I had to write in response to the letter citing a need for public debate before implementing measures to combat climate change. Just as there are probably people who still believe that smoking tobacco does not cause cancer, there will always be climate change deniers.
For these people, Arnold Schwarzenegger, former governor of California, had a compelling post on Facebook in December.
He knows that deniers are unlikely to change their minds about climate change, so he posed three questions.
The first question was, “Do you believe it is acceptable that seven million people die every year from pollution?”
That’s 19,000 people per day who die from pollution caused by fossil fuels, not to mention all those who develop chronic and debilitating respiratory ailments.
The second question was, “Do you believe coal and oil will be the fuels of the future?”
Mr. Schwarzenegger made the point that clean energy is a wiser investment and that, as an early adopter of clean energy, California’s well-diversified economy is growing faster than the U.S. economy.
He said he wants to have a plan for the future, and does not want to be like, “the last investor in Blockbuster as Netflix emerged.”
Finally, if answers to the first two questions were not convincing enough, he boiled it down to this: Imagine if there are two completely sealed rooms, one with a regular, gasoline-fueled car and one with an electric car, each running at full power.
You must enter one of the rooms and shut the door behind you. You cannot turn off the engine and you do not have a gas mask. Which room would you choose?
Well, guess what, we are already in that room with the gasoline-fueled car.
Look at a photo of Earth from space, and you can see that our precious atmosphere is a sliver-thin skin that supports life on this fragile planet.
If climate change deniers want to sit in that room with exhaust fumes building up while they study and debate the issue some more, that’s up to them.
However, they should not be allowed to force the rest of us to sit in that room with them.
Gerry Naito
Vernon
