Ironically, I agree with Ms. Marsden's ostensible principal point that carbon trading strategies are not the most effective ways to curb climate change and that such strategies are too complicated and may well be subject to financial abuse.
But her deeper message, if anything in her rant can be called such, is that the whole issue of climate change shouldn't be taken seriously. She calls the goal of carbon reduction a "luxury pastime." She calls it "useless." She claims that it is not a "real problem." And she says these things without once mentioning the clear and unambiguous science that says just the opposite.
She is dangerously wrong.
For 800,000 years the carbon dioxide level in Earth's atmosphere has been about 200 parts per million. That's 10 times longer than homo sapiens has existed, 80 times longer than agriculture has existed and over 5,000 times longer than the time that has passed since the industrial revolution. Today the carbon dioxide level in our atmosphere is pushing 400 parts per million. It has almost doubled in 150 years. And the rate of increase is itself increasing. These are facts, not opinions.
Also fact is that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. That leads to increasingly dramatic fluctuations in weather patterns. Has anyone reading this noticed the weird weather the world has been experiencing lately? Climate scientists have and have connected the dots.
So if Ms. Marsden doesn't believe there is a problem, she really has no place in the dialogue about what to do about it. If her real point is that carbon trading is not a viable solution, she should consider options.
One is the carbon fee-and-dividend proposal promoted by the Citizens Climate Lobby and embodied in Rep. Pete Stark's bill before Congress that would encourage market forces to address the problem of carbon release. Check it out at citizensclimatelobby.com.
Jack Curtiss is a volunteer with the Citizens Climate Lobby. He lives in Anchorage.
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