The climate crisis needs to be addressed right now

Louis Merlin, Citizens’ Climate Lobby

Senator Joe Manchin objects to President Biden’s clean energy plan for electric utilities in the Democrats’ reconciliation bill. He says that we are already transitioning to clean energy and we don’t need any incentives or penalties on utilities to get them to head in the right direction.

I’m sorry, but we’ve seen this playbook before. The soft climate deniers keep saying if we wait, we’ll be more able to tackle climate change in the future. They said this about climate bills that did not pass in 1993, 2003, and 2009.

Well it’s 2021 and we read about the devastation of lost homes and lost lives in the newspaper due to massive climate tragedies more or less every week. Waiting did not solve the problem – waiting made it much worse.

Climate scientists tell us we must drastically reduce greenhouse gases by weaning ourselves off fossil fuels as quickly as possible. We need an approximately 50% reduction by 2030.

Imagine you are headed towards a cliff, and the driver has his foot on the accelerator. You can’t compromise with him by asking him to accelerate less. You’ve got to tell him to hit the brakes, now.

A serious climate bill can’t wait. We’ve dithered too long already. We can be flexible about the details, but the bill must put us on a path toward serious CO2 reductions by 2030.

Louis Merlin is a member of the Boca Raton chapter of Citizens’ Climate Lobby.

“The Invading Sea” is the opinion arm of the Florida Climate Reporting Network, a collaborative of news organizations across the state focusing on the threats posed by the warming climate.