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Readers write: Climate change remedies, and Melinda Gates interview

Letters to the editor for the March 9, 2020 weekly magazine. Readers discuss anthropogenic climate change and Melinda Gates.

  • By Monitor readers

Climate change remedies

Regarding the cover story “Can this man stop global warming?” in the Jan. 27 Monitor Weekly:

It’s worth noting how some conservatives are willing to accept anthropogenic global cooling as a “cheap” fix for the climate crisis, but have largely rejected anthropogenic global warming as the cause of it. 

I believe this intellectual disconnect can be traced to the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to 1) deny culpability in our looming climate change fiascoes, 2) ride out profits as long as it can, and 3) invest in political candidates, ranging from wannabe presidents to state legislators, to support inaction. Recent successes are the dismantling of the Clean Power Plan and, closer to home for me, Ohio’s embarrassing rejection of minimum clean energy mandates.

Dispersing sulfate particles in the atmosphere to dim the sun is clearly not a solution to the challenges of climate change. At best, it is a temporary mask for the problem; at worst, a disastrous act of hubris that will make things worse. 

We would do well to remember that sunlight – undimmed – is the energy source of plant growth, and that plants are the basis of the food chain that links every living thing on Earth, including ourselves. We would be better served to emulate their example and tie our fortunes and economic future to that star.

James Turanchik
Columbus, Ohio

Melinda Gates interview

Thank you for printing the cover story “Melinda Gates: What she’s learned” in the Sept. 23, 2019, Monitor Weekly. It was one of the best issues of the Monitor that I’ve read in recent years. Please continue to find more people in the world who are doing good, and write in-depth profiles on them. So helpful!

Jodie Kennedy
Los Angeles

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

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If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

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