Open Letter to Senator Johnson

Dear Senator Johnson,

I understand and appreciate recent efforts to reduce wasteful spending and the national debt with the goal of making things better for our children. As a 40-year career environmental (protection) engineer, I’d like to point out the omnipresent big elephant in the room: increasing temperatures due mainly to increasing CO2 and methane concentrations in the atmosphere. To ignore or minimize this well-researched phenomenon/problem does little to improve our children’s lives decades from now.

Yes, this effort to curb greenhouse gases has a price-tag but doing nothing has a much larger potential price-tag. It’s like cutting back on car maintenance just to save a few bucks.

I’ve spent my career as a liaison between government and industry and now in retrospect I can honestly report that the Clean Air and Water Acts were complicated but ultimately successful, even economical. In my humble opinion, environmental protection is not now nor ever has been pork-barrel spending.

Let’s all avoid penny-wise and dollar foolish thinking. Most of all, let’s not leave all the heavy lifting to our children. Global warming will not solve itself.

Sincerely,
David R. Welder