Don Ewing: Debating fossil fuels and climate change advocates' motives

To The Daily Sun,

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. James Veverka doesn't provide evidence for his claim (Feb. 17): "No power source is more dangerous to life and the environment than burning fossil fuels."

Would returning to burning wood, peat, dung, whale oil, and animal fat be safer?

Honest evaluations consider minuses and benefits. If we only considered minuses, we would abandon most transportation forms because of their occasional injuries and deaths.

U.S. life expectancy has gone from about 40 to about 80 since oil was discovered. Reliable, cheap, portable energy enabled modern life; improving health, transportation, communications, medicines, education, etc., and improving most people's lives far above their former bare subsistence level existence.

Constructing wind and solar farms requires huge amounts of materials and land, destroying native plants and animals, maybe even whales. Obtaining the materials needed for wind and solar farms will require hundreds of new mines, some dealing, potentially unsafely, with very toxic substances and operated mostly using fossil fuels (https://tinyurl.com/4m628f3p). Operating wind and solar farms destroys millions of birds and bats, eliminating their beneficial impact on the environment. Burning fossil fuels seems far less destructive to the environment.

If climate change advocates actually wanted to reduce human CO2 production, they would immediately: abandon costly, unreliable, and environmentally damaging wind and solar systems; quickly transition to generating all electricity via safe, cheap, abundant, reliable nuclear power (eliminating about 25% of human-caused CO2 (https://tinyurl.com/2p83yw8f); and outlaw or prohibitively tax private jet travel — but they don't. Why?

Climate change advocates created a fake crisis to benefit their own and their rich supporters' wealth, power and conveniences (https://tinyurl.com/2p972wer). For that, they willingly sacrifice the well-being of the vast majority of living humans.

Don Ewing

Meredith