This is in response to a Bangor Daily News story reprinted in the Sun Journal (Sept. 19) about University of Maine students who attended the People’s Climate March in New York City. They are to be congratulated for their concern about the environment. I wish more people cared so much.
However, the students should ask themselves if the movement they are supporting makes sense, or is even moral.
Across the planet and across time, people have suffered from the impacts of climate change. Societies that did not properly adapt to those changes perished.
With increasing numbers of people at risk, it is important to help people adapt to climate change that is occurring today — Africans suffering from drought in the Sahel, Inuit suffering due to Arctic permafrost melt, etc.
Yet, rather than focus on the needs of those vulnerable people, demonstrators in New York focused on mitigation, trying to avert hypothetical events that may, or may not, some day happen.
Although the U.N. says that funding for mitigation and adaptation should be approximately equal, the Climate Policy Initiative shows that only 6 percent of the $1 billion/day spent worldwide on climate finance goes to adaptation. The rest is spent on mitigation because of the common, but disputed belief that humans can control the planet’s climate merely by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Students should ask themselves is it ethical to place more importance on the possible problems to be faced by future generations than on the known, serious issues faced by those suffering today?
Tom Harris, Ottawa, Ontario, executive director, International Climate Science Coalition
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