Excess CO2 Costly in More Ways Than One
“There is no climate crisis, no emergency” (letters, March 9) not only denies that there is a climate crisis but uses the simpleminded logic that more is always better, extolling the virtues of excess CO2 as plant food.
In fact, excess CO2 has increased global temperatures and droughts, creating more desert areas, adding to plant damage from insects and decreasing crop yields worldwide.
The excess CO2 we’re adding to our atmosphere does not dissipate; it just keeps adding on to what’s already there and will last for centuries. It’s going to get a lot worse because it takes about four decades for the CO2 we emit today (now at record levels) to heat up and put global warming into overdrive.
So it would be disastrous to keep adding CO2 to the atmosphere, especially since that excess CO2 comes from burning fossil fuels, which creates air pollution that kills hundreds of thousands of Americans and costs us well over $800 billion annually in medical bills.
By replacing coal, oil and natural gas with cheaper solar and wind energy, we’d make clean energy essentially free by 2030 and create millions of high-wage, local, permanent jobs in this country.
We’d also put the brakes on climate disasters that have cost Americans over $1.6 trillion so far and are swiftly getting much more costly (over $300 billion in one year) over the past decade due to excess CO2.
Lynn GoldfarbDenver
