Letters to the Editor: If burned sequoias and scorched koalas don't wake you up, maybe less coffee will
To the editor: You saw news photos of those cute Australian koalas with scorched fur and paws, and you were sad. Then you skipped over the news article about how all those immigrants are coming here because climate change has imperiled local agriculture and therefore their livelihoods.
You were so angry when your trip to a tropical island had to be canceled because of yet another hurricane. Then you blew up at your neighbor who questioned you for running your air conditioner all night long.
Your kids quit eating meat — what's up with that? You complained when your mother came to live with you after her home burned down in one of those wildfires.
Now you read that coffee plants, the source of your daily survival tonic, could become extinct. It's just too much! Somebody should do something about all this, right?
Kathleen Brown, Santa Clarita
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To the editor: The KNP Complex fire is endangering Sequoia National Park's Giant Forest. We should not have to see yet another casualty of climate change to end Sacramento's and Washington's subsidies and other favors to an oil industry that lies to us and gaslights the public.
To get our politicians to show more backbone and resist oil money, we voters must do two things. First, we must communicate to legislators that we will not reelect them unless they end subsidies to the corporations that sell us a product that damages our health and the planet.
Second, we must lobby Congress to pass a carbon tax that will communicate to Big Oil that decarbonization has begun and its profits will steadily plummet.
Here's our choice: We can have giant sequoias and a habitable Earth, or we can continue with deforestation and a grim prospect for humankind's future.
Tom Osborne, Laguna Beach
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To the editor: I am astonished about the amount of resistance that still exists to the urgency of needed action on climate change. Some of it must be related to the fear of facing reality, the greed or power of those who profit off of pollution, and to those who just don't like change.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) is a good example of our hesitancy problem. He says he understands the necessity of change and recognizes it's happening, yet he is calling for a "strategic pause" in passing a budget bill that includes action on climate change.
Does a well-informed senator within a party that is working hard to legislate immediate and bold climate action not understand the urgency? Does he not know how to prioritize actions and consequences? Is he scared to legislate?
Manchin and everyone else must act with the seriousness this existential problem demands. If we don't act today, we just might not have a tomorrow.
Jonathan Light, Laguna Niguel
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
