Dear Editor:

Many articles about climate change causing higher temperatures provide extensive data substantiating concerns about escalating global heating and related damage like flooding, premature deaths, and crop failures. These impacts are costing Americans over $150 billion yearly in damages, with over half a million homes on the U.S. east coast now at risk.

But too little is said about the urgency of curbing the causes of these threats. Applying scientifically supported evidence about rising temperatures is vital in taking effective action that will rapidly curtail the source of these menacing climate-overheating impacts.

Potential corrective action includes Georgia’s Climate Pollution Reduction Plan [CPRP]. This ‘climate pollution’ includes carbon-dioxide and other heat-trapping emissions released in extracting and burning fossil fuels. The CPRP addresses the emissions of various economic sectors, including transportation, agriculture, and power generation.

Despite the urgency of curbing these emissions, Georgia Power Company is proposing to further expand reliance on natural-gas power generation. Not only does burning natural gas release CO2, but producing and using it is linked to methane leaks, far worse in heat-trapping effects than carbon dioxide.

Unless Georgia resolutely diminishes fossil-fuel dependency, it will be impossible for the state to hit targets for preventing the disastrous effects of rising temperatures.

Doing so will require diligent efforts to replace major sources of heat-trapping emissions – such as natural gas-powered generators – with community-based ‘distributed power’ systems, including extensive use of rooftop solar-panels and onsite battery storage.

Georgians must insist that state officials reduce these destructive emissions by denying Georgia Power’s proposal.

David Kyler, Center for a Sustainable Coast, St. Simons, Georgia