The fossil fuel industry and the free sump that is our atmosphere: Zing!

Sometimes a letter-to-the-editor hits its target, right smack in the bull's-eye. Not that Ray Welch is your average letter-to-the-editor writer: a quick look around the intertubes reveals that he's an energy consultant, a member of activist organization Sustainable San Rafael, a novelist, and a blogger (see AChangeInTheWeather.com).

This morning, his letter to the editor of the SF Chronicle was outstanding. The most notable excerpt:

Without a carbon tax, no fossil fuel company can alter its carbon-based business model. That would violate their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, which virtually mandates them to take advantage of the free sump otherwise known as the atmosphere. A carbon tax flips their fiduciary responsibility right-side up: They would be obliged to phase out rather than increase their fossil portfolio.

This: the free sump otherwise known as the atmosphere.

Exactly.

Paying what things cost is one of my own core political themes, and Welch sums it up with admirable concision.

What do you call industry's habit of 'externalizing' effects of their activity in order to take profit that humanity and our biosphere as a whole, now and in the future, subsidizes at great peril? Sleight of hand is too polite. Illegal dumping isn't sufficiently grave.

Whatever you call it, it's killing us. Thanks for the letter, Ray....


Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Weather? Climate? Change?
Paying what things cost
The radiation cloud is blowing in the wind

Thanks to Gary Miller and the EPA for the image of an illegal dumping site off the New Jersey Turnpike, circa 1973, via Wikimedia Commons.