Readers React: Local governments are picking up the slack on climate change

To the editor: When Aaron Renn scolds local communities for challenging climate-destroying fossil fuel development like drilling in the Arctic, he’s relaying Big Oil’s message: Resistance is futile. (“Local environmental activists don’t get to make federal policy,” op-ed, July 27)

More than a quarter of a century after scientists confirmed to Congress that climate disruption poses a grave threat, we still have no national climate policy. Climate denial has reached its ultimate expression when the melting of the Arctic ice is greeted as a signal to drill for more oil where the ice used to be. We have no ethical choice but to stop it before it’s too late.

Here in Seattle, we are joining communities all over the world where people are rising to break Big Oil’s stranglehold on our democracy and win the transition to a clean energy future. Penn’s alternative — leave it to the feds — is simply capitulation.

That’s Shell’s goal, precisely.

K.C. Golden, Seattle

The writer is a senior policy advisor for the group Climate Solutions.

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