Your article, “Biden signs massive climate and health care legislation” (Aug. 16, TribLIVE), was good to see. I cannot stress enough how much investing in Pennsylvania’s future is aligned with fighting climate change. As someone working with businesses and educating future decision-makers, I know how important all efforts to reduce pollution are to improving the future of Pennsylvanians, providing jobs and enabling a healthier population.
A solution is already available to us that can have a multiplicative effect with this new climate legislation. The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is a bipartisan multistate program that works by setting a cap on pollution from power plants and then reducing those caps each year. So the air keeps getting cleaner and cleaner each year while also requiring power plant owners to pay for their pollution, thus incentivizing them to cut their emissions even faster. We can then invest the money raised in renewable energy projects and energy efficiency and conservation, which further cuts climate pollution.
Pennsylvania has officially begun participating in RGGI, but a lawsuit by coal and gas industry interests is trying to stop this. We need to stop fighting each other, and, instead, invest in RGGI and fight climate change together.
Robert Sroufe
Blawnox
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The writer is Murrin Chair of Global Competitiveness in Duquesne University’s Palumbo-Donahue Graduate School of Business.