I sent the following to Jerry McNerney tonight:

Jerry,

I have supported you for a long time, writing newspaper columns calling for voting Pombo out and you in both in 2004 and 2006.  Now, I need to tell you what has to happen for you to continue getting my support.

To begin with, you know and I know that climate change changes everything.  There is nothing more important than dealing with this.

If you want to cut health care costs, you must deal with climate change before tropical diseases like malaria invade the US and valley fever become even more wide spread.  The latter only killed 200 last year.

If you want to fix the economy, you must deal with climate change as the costs of trying to mitigate its effects later will devastate our country’s economy.  The entire Obama economic plan depends on returning to an era of growth the help pay off the debts that we are incurring now.  The effects of climate change may be that such growth never occurs just at the time that we need to be building Netherlands style dikes to protect half of your district from flooding.

Neither Waxman – Markey nor Kerry – Boxer will really achieve their alleged goals.  Those who cheated on mortgage back equities will cheat on trading pollution credits.  Neither bill really takes on coal.  They still talk of the mythological clean coal.  Duke Energy has pulled out of the Clean Coal Coalition and Jim Rogers, it’s CEO, says this about carbon capture and sequestration:

> He argued that it’s unlikely that the United States will be able to develop and bring to scale carbon-capture-and-storage – often called “clean coal” technology. “I think there’s no way we can scale in this country,” he said. “It’s more likely that China will develop and bring CCS to scale. I’d like to be China for a day so we can get CCS done. They’re more likely to get it scaled and deployed than we are. We’re going to be buying their technology.” (Source: Washington Independent)

I expect to hear you telling the truth about where we are headed and to see you working for much stronger legislation than we currently see.  The alternative is to work for someone else who will promise to get this job done, no matter what party they are from.

Wes Rolley