The growing numbers of climate-driven disasters are pay-now or pay-later propositions.
Power generation from wind or solar sources isn’t perfect, but it’s going to be key to getting the nation and the world out of the pickle they’re in. Yet, some organizations haven’t gotten the memo.
Hurricane Ian, the Category 4 storm that walloped a huge swath of Florida this week, is just the latest piece of evidence that the U.S. must urgently confront and combat climate change and get going on technologies that can help reduce the level of greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere.
Hurricane Ian followed on the heels of Hurricane Fiona, a Category 1 storm that whacked Puerto Rico.
Recent flooding in Pakistan put one-third of the country underwater.
Summer heat waves in Europe shrank major river channels to the point that they verged on being unnavigable.
The western U.S. had yet another summer chockfull of massive wildfires and smoke.
Scientists tell us that such disasters will continue to hit more places and become more frequent as the climate warms. We must turn down the heat in order to stop seeing disaster after disaster.
Every time a massive storm, drought or wildfire hits anywhere in the U.S., every American gets the bill. Effects don’t recede like the daily news and fade from memory.
Cities and homes can’t be rebuilt quickly. Families can be displaced for years after losing their homes and their jobs. Businesses may never reopen. All the insurance in the world or tax-funded government grants can’t make it like disasters never happened. How long they will be able to continue to offset climate disasters is an open question.
The writing on the wall is now so large that it’s impossible to ignore. It says that the nation must change how it produces energy and how its vehicles are powered.
As addicts know well, denial is powerful and Idaho is firmly within its grip.
Idaho must face the facts. While it’s true that solar technology doesn’t generate power when the sun isn’t shining, the world is going to need every watt of electricity it can generate. As vehicles shift from internal combustion engines to cleaner electric power, they will drive demand for electricity to levels never seen before. It will be challenging to meet that demand.
Blaine County and the cities of Bellevue, Hailey and Ketchum just banded together to tell the Idaho Public Utilities Commission to encourage solar power installations by setting solar-generation credits at a healthy level.
They called on the PUC to prevent Idaho Power, the state’s publicly regulated private utility, from underestimating the value of the electricity produced by rooftop solar installations. They asked the PUC to stop the company from reducing credits for solar-generated power contributed to its grid.
They disputed the methodology Idaho Power used to justify proposed rate changes that would discourage homeowners and developers from incorporating solar panels into new and existing buildings.
Idaho has long used its heavy reliance on hydropower to justify its tepid support for green technologies. That must stop because the choice is clear.
We can pay now to rapidly develop climate-friendly power sources or leave ourselves vulnerable and unable to recover from the devastation of mounting disasters.
“Our View” represents the opinion of the newspaper editorial board, which is made up of members of its board of directors. Remarks may be directed to editorialboard@mtexpress.com.
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(6) comments
A great editorial. Some pretty inane rebuttals.
Oh, did you just learn a new vocabulary word from Perry? "Inane." You're obviously a deep thinker. Keep working on it but maybe do your homework first. On second thought... nah.
Good luck squeezing blood from a turnip. Your ridiculous rants about Climate Change (not backed by science by the way) and how we need to "PAY NOW," are coming on the heels of your left wing radical denials of inflation wreaking havoc on our personal finances. Biden told us last month that we have "ZERO INFLATION!" Yet somehow we don't have any more money in our billfolds to shell out for electric cars that overload the power grid and that get can't even be charged in emergencies. Americans want clean affordable energy. We have no idea what you Marxists want, nor do we care.
"Your ridiculous rants about Climate Change (not backed by science by the way)" Your a total idiot!!!!
"You're" @ funkhouse
Yet another inane editorial based on narrative over analysis. First of all, we get just as much coal fired electricity as hydro in ID—it’s in that “other” category from IPC, and it is what we purchase from WY. Second, in the past 40 years, all wind and solar has done is to replace generation from nuclear. It has no budged fossil fuels one bit. Third, all the carbon reduction in the US has come from a shift from coal to natgas. Fourth, there is not one global warming model, not one, that says moving to solar and wind will reduce global warming. There are only two ways to move that needle. One is to shift from coal to nuclear as fast as possible. The other is to impose a carbon tax on pretty much everything. The IPCC model used by the UN shows that the new IRA passed by Congress won’t move global warming, at all. If we car about global warming, we have to get away from the distraction of wind/solar and implement nuclear and carbon tax—now, before it is too late. The climate activists obsession with wind and solar will doom us.
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