LETTER: Make polluters pay to counter climate change they caused

To Ozaukee Press:

The reality of climate change has been known for decades, yet so many of our politicians have been keeping their heads in the sand, hoping the reality doesn’t hit home on their watch—let future generations deal with the havoc we have unleashed.

Well, the havoc has gotten bad enough that the deniers are slowly switching their story to it’s real, but let’s just build the dikes higher, rather than stop the pollution causing the problem.

Democrats and Republicans have worked together to fix the problem in the past. The late 1900s and early 2000s saw bipartisan cooperation on clean water and air, hazardous waste, acid rain and ozone. It wasn’t the politicians leading the way, it was ordinary patriotic Americans demanding that we stop polluting our land, air and water. We can do it again.

Please write or call your Democratic and Republican representatives to ask for significant action to slow climate change.

A bipartisan market-based approach has been proposed by economists throughout the world as the best first step to make this happen. It makes the polluters pay by putting a tax on the carbon pollution. It will unleash American ingenuity, creating millions of good jobs while saving the planet.

Philip Smith
Waukesha