Dear Sir:
In response to a column published in the Terrace Standard on February 17, 2016.
Climate change activists such as Al Lehmann are unwittingly supporting one of the greatest moral travesties of our time: the valuing of people yet to be born more than those suffering today.
Rather than focus on the need to help vulnerable people adapt to real climate change in the present, activists promote mitigation, trying to avert hypothetical events that may, or may not, someday happen.
The UN said that funding for mitigation and adaptation should be approximately equal. But the Climate Policy Initiative demonstrates that only 6 per cent of the more than $1 billion/day spent on climate finance across the world goes to adaptation.
The rest is spent on mitigation because of the common but unjustified belief that we can control our planet’s climate merely by reducing our carbon dioxide emissions.
People of all political stripes are starting to recognize that allocating more importance to the possible problems to be faced by future generations than to the known and serious issues faced by those suffering today is immoral.
Tom Harris
International Climate Science Coalition
Ottawa, Ontario