Arguments
Video: Climate science crash course by Dana Nuccitelli with Citizens Climate Lobby
Posted on 4 April 2014 by dana1981
On March 8th, 2014, I participated in a Faith and Climate Forum near Sacramento, California. The event was co-sponsored by the Sacramento chapter of Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL), of which I'm a member. CCL is a non-partisan grassroots organization whose goal is to build the political will to maintain a liveable climate, specifically through a revenue-neutral carbon tax.
Another Sacramento CCL chapter member, Christine Bailey organized this event, bringing together local faith leaders and CCL members to speak about the importance of addressing climate change. The event began with local leaders of various religions including Presbyterian, Buddhist, Islamic, and Jewish faiths speaking about the importance of preserving a liveable climate for each of their religions. I was asked to follow these speakers to talk about the science, and I gave what I called 'a climate science crash course'. Videographer Brian McKinsey recorded the event, and the whole thing can be viewed on his YouTube page. My talk can be viewed below, and the Powerpoint slides can be downloaded here (8.5 MB, without Andy Lee Robinson's Arctic sea ice cubes video) and here (16.5 MB with the video).
Jerry Hinkle, economist and Northern California Regional Coordinator for CCL closed the event by explaining the benefits of a revenue-neutral carbon tax. Putting a price on carbon emissions is a key solution to human-caused climate change, and a revenue-neutral carbon tax has the advantage of bipartisan support for several reasons. For one, by returning 100 percent of the revenue to taxpayers, it doesn't increase the size of government, and it also offsets the financial impact of higher energy and fuel prices, and it's also a free market solution. For these reasons there are a growing number of conservatives speaking out in support of a revenue-neutral carbon tax, especially conservative economists.
The event was very successful, and it was great to see this diverse group of faith and science and policy people come together to discuss the critical problem of human-caused climate change.
I agree it is great to see examples of faith-based and politically-fiscally conservative individuals who acknowledge the need to change the system to undo the motivation for the unacceptable types of development that the system has been creating.
The need to change the system so that people who try to benefit from unsustainable or damaging activities and attitudes cannot succeed is easily understood by people with a wide variety of value sets. About the only groups that fight against the required change are people who want to benefit from unsustainable and damaging activities as long as they can get away with. And that group has many masks, but they commonly hide behind the Conservative Movement, which is only a sub-set of faith-based and fiscal-conservative people hoping to be confused with, and get support from, the larger population of faith-based people and fiscal conservatives.