May 07, 2018
Missoulian
Tuesday‘s (May 1) guest column by Lori Shaw, titled ”Colstrip not included in coal event” bemoaned the Sierra Club‘s ”short-sighted agenda” believing that the Sierra Club has a ”goal of forcing premature closure of mines and power plants.” She‘s right, they do. Closure‘s not premature though, it‘s decades overdue.
Shaw continues, ”no resource industry is safe from this insidious organization‘s well-funded onslaught of propaganda.”
Then comes her bold-faced lie, “Unlike the coal industry, the wind and solar industries require massive federal and state subsidies to be economically competitive.” According to a cleantechnica.com report Feb. 26, ”Studies by the International Energy Agency point out that global subsidies for fossil fuels outstrip those for renewable energy nearly 10-fold. The International Monetary Fund said if climate and environmental costs were included, then the fossil fuel subsides increased another 10 times to nearly $5 trillion a year.”
Sierra Club‘s Beyond Coal campaign addresses coal workers and their families and a “just transition” to renewable jobs. Shaw, and all fossil fuel corporations, deny real economic costs.
Montanans who keep denying climate chaos are doomed to no clean water, no clean air and no future. Vote Republican. We‘ll all go down with you.
Beth Taylor Wilson,
Missoula