynn Goldfarb

Lancaster, Pennsylvania

Copy the Story Link