LETTER: Climate change is here to stay

To the Editor:

Few of us will soon forget the winter and early summer of 2012.

If these record high temperatures had come out of the blue, following years of normal weather, it could be written off as a freak year. But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that the 20 hottest years since 1901 have all occurred during the last 24 years.

Climate change is here to stay, and we will be paying the price the rest of our lives in higher food prices and taxes to pay for increasing flood, fire and hurricane damage.

When climate scientists brought “global warming” into public awareness in the 1980s, the major fossil fuel companies responded by mounting a public campaign to discredit it as a crackpot theory. Shell, BP (British Petroleum), and the others had long known the truth.

The combustion of their fossil fuels sends billions of tons of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere. They are turning our planet into a giant, overheated greenhouse. However, they could not permit public awareness to force a policy shifts away from their combustibles.

Many politicians, generously gifted by Big Oil, publicly echoed the denial game and, to further show their gratitude, have championed over $72 billion in tax breaks and subsidies to the fossil fuel corporations since 2002.

Now that climate change is as real as the thermometers on our back porches, Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon-Mobil, admitted on June 28 (after decades of denial) that man-made climate change is happening. His suggestion?

“We’ll adapt to that. It’s an engineering problem." He believes that nobody dares to tame his drilling frenzy.

I have news for Mr. Tillerson. Mother Nature can’t be bluffed. If humans don’t stop him, she will. And it won’t be pretty

@sig: Ed Prell

@ln: Eau Claire

Tags: letters to the editor, opinion