Letter: Ideology masquerading as science
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The Advocate’s Oct. 8 edition contains two examples of ideology masquerading as science.
The letter in the Readers’ Views section by Claude Culross (“Biomass fuel switch questioned”) raises a legitimate question about whether biomass crops can be grown at a scale to meet a large portion of our energy needs, but then goes off course in global warming skeptic mythology. His claim that not one experiment shows an influence of carbon dioxide on global climate is simply wrong. It ignores an overwhelming body of peer-reviewed science showing that carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases do influence climate, though climate science has never claimed that greenhouse gases are the only influence.
Residents of Baton Rouge will have an opportunity to listen to and question one of the world’s top climate scientists, Dr. Stephen Schneider, when he speaks at LSU on Tuesday.
They can even pose questions from Culross’s letter to an actual climate scientist.
In an article about job growth The Advocate gives front page coverage to Loren Scott’s assertions about the supposed negative impacts of cap and trade legislation to counter the effects of global climate change. But Dr. Scott has a long record of letting his anti-environmental thinking cloud his economic forecasts.
He neglects to mention the short and long term economic costs of doing nothing about climate change. Industry has long used the mantra of the need for “growth” to say no to the use of any of its profits to pay for the external costs it imposes on society in the form of human health problems and environmental degradation. Mr. Scott’s assertions fit the same old pattern.
Setting a price on carbon emissions by way of carbon tax or cap and trade is the only effective solution that we have been able to come up with that will limit human-caused carbon emissions.
Many industrial players in the United States are seeing the value of being part of the solution to the problem and are adjusting to the needed changes.
What Louisiana needs is balanced analysis that accepts reality and that shows how government and industry in our state can also be part of the solution. This should be a major priority in a state that is exposed, perhaps more than any other, to the destructive effects of climate change.
Haywood Martin, chairman
Sierra Club, Delta Chapter
Lafayette
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