Opinion | Better question on climate change - The Washington Post - The Washington Post
Opinion | Better question on climate change - The Washington Post
As someone who has worked on climate change for more than 40 years at the International Finance Corporation and the University of Maryland, I appreciate the growing number of front-page articles focusing on extreme weather events, including the July 13 article “ Alarms for a planet on edge: Flooding, fires and lethal heat.” However, I disagree with framing the issue as “when the alarms will finally be loud enough to make people wake up.” What can “people” do is the question oil companies want us to ask. The power to make a difference is with governments, fossil fuel companies, large financial institutions and insurance companies.
Some significant actions have been taken in the United States, most notably the billions for climate technologies included in the Inflation Reduction Act and the many initiatives by state governments to improve energy efficiency, reduce use of natural gas in new construction and incentivize solar energy. The relevant questions to be asked are whether these actions will be enough to avoid much greater disasters and how we can protect ourselves from extreme heat, floods and wildfires as insurers increasingly withdraw property coverage, as reported in the July 13 news article “ Citing climate change risks, insurer Farmers is latest one to exit Florida.”
Alan Miller, Rockville
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.