Our Jeff Ruch wrote a letter to the editor in response to the Los Angeles Times’s climate columnist Sammy Roth’s column, Changing our lives is scary. But the climate crisis is way scarier:
The “jarring lifestyle changes” that will be forced on us by unchecked climate change are so much worse than cooking without gas or giving up throwaway takeout containers, which Roth mentions.
Most importantly, climate change is not “the” problem to be solved. It is a symptom of a massive ecological overreach. Even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels tomorrow, we would still be screwed — because pollution, loss of biodiversity and the filling of wetlands will get us.
As the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has pointed out, reducing conversion of intact ecosystems is crucial to fighting climate change. Degrading natural places for industrial energy, even if it’s “renewable,” simply cuts off our ecological nose to spite our environmental face.