Aug. 1, 2025 6 AM PT
To the editor: In 2009, then-Environmental Safety Company Administrator Lisa P. Jackson signed the Endangerment and Trigger or Contribute Findings, confirming that greenhouse gases within the environment threaten public well being and welfare. On Tuesday, the EPA proposed repealing these findings. As Hayley Smith and Tony Briscoe’s article identified, this would go away industrial polluters free to emit limitless greenhouse gases (“As Trump’s EPA reverses landmark climate policy, California could lead a resistance,” July 29). It is a harmful transfer within the flawed course.
Some would say that clear power sources are too costly, although these sources are quickly changing into extra inexpensive. The actual value of soiled power lies within the externalities related to local weather change. Unprecedented floods, fires, hurricanes and glacial melting value billions. Air and water air pollution create expensive well being points. World migration due to desertification or flooding causes nationwide and worldwide strife. Past the monetary prices, in fact, the well being and well-being of all life on the planet is gravely in danger.
It’s inevitable that clear power will prevail as coal and oil turn into exceedingly costly to extract. Why not expedite the transfer towards non-polluting power sources now, earlier than we’ve induced larger irreversible injury? Defending the surroundings is the supposed job of the EPA, therefore the title, so it must get again to the vital work earlier than it’s too late.
Margaret Baker Davis, Claremont
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To the editor: The current article detailing the EPA’s transfer to reverse the endangerment discovering is not only alarming — it speaks of a betrayal. For these of us who’ve spent a long time grappling with the arduous scientific reality of local weather change, that is maybe probably the most devastating environmental coverage resolution in a era. And for these within the fossil gas business, who knew the dangers of carbon emissions way back to the Eighties and selected deception over accountability, it’s a long-awaited victory.
The endangerment discovering has been a authorized cornerstone within the struggle towards local weather change, recognizing greenhouse gases as a risk to human well being and the surroundings. To dismantle it’s to intentionally ignore science, public well being and our youngsters’s future — all in service of earnings for polluters.
Historical past won’t be form to those that stood by or cheered this rollback. It is a second that calls for outrage, motion and reality, and California should paved the way.
Barry Engelman, Santa Monica
