Letter: A carbon tax would help
Re “Planning New Hampshire’s energy future” (Monitor, March 11):
Excellent editorial on the state’s needing an energy plan and not just letting transmission lines and pipelines happen without state input or be torpedoed at the town level. New Hampshire would be able to establish an energy plan everyone would understand and support, if Washington would pass a national carbon tax (like the one proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders). Then electricity from fossil fuels would increase in price, reflecting their pollution costs, and the public would support electrical cables, wind turbines and solar installations.
However, the fossil fuel industry and its well-paid lobbyists (Americans for Prosperity, Tea Party members, the House Republican Study Committee, the Heritage Foundation, American Energy Alliance, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to name a few) are waging an expensive advertising campaign to spread lies about climate change, carbon tax plans and community plans for clean energy. With their ads they have been promulgating falsehoods to misinform the public and sway us against a carbon tax because such a tax will push us to use less of their products and more clean energy.
It is your obligation to expose the chutzpah of their misinformation campaign, revealing every lie they utter and helping the public see we need a careful plan for the future: carefully planned reliable sources of clean energy, transmission lines, safe pipeline, and a carbon tax to spur conservation and innovation.
(The writer is a member of Citizens Climate Lobby.)