by Toby Reid, VPOE

Dear President Obama,

I am writing to you today as a concerned global citizen who wishes for his future and the future of the generations to come to be taken into account when the world gets together to plan the successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, in December of this year in Copenhagen, Denmark.

For many years now, we have known the cause of climate change. It is human caused, and is due to our exponentially rising carbon emissions which have resulted from an exponentially increasing consumptive society. We have been keenly aware of the dangerous path that we’ve been collectively blazing since the second Great War, a time that caused my grandparents to say ‘enough is enough, we just want peace and stability’. It was the noted economist, Kenneth Boulding, former president of the American Economic Association, who declared in his book “Economic Analysis” in 1941: “anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist”.

While the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 is a good first step in tackling our exponentially growing carbon emissions, containing provisions that improve building codes and that support a cap and trade system for carbon management, it is not even close to being enough for what the world needs from its largest emitter. Under the terms of this Act, a satisfactory outcome could be obtained if just 12 percent of the nation’s electricity is generated by renewable means by 2020. This outcome would simply be delaying the inevitable and making the problem worse. Renewable electrical generation IS the future, and something the current administration should be holding as one of its top priorities for the current term.

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