To the editor: In 2009, then-Environmental Safety Company Administrator Lisa P. Jackson signed the Endangerment and Trigger or Contribute Findings, confirming that greenhouse gases within the environment threaten public well being and welfare. On Tuesday, the EPA proposed repealing these findings. As Hayley Smith and Tony Briscoe’s article identified, this would depart industrial polluters free to emit limitless greenhouse gases (“As Trump’s EPA reverses landmark local weather coverage, California may lead a resistance,” July 29). It is a harmful transfer within the flawed route.
Some would say that clear vitality sources are too costly, although these sources are quickly changing into extra inexpensive. The true price of soiled vitality lies within the externalities related to local weather change. Unprecedented floods, fires, hurricanes and glacial melting price billions. Air and water air pollution create pricey well being points. World migration due to desertification or flooding causes nationwide and worldwide strife. Past the monetary prices, after all, the well being and well-being of all life on the planet is gravely in danger.
It’s inevitable that clear vitality will prevail as coal and oil grow to be exceedingly costly to extract. Why not expedite the transfer towards non-polluting vitality sources now, earlier than we’ve prompted larger irreversible injury? Defending the atmosphere is the supposed job of the EPA, therefore the identify, so it must get again to the necessary work earlier than it’s too late.
Margaret Baker Davis, Claremont
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To the editor: The current article detailing the EPA’s transfer to reverse the endangerment discovering isn’t just alarming — it speaks of a betrayal. For these of us who’ve spent a long time grappling with the laborious scientific fact of local weather change, that is maybe essentially the most devastating environmental coverage determination in a technology. And for these within the fossil gas trade, who knew the dangers of carbon emissions way back to the Eighties and selected deception over accountability, it’s a long-awaited victory.
The endangerment discovering has been a authorized cornerstone within the battle towards local weather change, recognizing greenhouse gases as a menace to human well being and the atmosphere. To dismantle it’s to intentionally ignore science, public well being and our youngsters’s future — all in service of earnings for polluters.
Historical past won’t be type to those that stood by or cheered this rollback. It is a second that calls for outrage, motion and fact, and California should cleared the path.
Barry Engelman, Santa Monica
