Tom Ellis is the York River Chapter Chair

By:  Tom Ellis

Read Tom’s letter to the Editor
The Richmond Times-Dispatch:

The reported speech by Dominion CEO Thomas F.Farrell to the Virginia Bankers and Chamber of Commerce was sadly typical of the myopic, self-serving groupthink of wealthy powerbrokers. These folks live inside their own fantasy bubble, where they mutually reinforce each other’s major premise—that money is all that matters—and hence their shared delusion of an infinite world of infinite growth in energy use, industrial productivity, and profits for themselves.

Unfortunately, this shared virtual reality no longer exists. In the real world, as all scientifically literate people on the planet now recognize, rising global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels are severely disrupting our normal global climate cycles, driving us perilously close to a point of no return, in which runaway positive feedback loops of melting ice, collapsing ecosystems, desertification, and rising sea levels will doom all future generations to a hellish, dying world.

The Clean Power Plan and the Paris Climate Agreement, of which Farrell and his friends bitterly complain, are essential last-ditch efforts by the governments of the world, including our own, to curb global carbon emissions, in order to forestall this catastrophic tipping point and gradually reduce global carbon emissions to a sustainable level. Such government action is prerequisite to a collective effort by all of us to recalibrate our economic infrastructure, shifting from the goal of endless growth (the ideology of a cancer cell) to a steady-state economic model, based on local, decentralized, renewable energy sources. We cannot afford to wait any longer in making this fundamental shift in economic, technological, and cultural priorities. The alternative is a horrific scenario of ecological, economic, and social collapse that nobody—not even Farrell—would want for his children.