Dear Editor,
In his March 17 letter to The Vermont Journal, Mr. Stuart Lindberg sets the tone by referring to the transition to the Biden presidency as “regime change,” a term normally used for a military coup or similar takeover of the government. Well, that might have happened if Trump’s supporters had taken over the Capitol and killed Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, but fortunately our democracy survived.
Mr. Lindberg says that the Green New Deal is all about “cleaning up the environment and creating a more socially responsible society,” but that’s not the main concern of the modern environmental movement. The main concern is climate change.
Climate change is a scientific fact. The National Academy of Sciences, our most honored scientific organization says, “Natural changes in the Sun and Earth cannot explain today’s global warming. Human activities are causing Earth to heat up in ways that are different from warm periods in the past.”
According to the American Meteorological Society, “Humans are causing climate to change and it poses numerous serious risks.” This is echoed by all serious scientific organization, including the American Physical Society, the American Chemical Society, and the Royal Society, as well as NASA, which states: “Scientists attribute the global warming trend observed since the mid-20th century to the human expansion of the greenhouse effect.” Those who say that climate change is not real or that we are not causing it should explain how they know more than the thousands of scientists in these organizations. Mr. Lindberg wrote about “regime change,” a product of his political philosophy or his imagination, but did not mention the term “climate change,” which is a scientific fact.
Mr. Lindberg justifies his attack on stopping greenhouse emissions by appealing to the terrible plight of children working the cobalt mines in the Congo, cobalt currently being used in lithium batteries. But children are forced to work in other types of mine around the world, extracting gold, salt, coltan, copper and tin, and work in quarries in Nepal and Madagascar (Source: www.borgenproject.org/facts-about-child-miners). We should be equally concerned about them.
I don’t doubt Mr. Lindberg’s concern for child cobalt miners, but these other minerals don’t fit well with Mr. Lindberg’s denial of climate change. Child labor must be stopped, but “the net damage costs of climate change are likely to be significant and to increase over time.” (Source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.) It must be stopped too.
Sincerely,
Kem Phillips
Cavendish, Vt.