‘Kuwait Oil Fire’. Photograph taken by Steve McCurry and published in National Geographic, August 1991.

I’ve sent a letter similar to the one below to my Senators and Congressional representative. If you also feel strongly that it is time to take action on climate change, share your story on the human cost of climate change and write or call your Congressional Representatives in the House or the Senate in support of a National Climate Dividend.

You can also ask your Congressional Representative to join the bi-partisan Climate Solutions Caucus, which currently has 30 Republican and 30 Democratic members. A key requirement for your Representative to join the Caucus is for he or she to reach across the aisle to find a member of the opposite party to join as well, because the Caucus is chartered to be 50–50 Democrats and Republicans.

To organize with like-minded folks, join the Citizen’s Climate Lobby because politicians don’t create political will; they respond to it.

My Story

Dear Senator or Congressperson,

My name is Brinda Thomas and I’ve devoted my entire adult life to studying the energy industry and solving the climate change problem. I’m writing to ask for your help to make progress on this issue.

Throughout my life, I have seen that our dependence on oil leads to war, terrorism, and climate change. And climate change results in more frequent floods, droughts, and storms, causing harm to property and people, at home and globally. I was born in 1983 to an office clerk and nurse who emigrated from farms in Kerala, India to find work in Kuwait. We moved to Canada in 1989, a year before Iraq invaded Kuwait in the first modern oil war. In 1995, after 13 years of waiting in a visa queue, my family and I received our Green Cards and moved to the Washington, DC area. We became U.S. citizens in 2001. A week before I was preparing to fly across country to attend college at Stanford University, 9/11 happened. There is evidence that the attacks were funded by Saudi Arabia, which derives 70% of its government revenue from oil in 2017 and as much as 90% from oil as recently as 2013. Oil dependency is not the only contributor to the terrorism risks the U.S. faces, but it is America’s main interest in the Middle East region. To cultivate those relationships the U.S. conducts military interventions, weapon sales, and supports policies to enable dictatorships which are widely criticized and used by radicals to recruit terrorists.

At Stanford, I majored in physics and focused on energy engineering after taking a social entrepreneurship class on rural electrification, because my mother grew up without electricity, and my maternal grandparents only got an electricity connection in my lifetime. I thought I might pursue a career to improve energy access, so I interned in Bangladesh for a sustainable energy NGO that installed solar panels in villages. During that summer of 2004, Bangladesh experienced severe flooding of the Ganges Delta and I volunteered to provide supplies to slum-dwellers who had lost their tin shack homes built on the banks of the river. Seeing hundreds of stranded people, desperate for food and rescue, drove home the human cost of climate change in a way a class or model cannot. While we can’t attribute a single flood to climate change, the scientific evidence does show that climate change will lead to rising sea levels, more severe floods, heat-waves, wildfires, and droughts, and stronger hurricanes, tornadoes, and storms globally, whether you live in Baton Rouge or Bangladesh. And the longer we wait to respond to climate change, the worse these storms will get. After that summer, my career trajectory shifted to find solutions to address climate change. After college, I worked (as a contractor) for the U.S. Department of Energy, earned a Ph.D. in Engineering & Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon, and I now work in the sustainable energy industry.

The Carbon Dividend Proposal

I am writing to ask for your support for legislation to create a carbon dividend, as described in this TED talk by Ted Halstead.

The proposal has four parts:

(1) Institute an economy-wide carbon tax on fossil fuel extraction that increases over time,

(2) Pay the collected tax revenues back to taxpayers as dividends or credits on income tax,

(3) Apply a border carbon tax adjustment for imports from countries without a carbon tax,

(4) Repeal the Clean Power Plan to regulate carbon emissions from electric power plants.

A number of details still have to be worked out with this plan, but it has all the elements of a viable solution. A price on carbon provides the entire economy with the incentive to produce and consume energy from low-carbon sources. A dividend to consumers ensures that the tax does not penalize low-income households and that there is an incentive to set the tax high enough to encourage energy efficiency and a switch away from fossil fuels. A border carbon adjustment tax ensures that foreign imports from countries without a carbon tax do not have an unfair advantage in the domestic market. A repeal of the Clean Power Plan would have support from the Republican-majority Congress and would be justified since the carbon tax could achieve similar outcomes. I urge you to reach across the aisle to help make this proposal a reality.

Regards,

Brinda Thomas

Fremont, CA

Note: All views are my own and the views expressed in this post do not reflect the views of any other organization.