Something we can do something about

We need to let our lawmakers know that we care passionately about global warming. Wherever we are. According to the Seattle Times, those of us living in Washington State are behind both Oregon and California. This would be a nice place for us to get into friendly competition. We need to let our legislators at all levels know we want actual, meaningful, painful action on climate change. We may not have the lobby money, but we have the ability to vote people out of office.

I also noticed a political cartoon somewhere (sorry I can't recall where) poking fun at the oil companies, basically saying that "Now that we have figured out how to make money from global warming, we're at the table." Well, duh. Whether we like it or not, this is a largely capitalist society. And while we all need to make changes, urge changes, lobby for changes, accept changes, it's the largest of our global corporations that are in the best fiscal position to make changes. After all, the Federal government didn't make what Exxon did last year.

Lets do three things:

• Put in place the kind of regulation that punishes corporations for the "business as usual" that we don't want. And it's time to be somewhat draconian about it.
• Put into place some real incentives for businesses and consumers. We shouldn't be as specific there: we want to reward creativity. The government (us and our taxes) can help fund research directly, and what we should incentivize for both consumers and corporations is actual action, before we run completely out of time.
• Let the price of oil go up. The higher it goes, the more behavior will change. Yes, it will be hard on some people. But it will be harder to deal with runaway climate change.