Tell your reps: Make polluters pay

I am writing because the world is on fire and no one can agree on how to put it out. People are too busy parsing terms over their political ideologies to confront the biggest issue any of us will face in our lifetime: the destruction of our relationship with nature and with it the destruction of our planet. There is much disagreement on how to address climate change, but we’ve all experienced it. In Massachusetts, it looks like crazy flooding that causes roads to cave in every year and less severe winters that increase the number of ticks, making more people get sick. Amidst this soup of experienced changes, and ones you hear on the news, taking action can be daunting. However, the Make Polluters Pay bill is a good place to start.

Make Polluters Pay is a crucial bill because it makes those who are most responsible for climate change, billionaires, give money back to the community to address the issues they are creating. It will let Massachusetts create a huge pot of money from these billionaires to pull from for mitigating and adapting to climate change. Some of the strategies specifically approved to pull from this fund include stormwater infrastructure upgrades, building weatherization, and defensive upgrades to transit infrastructure. Forty percent of these funds will go to projects that directly benefit environmental justice communities and all projects will sustain over 7,600 well-paying green jobs a year for 25 years.

The Make Polluters Pay bill (or H.1014 “An Act establishing a climate change superfund”) has been sent to the Joint Committee on Environment and Natural Resources to be “studied.” Basically this means to shelve it indefinitely and hope people forget about it. But we will not forget or stop fighting. If the future of our state and future generations matters to you, please write a letter to your representative to get this bill out of committee and passed into law.

The following link can be used to email representatives: https://tinyurl.com/4u467m2b.

Scarlet Labbé-Watson

Northampton